Posted on 07/30/2009 6:36:55 AM PDT by Captain Kirk
The now-infamous Gates story has gone through the familiar media spin-cycle: incident, reaction, response, so on and so forth. Drowned out of this echo chamber has been an all-too-important (and legally controlling) aspect: the imbroglio between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has more to do with the limits (or breadth) of the First Amendment than with race and social class. The issue is not how nasty the discourse between the two might have been, but whether what Professor Gates said--assuming, for argument's sake, the officer's version of events as fact--could by any stretch of both law and imagination constitute a ground for arrest for "disorderly conduct" (the charge leveled) or any other crime. Whether those same words could be censored on a college campus is a somewhat different--though related--question.
First, a quick recap. Gates returned to his Cambridge residence from an overseas trip to find his door stuck shut. With his taxi driver's assistance, he forced the door open. Shortly thereafter, a police officer arrived at the home, adjacent to the Harvard University campus--in my own neighborhood, actually--responding to a reported possible burglary.
Upon arrival, the officer found Gates in his home. He asked Gates to step outside. The professor initially refused, but later opened his door to speak with the officer. Words--the precise nature of which remains in dispute--were exchanged. Gates was arrested for exhibiting "loud and tumultuous behavior." The police report, however, in Sgt. Crowley's own words, indicates that Gates' alleged tirade consisted of nothing more than harshly worded accusations hurled at the officer for being a racist. The charges were later dropped when the district attorney took charge of the case.
It is not yet entirely clear whether there was a racial element to the initial
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
“I always wondered why the cop didn’t have his weapon drawn when he was responding to a ‘suspected burglary’? “
-Because the cop was SENT on this call to investigate. It’s his JOB.
He probably figured it was what it was, or had a good chance of being that so you DON’T show up with guns drawn. It would only initiate conflict with possible deadly consequences.
But you cannot attack authority like the police the way Gates did. You can call the station and rant all you want - thus excercising his 1st amendment rights... But you DON’T scream at cops on duty. There is a law against that and it was followed here.
The cop knew Gates (the idiot) was p*ssed off and he knew Gates (the idiot) had some more to say, so he gave Gates (the idiot) the chance. Outside. If the cop was ready to leave, he would told Gates (the idiot) that and ended it right there. Period.
parsy.
‘But you DON’T scream at cops on duty. There is a law against that and it was followed here.’
The Supreme Court has already ruled on this. You can call them what ever you want.
Second, why wouldn’t you draw your weapon going to a suspected burgarly? That’s SOP for many stations.
re: Why invite him outside?
Why not? The officer has every right to assure his own personal safety. The officer has no way of knowing if anyone else is in the house or if Gates has a gun hidden in a couch and is just waiting for a chance to go for it. At this point the officer is at a distinct disadvantage. He has done this long enough, and read enough after action reports of police officers who didn’t finish their shifts and go home, to know he could be in danger. And the behavior shown by Gates served only to heighten the officer’s defense mechanisms. The officer knows for a fact only what his senses tell him at this point. He is perfectly within his rights to ask the person to step outside where the officer is more in control of the situation. The officer asked, Gates refused with an insult and the officer left the house. Confrontation over. It was Gates who chose to extend the confrontation.
See here for the source of "Teachable Moment"
"The action creates the teachable moments when people find that the world is not the way it is taught in the civics text books. In these situations of cognitive dissonance there are real opportunities for education."
No surprise that it comes from Obama's ideological parents, the 1960s Marxist-Alinsky hippie street rabble.
It's rare. Mostly they incite laughter and amusement, which is why there is so much police reality entertainment on TV. Your standard for tossing the First Amendment is disturbingly low, as low as the left's standard for tossing the Second. Unless Gates was making credible fists, swinging his cane, or yelling for the crowd to attack, his disorderly speech did not rise to the level of disorderly conduct. He has a case for false arrest, and it would be patriotic to pursue it to push back on government worker conduct. The police are held to a much higher standard while on the taxpayer clock.
That was in THE police report. Yes, the cop lured Gates (the idiot)outside.
parsy.
Sorry, but the cop did the right thing. I don’t care who the heck wrote this article.
Insulting cops in your own house is NOT disorderly conduct.
I once worked in a Starbucks and would give fee coffee to the cops so they would hang out and dissuade the skater kids from loitering. I'd converse with the cops, and even went on a few ride-alongs. In a conversation with an An SFPD detective, he used the term "tonk light". I said "huh what why?", and he said
"That's the sound it makes on a hippies' skull".
