Professor Henry Lewis Gates of Harvard was arrested in his own house, on his own front porch on July 15, 2009. A white bystander noticed him forcing open his own door, which was stuck, and called police.
Detailed Harvard Crimson Report According to the Crimson:
But according to an e-mailed statement from law school Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., a friend of Gates’ who is now representing him, Gates was returning on Thursday from a week-long trip to China and tried to enter through his front door, which was damaged. Ogletree said that Gates had forced open the front door with the help of his car driver, who also helped carry Gates’ luggage into the home, after first entering through a backdoor and turning off his alarm.
“I think that the charges should be dropped because Professor Gates was a suspect for being a burglar in his own home,” Ogletree said in an interview with The Crimson. “This was precipitated on a false assumption that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He added that Gates has been “traumatized” by the entire affair and is now resting comfortably in his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard.
According to Ogletree, Gates noticed a police officer on his porch while he was on the phone requesting a door repair from Harvard Real Estate Services, which owns the home. The professor reportedly stayed inside when the officer asked him to come outside, but provided the officer with both his Harvard identification card and his driver’s license as proof that he lived at the home and taught at the University. Ogletree said Gates then asked the police officer for his badge number and name several times but received no response.
For another account: New York Daily News
The police report is available: Police report
The question in my mind is this:
Would Professor Henry Lewis Gates have been arrested in his own home under these circumstances if he were NOT an African American male?
The problems with “racial profiling” in our state are fairly well known, see for example Commonwealth v. Lora
That’s my honest answer: we don’t know.
Someone witnesses a person prying open a door to a house. They call the police. The police show up, the person is now inside the house, they ask for ID, he says no and says a few additional unflattering things to the police officers but later complies. He berates the officer and follows the officer outside on the porch and continues to yell. He then tells the officer “you don’t know who you’re messing with”. At this point there are several on lookers who are described as “surprised and alarmed” by the Crimson. This person is then arrested for disorderly conduct.
see Ernie’s post.
I’d be inclined to call police if I saw someone I didn’t know trying to break a door open too.
Read the police report. It is different than the Globe’s account, and it’s a first-person account. Ogletree’s commentary is not. UPDATE — I read it this AM before the Globe took it down off the web site — WHAT”S THAT SAY?
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p>Given that the cop was responding to a report of break in, he was correct in asking for ID, verifying the right of that person to be in the property (is it owned by Harvard? I think it is,) and making sure there’s actually not a forced entry in progress.
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p>Instead, Gates, according to the officer’s report, goes into victim mode, in the officer’s face, not catching the officer’s name (repeated 3 times, according to the police report) and so on.
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p>Serve and protect, responding to forced entry, make sure who’s who … y’all can pull the “you’re not black so you don’t understand” trump card, but I bet the officer would have arrested William F. Buckley had he acted in the same way Gates did.
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p>I’ll go further. After reading the police report, I’d say it’s Amber Paw who should ask herself what’s in her heart by immediately thinking the white cop is wrong and the black man is a victim, whether or not she poses her racism as an hypothetical question.
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p>Interesting that the Globe’s pdf of the police report, and Amber’s link to the NY Post, are dead.
Amber, you’re a lawyer and usually present only “relevant” data. Your quote…
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p>Does the color of the person who saw Gates trying to breakdown his own door matter? If they were black, would this make any difference? What about the police on the scene… what color were they and does their color matter? We certainly know sure as shit that the color of the criminal in this case matter since if Gates were white there would be NO STORY, whether he was arrested or not.
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p>How many other celebrities get arrested for disorderly conduct and get their faces plastered on the MSM and the charges are NOT dropped… because they are white.
Read my links, John. Me? I do due diligence before contacting gendarmes. Do YOU?
What if the officer was black???
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p>What if it had REALLY BEEN a break-in??
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p>What if the professor was an illegal Mexican immigrant??
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p>What if the Scooby Gang came by in the Mystery Machine and pulled off Gates’ mask to reveal Old Man Johnson, the owner of the Haunted Amusement Park???
if it wasn’t for those blasted kids!
Don’t forget Arthur Conquest’s run-in with Brookline’s finest.
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p>I grew up in Washington, DC in the fifties and sixties, and I have never seen the kind of insidious and pervasive racism I found here in Boston. I was in DC during the epic civil rights battles. The MLK “I have a dream” speech was local news when I was a kid, and hotly debated. I watched black smoke billowing from NE Washington during the riots that followed the MLK assassination from my backyard, again during the “long hot summers” that followed.
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p>None of that prepared me for things like the brazen attack on Theodore Landsmark a scant two years after my arrival in my new home of Boston.
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p>Things have improved since the days of racists like Pixie Palladino and Louise Day Hicks, but we still have a very long way to go.
He’s the problem. He’s twisting this incident into a magnificent race issue. And the media is assisting … WCVB (Ch. 5) didn’t even mention the police were responding to a forced entry report.
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p>If I were the CPD, I’d now wonder whether I could do my job in minority parts of town. What are the ramifications of race profiling accusations now likely to be leveled at every traffic stop or jaywalking? Can the police actually do their job? Should we assign only black officers to certain parts of town or call ins?
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p>Good luck.
Did you ever notice when black cops do the same things white cops do, the incident isn’t racial but change the faces of the cops and it becomes racism.
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p>What would we all be saying of all the cops involved were black? The race of the cops (or the bystander who called the police) should not matter.
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p>Why can’t people talk about cases like this without a bias? Why does the race card get pulled so quickly? Shit like this happens EVERYDAY to people. Mistakes are made by cops and so many other people but often times it’s called racism when blacks are involved.
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p>Obama and others have asked for Americans to get race on the table and discuss it but I think it’s hard to do when shit like this happens. Gates was being an asshole and should have been arrested whether he was black, white, Asian or green. Most other people would have understood the procedure the CPD followed, understood the mistake and went on with their lives. Gates had to continue to be the jerk he is known to be and pushed the envelope. Too bad the CPD and the City of Cambridge decided to drop the charges. I think a judge would have sided with the cops.
This case is a “magnificent race issue” — it takes no “twisting”. It became a race issue the moment that the white arresting officer refused to identify himself and provide his badge number to the black resident whose home he was “protecting”, and became “magnificent” when the same white officer arrested the black resident who had the audacity to actually object to being bullied in his own home.
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p>Spare us the horse-pucky about traffic stops and jay-walking. Stuff the bullshit speculations about black cops. This is a racist incident because a white cop thought he could get away with bullying a black resident. This white officer treated this black resident in an insulting and racist way — treatment that no white resident would have received. THAT is the issue.
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p>John D. alleges that “[Mr.] Gates was being an asshole and should have been arrested whether he was black, white, Asian or green.” The only “asshole” in this incident was an insecure macho cop who attempted to bully his way out of a “magnificent racist incident” that his own incompetence created.
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p>Perhaps John D. wants to live in a society where police thugs can harass, bully, and arrest whoever they don’t like the looks of. I don’t.