Holy Smokes Update (aka, still astonishing but now for different reasons)
If you just watched the Cambridge police union* press conference, I’m pretty sure you heard the spokesman claim there was no influence of the bad history between cops and black people in Cambridge. At least, that’s what I think I heard; we’ll have to wait for a transcript. Stand by.
… So far, very little, but already sounds pretty bad. I stick by my original prediction.
Police unions call for apology from Obama, Patrick
By Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff
Cambridge police unions today called on President Obama and Governor Deval Patrick to apologize to “all law enforcement personnel” for their comments about the arrest of an African-American scholar last week at his home near Harvard Square.
Speaking in at a press conference packed with local and national media, the union officials also said that the disorderly conduct charge should not have been dropped against professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. The move earlier this week to drop the charges “was a decision made without our input.”
… already clear that a lot of people need to watch Jay Smooth again.
As Jay Smooth says, “I don’t care what you are, I care about what you did.” The President did not say “Cambridge police are stupid”, nor did he say “Officer Crowley is stupid”. He said, “Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof he was in own home.” (As my colleague Professor Kelman points out, quite possibly, as a constitutional law professor he has an informed opinion on what police behavior is stupid and what isn’t.) But it’s clear that the discourse is already spinning out of control.
HOLY SMOKES update: The President of the United States is pretty smooth.
So at the end of the conversation there was a discussion about — my conversation with Sergeant Crowley, there was discussion about he and I and Professor Gates having a beer here in the White House. We don’t know if that’s scheduled yet — (laughter) — but we may put that together.
He also did say he wanted to find out if there was a way of getting the press off his lawn. (Laughter.) I informed him that I can’t get the press off my lawn. (Laughter.) He pointed out that my lawn is bigger than his lawn. (Laughter.) But if anybody has any connections to the Boston press, as well as national press, Sergeant Crowley would be happy for you to stop trampling his grass.
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… which, it appears, means the President has proven my original prediction incorrect. But if you’re gonna be wrong, you might as well be wrong in the most wonderful, rainbow-colored ponylicious way. It’s not as big a pony as passing healthcare, ending the war ‘n’ stuff, closing Gitmo and Bagram, and returning to the rule of law, but you gotta start somewhere. Even small ponies have been scarce as of even date.
*See Ralph’s request for clarification below.
The Edge of the American West 
29 comments
July 24, 2009 at 9:42 am
Ralph Luker
Eric, I *think* you are referring to a press conference held by the police union, which would not be the same as a pc by the police department.
July 24, 2009 at 9:43 am
eric
Technically, I didn’t claim that it was by the police department. But I’ll clarify.
July 24, 2009 at 10:17 am
Carl
Smooth’s got it right, but his advice to keep the conversation about actions vs. essences runs up against his observation that folks attacked with the former will do “judo flips” to turn it into the latter and then enjoy the dissipating effects of the resulting “rhetorical Bermuda Triangle.” I’d say this is not even merely a clever dodge. There are plenty of people who firmly believe that all actions are fully intentional and reveal the truth of the actant. For them, the two conversations are one.
So good luck wit dat. Now that the cops are united and motivated by hurt personal and professional pride (there’s nothing much else at stake here on their side), it will be interesting to see what new ‘facts’ and subtleties of interpretation emerge to explain how the interaction and arrest were self-evidently legitimate and judicious. This is shaping up as a classic mirror trap.
July 24, 2009 at 10:40 am
drip
There is ample evidence that Cambridge police are arrogant and stupid. Take this picture from my annual visit to the homeland as an example of a certain level of disregard for the application of the law to police and “a who gives a shit what you think about how I behave” for good measure.
The “this is not a request for an apology” request for an apology will not elicit anything more than a “this is not an apology” apology, gives me the idea that the advice the union is getting is a little shaky. Somebody did give the officer the good advice to STFU which he has taken so far. I can’t wait for the rest of this to play out.
July 24, 2009 at 11:26 am
TF Smith
Cambridge police apparently don’t believe the First Amendment applies to critics of their officers.
Union or not, Sgt. Crowley gets paid to DE-escalate situations involving Joe and Jane Citizen, not escalate them; the sergeant should admit that if he could not handle a 60-year-old college professor with bad knees who was yelling at him on the professor’s own property in any other manner than arresting and handcuffing said professor, the sergeant is in the wrong line of work…he should zip it, ask his “brothers” to zip it, and put in his papers for retirement.