The deadpan delivery, combined with the fact that there wer no more true hippes around, almost made milk come out of my nose, and I wasn't even drinking milk at the time.
Our society has taken the concept of law enforcement and turned it into nothing more than a mechanism for providing taxpayer-funded security services. That's not was law enforcement was ever supposed to be in the U.S.
If you go back and examine the historic role of a "law enforcement officer" in this country, you'll find that such a person had no pro-active role at all like the police have today. The typical county sheriff wasn't appointed to walk around a jurisdiction and make arrests or hand out citations whenever someone broke a law. The term law enforcement did not mean "ensuring that the citizens obeyed the law" at all. Instead, law enforcement meant "enforcing the orderly application of a legitimate legal process." The role of law enforcement wasn't to serve as a publicly-funded pain in the @ss, or even to protect citizens from each other . . . it was to protect the accused criminal and ensure that he/she was subject to a lawful legal process.
In other words, arresting someone wasn't a mechanism for protecting the citizenry from a criminal . . . it was to protect the criminal from an armed citizenry that was likely to have a predisposition for hunting the accused criminal down and enacting their own version of "frontier justice" on him.
He was outside the house, and he was attracting a crowd, hurling incendiary comments at the cop. That’s creating a clear and present danger for the officer.
re: Why else ask him to come outside?
SOP for an officer when facing a situation where he does not know what he’s dealing with for certain. He is having to deal with a belligerent citizen who is yelling at him and preventing him from communicating with his dispatcher or other officers. He simply needs to get that person into an environment where he feels he has more control over the situation. Where on the property something takes place has nothing to do with anything other than the safety of the officer.
If folks truly believe the public should be protected by the first amendment to say anything they like to an officer, I would suggest they take the act into court and try it out on the presiding judge.
Police officers should not have to endure a tirade of verbal abuse from anyone.
Gates says he EXPECTS an APOLOGY from the police officer this afternoon at the ‘beer summit’ per Fox News!!!
I would argue that you are within the judges courtroom, his authority there rules. When you are on my property I am in charge. If I want to shout Praise Jesus! at the top of my lungs or Police are Facists! or Long Live the Second Ammendment! I have that right.
Try acting the fool like Gates in front of a judge and see what happens.
We can't just allow people to act like a fool now can we? No, sir. They might get funny ideas about freedom then.
I could care less if Gates was in his house or not,
Well, not everybody feels the way you do. I know, for my part, it matters to me immensely whether I am in my own castle or not. If I am in my own home I tend to think I have a certain amount of lassitude in the things I do and what I say. Maybe in your house it is different- fair enough. I don't like the idea of the government being able to incite you on your own property and then arrest you for that incitement.
And we can keep this in context. It wasn't a traffic stop. It wasn't even a criminal investigation by the time the officer decided to arrest Gates because he had already determined that there was no criminal activity taking place.
I believe, and it's maybe just silliness on my part, but I was raised to believe that a person has a great deal of freedom on their own property. More so than when out in the public commons. I believe that a citizen should be secure from government intrusion- particularly unwarranted government intrusion. Gates made his position clear to the officer. He didn't like him being there. He felt like he was being racially profiled or whatever he said. But the point is he made it pretty clear to the officer that he wasn't welcome on his property. I was raised to believe that if someone told you to get off his property you had a moral obligation to do so. And once this officer determined that there was no crime in progress, he should have just left and not worried about whether his law man ego and sensibilities were wounded by Gates' behaviour.
Speaking as one who has attended multiple tea-parties, I can say that the police were always very nice and polite. Their only goal was to keep order and keep everyone safe.
I was thankful for their presence, as I am quite sure some anti-tea party protestors that were there were trying to get something started. The cops moved them along and told them they needed to do their protesting on the other side of the street. If they hadn't done that, who knows what might have occurred.
He asked Gates to step outside, Gates refused and the cop left. Gates followed him out the door. Why didn’t Gates just stay there in the house? The cop was leaving. The confrontation was over. The cop chose to ignore the childish behavior of the esteemed intellectual. The cop had ended the encounter. It was Gates who insisted that it continue.
The officer's training would instruct him to be wary of a gathering crowd. While you wouldn't expect a Cambridge gathering to be in full "kill the pigs" mindset, he's already got one guy who seems to be a little off the plumb of acceptable social behavior, maybe he's got like-minded friends.
This wasn’t Harlem, or East L.A. It was Cambridge, where the intellectual elite have deigned to live. Not likely to have a race riot amongst that crowd of eggheads.
There are people in Cambridge who can be incited to throw a rock and hurt someone...or should the cop have been able to mind meld with the public and be sure he was in no danger?
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