Professor Gates, When Confronted By Cops Be Really Polite

Pretty much everything has been said about the arrest by a Cambridge, Mass. police officer of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. on a disorderly conduct charge, since dropped. But not everyone has said it, so here are a few more thoughts.

As a black man who has been stopped by cops, mostly but not always white cops, and sometimes at gunpoint, I've found the best way to handle these situations is to be unfailingly polite. That's the first rule in such a confrontation.

It just makes sense since the cop always has the upper hand. The proof of this is you never see photos of unarmed civilians leading armed cops away in handcuffs.

Like President Barack Obama I don't know all the facts in the Gates case. That, of course, didn't stop the president from saying during his news conference that the police had acted "stupidly" for arresting his friend Gates. This comment is unlikely to endear the president to many police officers.

It doesn't help us that Gates' and Police Sergeant James Crowley's versions of what happened are so divergent. A colleague of mine likened it to Rashomon where your narrative of what happened depends on who you are. So it's difficult to know what the actual truth is.

 

But it appears safe to say that once the first officer arrived on the scene, matters escalated in the house.

In the police report, Gates is described as shouting that the police sergeant was a racist among other things.

It's worth noting that even in his interview with his daughter Elizabeth that appeared in the Daily Beast, the Harvard professor doesn't suggest that he treated the officer with the utmost respect and still got arrested.

Now, there's no law that says you can't be prickly or rude with a cop who shows up at your house to investigate a reported burglary.

But common sense suggests you shouldn't antagonize a law enforcement officer in such a situation anymore than you should utter the word "bomb" when trying to pass through airport security.

Peter Moskos, a Harvard-trained sociologist who actually worked as a cop in Baltimore and wrote the book "Cop in the Hood," makes this very point on his blog.

Seems like you should treat everybody with respect—strangers, waiters, employees in stores—but of all people you should treat with respect, a police officer with a gun, handcuffs, and the legal authority to put your @#& in jail should be pretty high on the list.

In the old days, if you were a jerk to the police, they might beat you. That doesn't happen much anymore. Ultimately cops have handcuffs. Handcuffs—and not, as Bittner once said, the use of force—handcuffs define the function of police...

Every police/public confrontation ends up in one of three ways: the suspect must 1) defer to police authority, 2) leave the scene, or 4) get locked up. Right or wrong, there really is no other choice. Not that I can think of.

Generally, I had a pretty high-tolerance (at least by Baltimore cop standards) for taking #$%*. I'm a pretty mellow guy. Sometimes I would just laugh. I did not have a chip on my shoulder and I didn't want to lower myself to ghetto standards. Other cops would be quicker to take things personal.

But if you questioned my authority? Well, ain't nobody gonna punk me. Not when I was working. Cops can't lose face. Period. To do so is dangerous if you ever have to walk those streets again.

I'm having trouble viewing this as a case of racial profiling. A neighbor sees two black men apparently trying to break into a house. Was she profiling when she called the police? Maybe, but most neighbors would call the police under such circumstances regardless of race.

And as far as Gates, the police were investigating a suspected crime at the address where he happened to answer the door. So where's the profiling there?

In a perverse way, Gates may come out ahead of this situation. Before the arrest, he was a famous Harvard intellectual but still there were probably many who didn't know who he was, even African Americans. Now, with a mugshot to call his own, he has a lot more name recognition and maybe even some street cred he lacked before.

Still, maybe all this could have been avoided with a little more common sense on the professor's part.