Today, President Obama attended the White House press briefing to state that he “could have calibrated those words differently” when he stated that the Cambridge police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr. acted stupidly. To sum up what happened, Gates, a Harvard professor and leading authority on race, locked himself out of his house. Neighbors witnessed two black men (Gates and an associate) breaking into a house and called the police. The police arrived, questioned Gates, who took offense, and eventually the police arrested Gates. Both sides claim that the other was at fault, and many of the claims center around the police being racist and Gates refusing to cooperate. This matter, however, is not only about civil rights, it is about civil liberties.
Now it is certainly plausible to think none of this would have happened if Gates were white. It might be less likely that neighbors would have called the police if they saw a white person locked out of their house. It’s also plausible that the interaction between Gates and police would have gone differently if they were of the same race, but all of that misses the point. Because we are so worried about race we are failing to question why the police even have the right to question or arrest a person who refused to show ID. I am not a Constitutional or Massachusetts law expert, but I question to authority of the police to ask you to produce ID simply because a neighbor called. In other words, what would happen if, every time I see someone I don’t know (or don’t like) doing something, I would call the police.
Missing the Point on the Gates Arrest
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