Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Harvard professor and one of the top black scholars in America, was arrested in front of his own house for disorderly conduct on July 16th 2009. The charge was dropped on July 21st, soon after the arrest made the news.
On the 16th a neighbour, a white woman, called the police and told them that she saw two black men trying to break into his house. As it turns out it was Gates himself and a driver. Gates had just returned from China and was having trouble opening the front door.
Gates got in at last and the driver left. Then the police arrived. The officer saw a black man (Gates) inside the house and asked him to come outside. He refused. He asked him to show ID and prove that he lived there. He did. Gates in turn asked him for his name and badge number.
That should have been the end of the story. It was not. Now it gets strange. And neither side makes sense:
As Gates tells it, he keeps asking the officer to identify himself but the officer says nothing. When Gates comes outside he is surprised to see other policemen there. They put handcuffs on him and take him away.
As the police tell it, Gates started yelling, saying stuff like “This is what happens to black men in America!” Gates tells the police that they do not know who they are messing with. Onlookers gather. Gates is creating a scene. The officer warns him to calm down or he will arrest him. Gates does not calm down, so they put handcuffs on him and take him away.
Can you be arrested for just yelling at the police? Would they do it to a white professor?
Gates’s story does not make sense: why are they arresting him?
But the police’s story makes even less sense: it has Gates yelling. Gates is a 58-year-old black man. He would have way more sense than that. I can see Gates being angry, but I cannot see him yelling at the police. Even at the end of a long trip. The police have a bad history of shooting black men “by mistake”.
I have been stopped by the police several times and had to show my ID based on some weak excuse. I have even been asked to prove that I am not robbing my own house. My heart pounds a mile a minute but above all I try to stay calm through the whole thing because I know that if they want to throw the book at me they will think of some excuse. Then what?
The Root said:
If Skip Gates can be arrested on his front porch and end up in handcuffs in a police cruiser then, sadly, there, but for the grace of God, goes every other black man in America. That is one sad statement, and it should also be enough to end all this post-racial hogwash.
See also:
- Chanequa Campbell – a black student at Harvard who was denied her degree in May for some wrongdoing that the police accuse her of but which they will not tell her about.
- Oscar Grant – shot dead by mistake
- Sean Bell – shot dead by mistake
- Is racism over in America?
- Will Smith: America is not a racist nation
In the Police report, it says the white woman that called the police in the first place was in front of the house, why didn’t she say anything? Surely, she must have recognized her neighbor being arrested?
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hmm…he got a mug shot that sucks. oh man that sucks
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poor henry louis gates junior even a distiguished scholar can’t catch a break
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Found this article with a photo of the arrest:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/07/charges_to_be_d.html
FWIW, at least one officer at the scene and possibly two was black.
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you should do a post on shaquanda cotton
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sgt crowley was the one who arrested him…
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“I have been stopped by the police several times and had to show my ID based on some weak excuse. I have even been asked to prove that I am not robbing my own house. My heart pounds a mile a minute but above all I try to stay calm through the whole thing because I know that if they want to throw the book at me they will think of some excuse. Then what?”
I’ve yet to be forced to show my id or pulled over but i’ve experienced racism. I went for a summer position and my friend worked there and i spoke w/ the owner and i told him i was looking for a summer position b4 college and he basically told me that he really wanted someone who wasn’t a graduating senior, he wanted someone who he could train blah blah blah. So I believed him at first, but then come to find he hired 5 people for summer positions and basically overbooked his employees and hired all these people including a graduating senior for 2 months only 2 months before they went to college, so basically he was a racist, ofcourse my friend doesn’t see/understand this (she’s white) but yeah…racism is still alive and well…
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What a bullshit final paragraph, Abagond. Hatin’?
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Good point. It was a resentful little paragraph: Gates, as a Harvard professor, can (in the end) get away with yelling at the police but I cannot. I think that is true, but it is only the police who say he acted that way, not Gates himself, so it might not even be true.
My last paragraph says (I will probably change it):
Maybe Gates is just plain fed up and figures Harvard (or a media firestorm) will fish him out in the end. Not all of us have that safety net when we fall.
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There’s a twitter quote at Racialicious from Melissa Harris-Lacewell (a colleague of Gates) that says, among other things, that she has long believed that Gates underestimates racism in America.
http://www.racialicious.com/2009/07/21/harvard-scholar-henry-louis-gates-jr-arrested-in-his-own-home/
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I can’t believe the Police Officer had the nerve to arrest him for being loud! You accused and we’re trying to arrest him for breaking into his own home. Of course he’s gonna be loud!!
