As long as we're nit-picking Obama's comment that the Boston police acted "stupidly", let us nit-pick what Police Officer Crowley did.
Several times, Professor Gates asked Officer Crowley for his name and badge number, and the officer refused to give it to him -- even though the law requires him to do so. By refusing to give Gates his name and badge number, Crowley was in violation of the law.
So, it's reasonable to say that, on this point, Officer Crowley broke the law, and that's usually considered acting "stupidly". In any event, his refusal to comply with Professor Gates's request was certainly not professional.
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That is Gates' story. The police report states that Crowley gave Gates him this information twice.
I hope Sgt. Crowley's story is correct because then he would have been following the law.
Crowley is a very admirable police officer. I have the highest respect for him. He is certainly no racist.
However, once Professor Gates showed him his ID, and he saw that the man was sitting at his own kitchen table in his own house -- not ransacking or burglarizing the place -- Crowley should have defused the problem.
Crowley is a trained peace officer, trained to keep the peace, not to escalate a heated situation. He should understand that Gates was understandably upset by being confronted by the police in his own
house, for doing nothing at all. Crowley is a police instructor. He should have calmed the situation, not allowed it to escalate.
They are both good people, they both over-reacted, they both made mistakes. Obama is trying to calm it all down -- and Obama will succeed in doing that.
From what I've heard, Crowley repeatedly tried to calm him down. Gates was completely out of line with his crazy, loud rants -- "Do you know who I am? Do you know who you're dealing with?" An average joe would've been hauled in at that point.
Both might have made mistakes. Gates certainly was in the wrong. (Was he drunk or high on something or what? Why would a Harvard professor launch into such a ridiculous tirade?)
All of that, however, is irrelevant. The only relevant point in this entire story is that the President had absolutely no business commenting, let alone taking a side, on what amounted to a local Cambridge police matter. The President had no place butting into this case. It was Obama who dramatically heated up the situation with his comments -- now he's trying to defuse it (without issuing a real apology, of course -- can't do that, too arrogantly small a man to do that). So he takes the usual liberal route and says weasel things like that he didn't correctly "calibrate" his words and that it is regrettable "IF he give the impression" of maligning the Cambridge police force.
Obama, with his completely inappropriate response to the reporter's question, is the one that caused this issue to explode. Now he's scrambling to defuse the outrage.
It is also notable that it was Crowley's, not Obama's, idea to get the three of them together for a beer.
Hmm, you really thought that this comment of yours regarding another blog post deserved to be promoted to a separate blog post of its own?
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