Barack Obama has been
taking heat for his off-the-cuff comment at the press conference Wednesday that police acted “stupidly” in arresting Skip Gates on his own front porch.
It caused a stir, not just because presidents don’t step into disputes, especially disputes between white cops and black citizens, without exercising extreme caution, but because presidents don’t usually use a word as honest as “stupid.” So much of a stir that today he tried to
take it back.
Obama's choice of words may not have shown political shrewdness, but it cut straight to the only perfectly clear thing about the brouhaha. Whatever you believe happened between the Harvard professor and the police sergeant—who was more out of line—it shouldn’t have ended with Gates being cuffed and thrown into the squad car. Whether that was racist or arrogant or well-deserved and by-the-book, it was dumb.
Why? Because it's a disaster for the cops regardless of who did what to whom. As Ed Koch, who’s been around the block on this kind of thing, tells Politico in today’s story, a police officer arresting a middle-aged professor in his own home is all people need to know.
There’s been a lot of speculation about why the good doctor went off on the cops (that is, if you believe their version of events) rather than going back in his house and using his considerable clout to plot his revenge in a way that wouldn't have entailed seeing the inside of a jail cell.
But why didn’t Sgt. Crowley—who teaches a class in racial sensitivity, for God’s sake—have the presence of mind to see that there was no way he could win this by hauling the guy, and his cane, down to the station, even if they had no idea who he was?
Various theories have been advanced in the last 48 hours: Cops can’t tolerate disrespect or it would undermine their authority. Cops are petty tyrants who use “disorderlies” to punish uppity people, especially uppity black people. When you catch a cop doing something wrong, you get arrested. With Gates dissing him publicly, the officer had to arrest him to save face in front of the other cops.
None of that makes it legal, of course. It doesn’t fit the definition of “disorderly conduct,” Stanford Law prof Richard Thompson Ford
writes on Slate, unless someone could argue credibly that Gates was inciting his Cambridge neighbors to start throwing bottles. And calling someone racist is protected political speech, he notes.
Which is why Obama nailed it the first time when he called the arrest not heinous, regrettable, unfortunate, chilling, or some other more predictable word, which would have carried a judgment about whether Gates was really a victim in this case, but stupid.
