I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
Crowley Acted Stupidly
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I haven’t really weighed in extensively on this issue until now because I have been on the fence most of the time about who was right and who was wrong.
(Disclaimer: I did weigh in with one post so far, but it was mainly directed at Obama’s high-profile rush to judgment admittedly without having all the facts; where, in effect, he “acted stupidly”. As to the actual two participants, despite my leaning towards Crowley’s side of the argument when posting that post, I was still chewing it over at the time…)
In any case, it may surprise you to know that after much thought, I’m actually not on Crowley’s side in this one, despite my disgust at Gates’ despicable race-baiting and childish antics (including his infantile “yo mama” retort to Crowley at one point).
A recent article in U.S. News by Robert Schlesinger helped provide the tipping point for me, when it provided some very thoughtful arguments as to why Crowley was in fact “acting stupidly”. Unfortunately, I can’t find a reproduction of that article online to which I can link, but I did find another one on townhall.com by Jacob Sullum that has some very similarly thoughtful points.
Schlesinger first describes in detail Gates’ antics, saying:
Gates, by Crowley’s account, behaved obnoxiously. He opened with race… He was confrontational, yelled, and was manifestly uncooperative. He played the officious, self-important jerk… he called Crowley a racist, and he warned the officer that he had no idea whom he was “messing” with. Arguably worse that acting obnoxiously, Gates was acting stupidly, to use the word of the moment.
Then, Schlesinger delivers the punchline:
But acting stupidly is not a crime. Neither is mouthing off to a cop or, for that matter, breaking into one’s own home. Peel away the racial and class overtones and what you have is someone being arrested in his own home for being rude to a police officer. [emphasis added]
Sullum says similarly:
The highly publicized arrest illustrates the threat posed by vague laws that give too much discretion to police officers who conflate their own personal dignity with public safety. [emphasis added]
Continuing with Schlesinger’s convincing analysis:
“The professor at any time could have resolved the issue by quieting down and/or going back inside the house,” Crowley told a radio interviewer. True. But the police officer could also have resolved the issue by rolling his eyes, wishing the cranky old professor a nice day, getting in his car, and going off in search of an actual crime. And as the person with greater power—in this case, the power to arrest and incarcerate—Crowley had more responsibility to defuse the situation. [emphasis added]
Sullum analyzes the actual details of the arrest nicely:
Even if we accept Crowley’s version of events, the arrest was not justified (a conclusion reinforced by the city’s decision to drop the charge). Let’s say Gates did initially refuse to show his ID — an understandable response from an innocent man confronted by police in his own home. Let’s say he immediately accused Crowley of racism and behaved in a “loud and tumultuous” fashion. So what? By Crowley’s own account, he arrested Gates for dissing him. That’s not a crime, or at least it shouldn’t be.
In Massachusetts, as in many states, the definition of disorderly conduct is drawn from the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code. A person is considered disorderly if he “engages in fighting or threatening, violent or tumultuous behavior … with purpose to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm” or “recklessly creates a risk thereof.”
Crowley claims Gates recklessly created public alarm by haranguing him from the porch of his house, attracting a small crowd that included “at least seven unidentified passers-by” as well as several police officers. Yet it was Crowley who suggested that Gates follow him outside, thereby setting him up for the disorderly conduct charge.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Crowley was angered and embarrassed by Gates’ “outburst” and therefore sought to create a pretext for arresting him. “When he has the uniform on,” Crowley’s wife later told The New York Times, “Jim has an expectation of deference.”
As the Massachusetts Appeals Court has noted, “the theory behind criminalizing disorderly conduct rests on the tendency of the actor’s conduct to provoke violence in others.” Yet police officers often seem to think the purpose of such laws is to punish people for talking back to cops.
“You don’t get paid to be publicly abused,” Michael J. Palladino, president of New York City’s Detectives Endowment Association, told the Times last week. “There are laws that protect against that.” A Brooklyn police officer agreed, saying, “I wouldn’t back down if there’s a crowd gathering. If there’s a group and they’re throwing out slurs and stuff, you have to handle it.”
In this context, the relevance of the gathering crowd is not the potential for a riot but the potential for losing face. A policy of zero tolerance for public slights may be appropriate for a gangster, but it’s not appropriate for a peace officer charged with enforcing the law.
Among other things, the law guarantees the right of citizens to criticize public officials.
Sullum sums it up nicely when he says:
When a police officer faces unfair criticism, the best response may be to walk away. Sometimes swallowing your pride takes more courage than standing your ground.
Both of these articles provide a very different perspective on the issue at hand: namely, the issue of liberty, as opposed to the issue of racism. These articles lay out a very intelligent argument for why Crowley was in the wrong, based strictly on both the power and the responsibilities he has as a police officer.
These arguments hit close to home for me because they stirred up a very vivid memory I have of one particular instance where I mouthed off to a small-town police officer who I felt was being unnecessarily rude and rough in handling a relative’s town ordinance violation and, almost as though to show that he could get the “last laugh” with his “power”, he followed me to my car and wrote up a couple of moving violations for me, requiring me to appear in court.
Knowing from experience exactly what Sullum is referring to when he says “police officers often seem to think the purpose of such [disorderly conduct] laws is to punish people for talking back to cops”, I do not doubt for a minute that had I been even remotely belligerent in my wisecrack to the officer, he would have found some pretext to actually arrest me. In fact, I’m probably lucky to have driven away with only a couple of tickets.
It’s a shame that with all the good police officers do and with all the risks they take to protect the public, that many of them feel the need to be disproportionately protective of their own egos, as well.