Bloodless Coup

Having spent a LOT of time in Cambridge over the years, and having had dealings (pleasant and otherwise) with the Cambridge PD, there's a lot about this story (as presented by Gates, Ogletree, etc) that has the ring of complete and utter bullshit. Rather than there being anything racially-motivated in the cops' actions, I would bet HEAVILY that somebody well-meaning called the cops, Gates acted like a total condescending asshole (or swung that cane at somebody, or both) when they showed up, and the cops did what cops do with people who act like assholes, and now assorted axe grinders at Harvard are making like Al Sharpton.

And shockingly, just about 24 hours after a rather dubious narrative was spoon-fed to the Globe, Cambridge has dropped the charges.

There's a story here, and I suspect it isn't "redneck cops persecute black scholar". But I don't think we're going to get to hear it.

Oh look, one of the arresting officers -- looks like a sergeant -- was black. Are we still sold on this hatched-in-a-Harvard-faculty-lounge narrative?

Oh, really? Now we're going to go with the black-cops-can't-racially-profile? I'll bet, in another context, if I said black people can't be racist, you'd strongly disagree. Well, that one cop is black means exactly nothing to me on this story.

That's not to say I buy it as presented by Gates' partisans. But then again, one of the articles I read on this said they did the same thing to a prominent black physician in 2004 in Cambridge. Why? Because a black person somewhere in the area had been reported to have done something wrong. So, sure, stop the well-dressed, middle-aged doctor to check him out. You know, that happens to me all the time -- pretty much any time a white guy is reported to do anything wrong, I get stopped on the street. After all, what am I doing on the street, huh?

Since we'll never actually know, I'm going to infuse this story with my experience and conclude as follows: the cops were following up on a legitimate tip, sort of. The tipster might or might not have called the cops if a borderline-elderly white guy was pushing into a jammed front door in broad daylight with another guy standing unsuspiciously nearby, but he might have, in fairness. I certainly might have considered it. Probably, I'd have gone outside and talked to them, but that's just me.

So anyway, let's assume the tipster is race-blind. Cops show up, have legit questions, Gates, like any upper-middle-class intellectual who's spent his life studying racism and racist behavior, who's evidently having a bad day (just in from a trip, and having to break into his own new home and all) is bitchy about the situation, and maybe especially leery of the cops (his physician friend having been inappropriately harrassed just five years earlier), and the cops try to calm him down, but that just gets him more fired up and they bust him.

Nonetheless, I'll say that his shortness with them was probably somewhat warranted; their approach to him was probably somewhat more hostile than it would have been with a near-60 year old white man; the two things tangled together and amplified the situation, and at the end of the day no one is entirely right.

But all of that said, no one is going to convince me that he was treated the same as a similarly situated older white man in that situation. Because it's about the most unsuspicious situation one can imagine, really -- old, cane-wielding, broad daylight on a busy street. That's not exactly the standard burglar MO, and I think plenty here was dictated by the level of suspicion the cops manifested in the initial interaction, which I would bet dollars to donuts was greater than it would have been had he been white.

And speaking more generally, last I checked, being a pompous ass, which would appear to be about what they had on him, wasn't a crime.

I got stopped and screamed at by a huge asshole of a Cambridge cop (in bulletproof vest and mirrored sunglasses, no less) some years back for the crime of doing 33 in a 35 (in first gear, in a red Corvette). I am a white male. Cops are assholes, in Cambridge and elsewhere. But if you don't think cops in Cambridge are extra-sensitive to the howling of the PC brigades, you're... well, out of touch. I still say that the story as broken by the Globe reeks of something carefully constructed to satisfy a certain set of prejudices. It's too pat. And I further note that the cop who made the arrest has said that he would LOVE to tell his side of the story but has been ordered by his chief to stay quiet.

Something isn't right here.

So you got hassled while driving a sports car in Cambridge. Wow.

Sorry, that's no response to the proposition that Gates was treated differently than a similarly situated white person would have been. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps something stinks about this one. And I'm sure the cop would love to tell his story, and I'm pretty sure that cop would love to tell his story no matter what the truth was, because, well, everyone's got a side of every story that serves them better than reality (including Gates, of course). Doesn't mean anything he has to say is true.