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This is America and it is time to stop the racism and harassment, We are entering into other countries trying to push democracy and to stop terrorism but what about here? minorities has always suffered in this country and now more so due to downsizing and the economy, racism and harassment is very much alive not only for minorities but for all who are under privileged. It is time that we do the right thing, let us start here in America first and then we can go abroad and help free others
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i only discovered today that alot of black women also fall victim to the same fate as black men. i had read an article of a 92 year old woman being shot 6 times by white police officers, who then turn around and plant marijauna to make it look like they had reason to kill her. i am amazed they got a jail sentence…not much though 4 to 10 years…they will probably get out early. her name was kathryn johnston.
and then there was 12 year old Dymond Millburn beaten by the police, who made went to the wrong addressed mistook her for a prostitute (even though their description was 3 white women, not black), and they beat her. she and her father ended up getting arrested.
the city justified their beating her and arresting them.
i wish media would have made attention to that, to show that there is more to this that people are willing to accept.
i guess making attention indepthly to it, will only cause people to have to ask…are the police becoming more like the gestapo? are they abusing thier power? and people dont want to deal with that possibility so it goes ignored.
i have wondered. if we be submissive and do as we are told…will more people listen to us if a cop does us any kind of wrong?
almost makes you want to carry a tape recorder for proof, so you will have real evidence…..
all i know is, when the upstanding blacks are killed or beaten or arrested unfairly…that causes blacks to feel as though there is no hope for a better world.
im still sad by omar edward’s murder. he was a black cop killed by a white cop.
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I seem to recall some higher court authority from some years ago, perhaps even Supreme Court, to the effect that cursing at a police officer, or calling names, is not a basis for arrest. Nevertheless, police routinely harass, arrest, or beat up people who curse them or call them names.
“Disturbing the peace,” the charge initially leveled at Gates but later dropped, requires that the accused do something that truly does disturb the peace. Some vociferous opinionating from one’s front porch does not rise to that level.
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How amazing is our president:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/22/harvard.gates.interview/index.html
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you know my only problem with this is that they arent including black women.
they are suffering too…i wish we could make it national the whole entire story, what i mean, innocent blacks and the white cops….not just men, but women too…i guess like i said before, the women stories, would cause too many people to be sympathetic, which would cause people to want change, or think that it may be needed….
i dunno…i was wondering when obama was gonna chime in though.
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As more information filters out, it appears that the only witnesses to the event were Prof. Gates and the several police officers present, some of whom are black (there is a famous photo taken by a neighbor across the street but we don’t know if that neighbor heard anything). Thus, it appears that the main racial issue here will be the “blue/not blue” divide.
Whether Prof. Gates was treated differently because of his race is something we will probably never know. The Boston area is famous for its high level of racism, cops target black males excessively in general, and thus it’s easy to surmise that this was the case with Prof. Gates.
On the other hand, the officers describe Prof. Gates as irate toward the encounter from its outset. If this was true, consider whether his ire was justified under the circumstances: the po were responding to a phone call about a possible burglary. If Prof. Gates had still been in China and the guys in the house were in fact burglars, would he be satisfied when he later learned that, when the cops arrived at his house, a black male in the house verbally identified himself as “Skip Gates” and insisted that he lived in the home, so the cops took that at face value and left, after which the burglar took all of Gates’ stuff? My point is that they were doing the right thing by requesting his ID.
It was apparently stuff that occurred on the porch, after the ID was produced, that resulted in the arrest. We do know that even though it’s not technically illegal to bad mouth a cop, any citizen who does so runs the risk that the cop will rough him up and arrest him on trumped up “disturbing the peace” charges, or worse. This happens all the time. A cop I know was very frank about it: “You become a royal pain in my ass and I will figure out a way to make sure you have a very bad day.”
It happens to people of all races. Just the other day in rural Minnesota a white guy, unarmed and wearing a swim suit, was shot dead by a white cop. The circumstances are horrific, far worse than the Gates matter, though the matter barely garned a blip in the media (which goes to my reply to the post about the media being soft on racism — recall the massive publicity about that guy shot dead by the cops outside a strip club, and compare to the almost complete lack of publicity about this killing).
http://wcco.com/local/deputy.kills.man.2.1094358.html?detectflash=false
It appears here that Prof. Gates is going to bump up against that blue line if he attempts to extract some pound of flesh for his ordeal. My gut is that the police will circle their wagons and keep each others’ backs.
