…I will go ahead and make a specific comment about the event. I have given the situation a lot of thought, and there are two conclusions that I have reached.

The first is that it would have been better had the president not weighed in on the subject the way that he did. It strikes me an inappropriate for a president to render so specific an opinion on a local matter wherein the facts had not yet fully come to light. I think he let the fact that he is friends with Gates get the better of him. Further, it was a politically unwise thing to do, as it made the Gates incident the story for the week.

Second, regardless of anything else that happened that night (i.e., whether race was a motivating factor or whether Gates was rude), the fact that he was arrested makes no sense and smacks of police overstepping their authority out a fit of pique. Because, quite frankly, the entire incident sounds enough like the following to give one pause:(from Peter Moskos’ book, Cop in the Hood, p. 117-118 as quoted the other day by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber):

Police may not order a person from his or her home. But an officer can request to talk to the man outside his house. At this point the officer might say, “If you don’t take a walk, I’m going to lock you up.’ The man, though within his rights to quietly reenter his house and say goodnight to the police, is more likely to obey the officer’s request or engage the police in a loud and drunken late-night debate. The man may protest loudly that the officer has no reason to lock him up. If a crowd gathers or lights in neighboring buildings turn on, he may be arrested for disorderly conduct.

As Henry notes, perhaps the similarity between the events at Gates’ home and the method described about is mere coincidence, but I have my doubts.

Along those lines I agree with Christopher Hitchens

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.

Indeed and this is what bothers me the most about the entire affair. Once it had been established that Gates was in his own house, there was no reason for the police to remain, and if Gates was being belligerent in his own home then the police should have walked away, gotten in the squad car, and left. The only reason to arrest Gates at that point was to show him what for. He was not a criminal and his “disorderly conduct” had was not a risk to the community. That the charges were dropped doesn’t erase the indignity of being arrested in the first place, or give back the time lost as a result of the incident.

As Radley Balko wrote in Reason:

By any account of what happened—Gates’, Crowleys’, or some version in between—Gates should never have been arrested. “Contempt of cop,” as it’s sometimes called, isn’t a crime. Or at least it shouldn’t be. It may be impolite, but mouthing off to police is protected speech, all the more so if your anger and insults are related to a perceived violation of your rights. The “disorderly conduct” charge for which Gates was arrested was intended to prevent riots, not to prevent cops from enduring insults.

Exactly. Balko continues:

The power to forcibly detain a citizen is an extraordinary one. It’s taken far too lightly, and is too often abused. And that abuse certainly occurs against black people, but not only against black people. American cops seem to have increasingly little tolerance for people who talk back, even merely to inquire about their rights.

This should not be so. Yes, I understand that police have difficult and dangerous jobs and that they deserve to be treated with common courtesy and sometimes more than that, but the notion that the public owes them deference to the point of quiet compliance no matter what the circumstances is misplaced (to put it mildly). Along those lines, Balko notes:

This deference to police at the expense of the policed is misplaced. Put a government worker behind a desk and give him the power to regulate, and conservatives will wax at length about public choice theory, bureaucratic pettiness, and the trappings of power. And rightly so. But put a government worker behind a badge, strap a gun to his waist, and give him the power to detain, use force, and kill, and those lessons somehow no longer apply.

I think that Maureen Dowd is correct: this incident was very much a class of egos between “the hard-working white cop vs. the globe-trotting black scholar, the town vs. the gown, the Lowell Police Academy vs. the American Academy of Arts and Letters.” However, in such a situation, the police officer should have backed down and left. Instead, he chose to, it seems to me, abuse his power because he didn’t like a mouthy citizen. While I am not suggesting that we go around mouthing off at the police, or that Gates was right to do (although I remain unclear on exactly what happened that night), I steadfastly believe that given the power entrusted to the police, that they need to remember that they are there to protect and to serve, not to prove how tough they are or insistent that citizens defer them just because they are the police.