Just about anything robust that has ever come out analyzing police conduct shows a conclusive, statistically significant, frankly appalling disparity in the way blacks and whites are treated by the police -- this isn't even global warming, where a few credentialed folks seriously maintain that the conventional view of the data is wrong -- so forgive me if I'm going to take the easy bet here and stick to my position, which pretty clearly has the better odds behind it. (And please note, I framed everything I said as an assumption, because I readily grant my version is by no means given, Gates might have manufactured the whole thing, and we'll never ever ever know what really happened in any event.)

Like it or not, Moon, "piss off a cop => get busted on bullshit charges" is a fact of life in much of America, regardless of race or creed (though not necessarily of class, but that's another discussion). Comparing me to a global warming denier -- while amusing, in a "are you really going there?" kind of way -- won't change that.

And yes, I maintain that the "racism!" narrative feels fabricated. Go read Cialdini and ask yourself if it's possible that you're being manipulated, if you have the balls for that kind of introspection.

Everything feels fabricated once the media gets its hooks into it. The "racism!" narrative is no more compelling than the "I was scared of a 60 year old man with a cane allegedly breaking into a house in broad daylight" narrative. The whole thing's getting out of hand.

And my testicles aside -- really, Jac, I expect slightly more adult debate from you, or at least debate that actually engages my statements, which your last comment manifestly doesn't -- I basically agree with your first paragraph. But I'm not surprised you avoid engaging the statement that it has been proved beyond any real disagreement that the cops empirically can be shown to treat people different on racial lines. And all I've maintained throughout this thread, as one might expect from someone who lacks the balls for deep thoughts or for reading some author he's never heard of but who apparently is so important he need be identified neither by line of work or given name, is that if I'm a betting man, I'm betting race was an inappropriate factor.

Sorry, Robert Cialdini is sort of a pop guru of applied spinmeister theory. His book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a good intro to his work, which is much beloved of hacks and marketers in many fields.

As for the rest, the whole thing is so laughably out of hand at this point that I don't think anything useful can be said, certainly not by me. Of course professional social-theory fetishists are finding racism here. I know a few who could find it in the glass of water sitting here on my desk. Maybe they're right.

But I do want to say one thing: You say "everything feels fabricated once the media gets their hooks into this." But the media frenzy starts with a narrative that is fed to someone, somewhere, from outside. I haven't traced this all back, but I gather that that someone was a Globe reporter, who -- I suspect, and this is the point that I have been trying to make -- was handed a narrative carefully crafted to play well with the professional tut-tut crowd in Cambridge. Does that mean that racism-deep-down-in-the-cop's-unconscious wasn't a factor? The social theorists tell us that it's a factor for everybody, everywhere, all the time. Maybe they're right. Does it mean that Ogletree (or people around him) overtly used white fears of being labeled "racist" to manufacture "outrage" and thus manipulate the situation so as to get Gates out of an embarrassing hole that he might well have dug for himself? Again, I don't know. But that's what it smelled like to me when the story was first breaking, and so far I haven't seen anything to rule it out.

Thanks for the clarification. I think it's interesting, and silver-liningish that, at the end of the day, something that got significantly out of hand relative to its real newsworthiness is very likely going to result in a very cool opportunity for a working stiff: i.e., to sit down with the first black president and one of the world's foremost scholars of race relations for a beer or a coffee or whatever in the White House. In a year, hell in a month or two, no one's going to remember the cop's name or face, and he'll go about his business. But he'll have the memory of a lifetime.

I know what this conversation is lacking: Morris! Where's Morris? Yooo-hooo, Morris! A rational basis for accusing President Stalin of racial intolerance has arisen, and you're nowhere to be found!

Balko

Balko's dead-on. America's relationship with its law enforcement employees is seriously busted.

I like a lot of what Balko says here. On a related note, Herbert said some of the same things, from a very different perspective, in today's Times.