After his regrettable encounter with Cambridge, Mass., police this week, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. now must put up with debate over whether the incident arose from police insensitivity or his own short fuse.
Charges against Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, have been dropped. The only point now at issue is whether a police sergeant owes a Harvard professor an apology, or vice versa.
The incident also opens the door for opinions about race and racial prejudice; the racial aspect of this case is indisputable. A renowned black professor was treated as a burglary suspect and asked to show identification. His outraged objections led to his arrest for disorderly conduct ”“ at his own house.
The incident began when police were called to the area by a suspicious neighbor who saw two black men trying to force the front door to Gates’ home. It must have seemed a clear case of breaking and entering, and the officers arrived with the intention of catching burglars. In this case it turned out that Gates and his driver were simply trying to open a jammed door.
No one can fault the police for demanding to see some identification, but even if Gates failed to produce it, the officers should have quickly discerned that this angry middle-aged man was no burglar. With responsible actions on both sides, the matter should quickly have become a non-incident. Instead, it led to handcuffs, mugshots, headlines and controversy.
As a specialist in African-American literature and cultural history, Gates is alert to the perceptions of the black community and clearly shares them. Confronted by the law, the professor refused do the sensible thing ”“ submit to police authority. Gates deserved more deference from the police not because he is a well-known scholar, but because he was acting lawfully in his own home.
President Barack Obama, at his press conference Wednesday, pointed out that many black and Hispanic Americans are understandably sensitive to the fact that they receive disproportionate police attention. Sometimes this is due to honest misunderstandings, he said, but the fact that this is still a problem shows that law enforcement must improve its policing techniques.
Neither side owes the other an apology for the way the Cambridge incident turned out, but both the police and the professor should consider how to handle such incidents, so we can avoid such misunderstandings in the future.
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