Gates, Crowley and Racial Profiling

7/23/09

Ok – so if you have any friends of color – you know this happens.  Racial profiling is very common.  People get pulled over for driving while black all the time and for those of you who haven’t experienced that, it is VERY different from being pulled over for any other offense. There is an assumption of guilt that cops have when looking at people of color. And then, some cops are just ignorant. For instance, I have a friend here in Tampa who is stopped every night by the same stupid cop outside his own home just because he happens to live in a rich neighborhood.  And every night when he asks the cop, in his British accent, what the problem is, the cop apologizes because obviously, my friend is educated because of his British accent and not part of the local riff raff.  My friend actually thinks it is funny that after all this time this particular copy doesn’t recognize him as a resident.

Anyway – as for what happened to Gates.  I would put money on his race being an issue and he has every right to be upset.  If a cop had been called to my house because a neighbor called them because I was trying to open a rain swelled stuck door.  They would ask me what was going on – I would tell them.  They might ask me for ID to verify I actually lived there and then they would help me get into my house.  This didn’t happen to Gates.   Further – it is a little weird that his neighbors didn’t recognize him.  I have known all my neighbors everywhere I lived and even had one who occasionally called the cops on a boyfriend who arrived late one night and knocked on my window – I was grateful they were watching out for our house. But back to Gates: his neighbors don’t know him and can’t recognize him on site. Weird.  The cop didn’t ask for ID and didn’t immediately apologize once he verified that Gates lived in the house.  (Again weird).

And finally, they arrested him for being belligerent – which I am always suspicious of because I have had a couple of friends arrested for resisting arrest or belligerence and in both cases, the cops were not only at fault, they were outright abusing their power. One of my friends was a former Benedictine monk who the cops beat up before arresting him for being belligerent.  But what had actually happened is a group of cops pulled him over and drug him out of his car with force and roughed him up.  He had no idea what was going on and any resistance was due to his confusion and attempts to defend him self from the abuse he was receiving. Turned out his car looked just like a car driven by a guy who had punched one of the cops the week before and they thought it was him and were retaliating for their fellow cop.  They had the wrong guy – but the damage was done.  Interestingly enough, my other friend’s story was fairly similar. My point is that my impression is when upstanding members of our community are arrested for being belligerent to a cop – it is usually the cop who is at fault.  And yes, they do difficult jobs and don’t get nearly enough thanks from the rest of us.  But that doesn’t mean they aren’t human and don’t make mistakes. They do and even though we don’t know the full details, the odds are that if Gates had been a white man, this would never have happened.