Contempt of cop

Ninety five percent of the verbiage about the Gates affair has consisted of gross distortions of the basic facts, and of conclusions about America’s racial reality spinning off on those gross distortions of the facts, mainly because people, including conservatives who ought to know better, have based their understanding of the event on fragmented, politically correct media accounts and have ignored the arresting officer’s detailed, coherent report. John B. offers a good summing up of what happened and the rights and wrongs of it.

I see no reason to think the arrest of Henry Louis Gates had to do with “contempt of cop,” the sort of knowing phrase in which liberals specialize. Professor Gates does not seem to have been arrested “in his home.” After Sgt. Crowley was satisfied (1) that the professor was lawfully occupying the house where he’d been discovered, and (2) that no break-in had occurred there, Crowley proceeded to leave. Professor Gates continued to shout after him, from his porch, into public space. The police are not entitled to ignore such conduct and would have failed in their duty if they’d driven away.

Here is raw video (21:48) of an interview of Sgt. Crowley by WHDH-TV, Boston.

LA replies:

And, of course, the phrase “contempt of cop” was used last week not only by liberals but by Richard Lowry and Heather Mac Donald at National Review Online, as I discussed here, while Robert VerBruggen of NRO’s Phi Beta Cons blog excused Gates’s behavior on the basis that Gates had been illegitimately “confronted” by police in his own home.

John B. adds:

I have not seen any liberals—champions of justice that they are—call for an investigation of the dropping of the charges against Professor Gates. Was it political?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 27, 2009 11:39 AM | Send