Maybe Gates should have stood on civil liberties rather than race

Henry Gates erred, says Christopher Hitchens in a must-read Slate piece, by assuming to know the motivations in a police officer’s heart when Gates found himself under arrest for screaming at Sergeant James Crowley from his own property.  Instead, Gates should have avoided motivation altogether and stuck to the strange notion that venting one’s frustration on one’s own property could result in an arrest for disorderly conduct.  Civil liberty and free speech are the issue, Hitchens insists, and not race:

I can easily see how a black neighbor could have called the police when seeing professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. trying to push open the front door of his own house. And I can equally easily visualize a thuggish or oversensitive black cop answering the call. And I can also see how long it might take the misunderstanding to dawn on both parties. But Gates has a limp that partly accounts for his childhood nickname and is slight and modest in demeanor. Moreover, whatever he said to the cop was in the privacy of his own home. It is monstrous in the extreme that he should in that home be handcuffed, and then taken downtown, after it had been plainly established that he was indeed the householder. The president should certainly have kept his mouth closed about the whole business—he is a senior law officer with a duty of impartiality, not the micro-manager of our domestic disputes—but once he had said that the police conduct was “stupid,” he ought to have stuck to it, quite regardless of the rainbow of shades that was so pathetically and opportunistically deployed by the Cambridge Police Department. It is the U.S. Constitution, and not some competitive agglomeration of communities or constituencies, that makes a citizen the sovereign of his own home and privacy. There is absolutely no legal requirement to be polite in the defense of this right. And such rights cannot be negotiated away over beer.

Race or color are second-order considerations in this, if they are considerations at all.

In my former career, I worked closely with police and fire departments across the country.  The overwhelming majority of interactions were at least polite and professional, and many warm and friendly.  Even when we had different short term goals, we had similar long term goals — the security of the communities they served.  However, in more than a few cases, my staff and I had to deal with officious, condescending, and hostile representatives who treated everyone as their enemies.  Instead of understanding the role and scope of their authority, they used their power as they saw fit, and in those cases went beyond their authority in demanding some kind of compliance to which they were not entitled.  And it might surprise a few people that we saw that dynamic more with fire marshals than any other type of authority figure.

(An old industry joke: What’s the difference between a fire marshal and God?  God doesn’t think he’s a fire marshal.)

When the Gates story first broke, I refrained from commenting on it until Barack Obama foolishly took sides without full information, mainly because I’ve had a couple of similar interactions with law-enforcement officers who either enjoyed their power a wee bit too much or simply had one bad moment.  At that time, I mentioned a party that I attended many years ago that drew noise complaints.  Someone mouthed off about a warrant, which provoked the officer to charge into the house without permission, thump his finger repeatedly into the smart-alec’s chest, and threaten to arrest everyone at the house.  That broke the law and was an abuse of power, which his partner was smart enough to end by grabbing the officer by the arm and dragging him back out of the house. Race played no factor at all in that incident, but like Hitchens’ experience, it has stuck with me ever since as a reminder of the potential cost of demanding that the police stick to the rule of law while keeping the peace.

James Crowley sounds like an outstanding officer, but arresting someone on their own property for yelling at the police sounds a little strange.  It seems at least plausible that Crowley had a bad moment and used poor judgment, not because of race, but simply because he’s human and has a tough job.    Had Gates stuck to just those facts, he would have provided a teaching moment and a lesson on civil liberty and the right, at times, to yell at the representatives of our government when they appear to trample on the rights of citizens — even when the citizens are wrong in assuming the motivations involved.

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