Obama vs. Cambridge police

[Imran Siddiqui]

you hate racist cops!

[Sava]

in soviet russia, racist cops hate YOU

[Imran Siddiqui]

[a.kitman]

It's natural for hoodlums like a.kitman to hate the cops. Do you regularly get thank yous from criminals?

Seriously though, many people on the left hate cops until they actually need them.

funny enuff my votes always end up on the right.

[Sava]

The right of what?

[a.kitman]

the sink

[Straybow]

Tell ya what, Berz. Let's try an experiment. Wait 3 months for the publicity to die off. Try to break into your own home and have a neighbor call the police. Shout at the officer(s) and accuse them of abusing their authority when you are asked to provide ID, and see if you get a ride down to HQ and an arrest on your record.

[Straybow]

the cop pulled a dirty trick by telling Gates to step outside while he was shooting his mouth off, thats the basis for the disorderly conduct in public charge. Gates was an ahole because instead of thanking the cop (and neighbor) for watching out for his house he went ballistic on the profiling nonsense.

If the officer went inside the home without backup, the officer's life is potentially in danger. Were there actual robbers in the home the officer could be ambushed. That's what police are trained to watch out for.

You should be able to figure this one out. Why are you being a dumbass?

I knew somebody whose house was broken into by a robbery crew. She arrived home while they were in the house. The first thing the robbers did was jam a toothpick in the lock so the owner can't just walk right in. She did what Gates did, went around back to get in the other way. Back door lock also jammed, she went to a sliding glass door and saw the four robbers leaving through the front door.

So, even if the initial suspect is the actual owner, the possible presence of robber(s) in the home is a potential danger. The cop did the right thing, as he was trained.

[BlackCat]

Sounds like Obama will drink beer with Gates and Crowley



Edit: Jump to 4:40

[DaShi]

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/henry-louis-gates-deja-vu-all-over-again/?em

July 24, 2009, 6:18 pm
Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again

I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.

As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.

The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?

At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.
DESCRIPTIONThe Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.

The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)

Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.

He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?

He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.

Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.

[Sava]

the sink

the stink?

[a.kitman]

isnt that the samething

[chequita guevara]

So yes, the cop acted stupidly. It doesn't make the cop a racist or anything (unknown and probably unknowable), but he acted stupidly in this particular situation. Make of that what you will.

-Arrian

Unknown and probably unknowable whether racism was involved in this situation, but statistically you stand a much better chance of being arrested for giving lip to a cop if you are a minority than if you are white.

Personally, I don't give lip to cops because of a story a friend once told me. He was at a demonstration in the 60s. The cops told him to get off the street and back on the sidewalk (though the street was packed with protesters). He said, "No. What are you gonna do, arrest me?" "No," they said, cuffing him, throwing him in their car, and then driving him to an alley a few blocks away where the proceeded to beat the crap outta him. And that's why I never give lip to the nice police officers, even when I refuse their requests (such as to search my car).

[Sava]

isnt that the samething

is it?

[Dis]

I have to say, I do not have any level of sympathy for Gates.

I've been in a worse situation than he was. I was awoken by a cop coming through my patio door. A friend/coworker had come over to my house at an arranged time, but I was sleeping in. I didn't answer the front door, so he came around the back and entered through the patio door (right beside the couch I was sleeping on).

A neighbour called the police when they saw my friend coming around and in the patio at the back of the house.

The police responded, came through the patio door with hands on guns. I was sleeping right there. I was 'holy ****!' After the initial shock and confrontation (*sits bolt upright* 'Don't move!' 'OK') they wanted ID. I had just moved so my DL had my old address on it. They wanted my name on a document at the address. I had received a phone bill there. *phew* This satisfied them, and they left.

The officers were agitated and confrontational throughout. They barked demands in sharp tones, but eventually settled into sullen resentment that their time was being wasted.

At no time did it occur to me to lip them off even though at no time was the encounter polite in a tip the hat sort of fashion. They made no apology for their agitated/aggressive behaviour and none was expected.

It was a confrontational situation that they responded to. Pouring gas on a fire would have been the worst possible thing to do.

most young people are smart enough to realize this.

I don't really think race is an issue, but age is. A lot of old people think they can act as bad as they want because they are old. Remember that old lady in Texas who got tasered? Similar thing. she even used her age as an excuse. . The wise thing to do is to respect their authority. And they do enforce the law, and thus have authority.

This guy though he was above the police and spend a short time in jail. My heart isn't exactly bleeding.