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blanc 2, if the news doesnt even report about 12 year old black girls being beaten by the police when the police were fully in the wrong, then i highly doubt they will report news about white men.
lets face it. the news wants to only report injustices they can mock.
rather than report facts, they say certain things that will trigger certain types of emotions in people.
reporting incidents like the Dymond Millburn incident would mean they couldnt mock the injustice, as no matter how you spin it, Millburn was the victim of brutality….
they keep the real injustices out of the news because they know that the real injustices would make light of the actual problem, and would have to make people ask if the police are abusing their power.
society has come to a point where the media essentially thinks for them.
if its not on the news, they usually dont know about it.
and what they dont know cant hurt them or at least cause them confusion.
i think Gates should make a situation out of this…but i think he should talk about all the cases that go unheard of in the media…he has a chance to really bring this situation to light.
the media needs to stop making him look like the villian, to please the target audience.
we have a great and dangerous problem in america, and its time to stop ignoring and pretending its happening. its only going to get worse, if people dont start waking up and accepting its happening.
i do think racism plays a role.
no matter what you say or think, when you are black in america, you are not given that same benefit of the doubt.
stop thinking in the mindset that racism doesnt exist. it doesnt matter if we have a black prez, that hasnt changed the racist incidents you hear in the news.
remember, we arent equal. there is no such thing as equality. and honestly we shouldnt strive to be equal…because that only causes people to overlook the specific problems of each race.
in the end, rather than trying to make equality happen, people should just teach about tolerance and acceptance….make required classes for children to learn those things early on.
but dont tell people we are all equal. because that is just misleading them about reality.
it doesnt matter if all races endure what Gates went through. in the end, there is something specifically that isnt getting attention.
and thats black people who are being killed or beaten, when they do absolutely no wrong. and the media is only reporting men who get hurt, and they always choose the men, they can make it out to be the villian.
white people wont see the reality of this issue, because everyone’s brain is based off of the media…and if media doesnt talk about it, then they wont know about it.
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I have HQ audio of the Henry Gates 911 call, Moderator, If you are interested
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Thank you!!
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The white lady that called police, i’m sure she is laughing and proud of herself.
We all know that white people enjoy harming black people in anyway they can.
I am sure she is happy that she started all of this trouble and happy she got a black man into trouble.
I would call cops on her and make up a story about her and see how she likes it!
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The white lady that called the cops did that on purpose!
She knew she would get Gates into trouble and she knew who we was! She was lying!
How nasty and crafty white people really are.
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I would not fault the 911 caller. She saw two men breaking into a house. Unless she knew it was Gates, she did the right thing.
The fault lies with Sgt Crowley. That cannot be blamed on her. Nor can it be blamed on Gates. Getting angry is not a crime. Crowley, as a trained police officer, is not supposed to let that get to him.
That they dropped the chargers shows that it was a mistake. But Crowley will not apologize. Either he is too proud or does not see what he did wrong. Or both.
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That they dropped the chargers shows that it was a mistake.
Not at all…charges can be dropped for many reasons. It does mean that someone did not commit a crime. It is up to the prosecutors office to determine if their is sufficient evidence and importantly resources (and will) to prosecute a crime. In my experience, when arrests occur at a political demonstration, the majority of time charges are dropped. In a different context (like a wild party..) I suspect prosecutors might actually pursue charges but when people are arrested at demonstrations, it’s basically as a form of crowd control. If the prosecution took the case the court they would likely face big guns like the ACLU, whether or not a crime was committed because it is easy to tread on the first amendment when you prosecute people at political demos.
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What are you talking about? I said Crowley was in the wrong, not Gates.
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Monica said in comment #7:
I went for a summer position and my friend worked there and i spoke w/ the owner … he basically told me that he really wanted someone who wasn’t a graduating senior, he wanted someone who he could train blah blah blah. So I believed him at first, but then come to find he hired 5 people for summer positions and basically overbooked his employees and hired all these people including a graduating senior for 2 months only 2 months before they went to college…
I had an experience like that too.
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Not to defend or excuse the obvious racist impetus behind this event, but…
Can you be arrested for just yelling at the police? Would they do it to a white professor?
Oh, you betchya. I’ve yelled at cops and been arrested, several times. I know plenty of white folks, professors and not, who can say the same.
I Gates did indeed do this, the cops were reacting in their normal BS way.
As Abagond points out, however, I HIGHLY doubt that Dr. Gates did this. He’s much smarter than I am, for starters. 😀
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