I’m sure there’s a department in Maine or somewhere equally rustic he could get hired at; if I worked for, or lived in, the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, I’d be concerned this individual will end up costing the taxpayers a lot more down the line, by losing it sometime in the future and calling in the SWAT team to arrest a 70-year-old grandmother in a walker for jaywalking or something similar…
July 24, 2009 at 11:40 am
max
his advice to keep the conversation about actions vs. essences runs up against his observation that folks attacked with the former will do “judo flips” to turn it into the latter and then enjoy the dissipating effects of the resulting “rhetorical Bermuda Triangle.”
Cambridge police apparently don’t believe the First Amendment applies to critics of their officers.
Well, actually, they don’t, in practice. This is about reinforcing the line that the police are beyond criticism by anyone but people no one listens to – those people can be marginalized the hard way.
I am 100% sure that the Cambridge police reason that they have a hard job, they don’t get paid enough to take the shit they get, and now the President is giving them hell, and this is their lives on the line here against the barbarians who threaten to overrun civilization and kill people like Gates. Gates fucked up and deserved what he got, because civilians just don’t understand the day-in, day-out difficulties of the typical uniform. It’s not about race, it’s about the upkeep of society…if Gates had been white, they still would have arrested him, because that’s their job… blah blah blah.
Heard it.
max
[‘How to lie with a straight face for dummies.’]
July 24, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Ben Alpers
Isn’t it nice to have a president who responds to situations like this with calm intelligence and humility, rather than chest-thumping, lying, and obfuscation?
I have been–and will unfortunately likely continue to be–very critical of a lot of policy decisions taken by the Obama administration. But, damn, the President has a truly outstanding leadership style!
Here’s the video of Obama’s statement.
July 24, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Ben Alpers
Yikes….I may have forgotten to close a tag in that last comment!
July 24, 2009 at 1:12 pm
eric
Yes. For style and grace, not at all disappointing.
July 24, 2009 at 1:14 pm
kathy a.
this and the updates make a wonderful post. jay smooth has it right; and obama stepped up in a personal way, but to defuse the situation. such elegance we have not seen in so far as i can remember. seriously, i do not think there is precedent. but he damned sure sets a good example.
July 24, 2009 at 1:22 pm
PorJ
Ahem:
Obama also joked that no one’s been paying much attention to health care because of this story.
[I agree it was a great rowback (stylistically) but let’s not forget he was repairing a self-inflicted wound]
July 24, 2009 at 1:25 pm
eric
PorJ, it looks like right now he did better than that, i.e., the situation appears better than it would be had the President not commented at all.
July 24, 2009 at 1:26 pm
kid bitzer
watched the new video. fuck, that guy is impressive.
of course, you can tell he read it all off a teleprompter, but still.
July 24, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Carl
Agreed Ben.
Max, that’s right. So what we have here is two groups with deeply held and keenly nurtured senses of grievance against everyone else who ‘just doesn’t understand what it’s like to be black/a cop’, each seeing the present case as a microcosm of their plight. Anyone who wants to focus on the specific facts of the specific case is missing the point: this is not about what it’s about, it’s about all the other stuff it’s about.
The thing is, even though both sides are right about all the other stuff, that doesn’t automatically make them right about this case. Does the case itself inevitably get carried off to Oz in the big twister, or can the discussion be de-escalated so it can be about what it’s about? I don’t see how we can decide how exactly the case works as a microcosm of this or that macro-woe if we don’t know first what actually happened. As Crowley becomes a more fully human character and not (merely) a categorical representation of the white male supremacist heterofascist police state the credibility meter begins to swing back towards the middle, doesn’t it?
July 24, 2009 at 1:44 pm
kathy a.
carl, i’m not quite sure what you are talking about. human events are frequently complex, and often don’t fit easily on some scale or another; sometimes the perespectives on them are very different. the credibility-o-meter to which you refer doesn’t make much sense to me.
the end of the clip has to be the best ever “you kids get off that lawn” speech, though.
July 24, 2009 at 2:12 pm
andrew
constitutional law professor he has an informed opinion on what police behavior is stupid and what isn’t
Also, wasn’t one of his big legislative victories as a state senator getting a law passed for videotaping police interrogations?
July 24, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Carl
Kathy, “human events are frequently complex, and often don’t fit easily on some scale or another; sometimes the perespectives on them are very different.” However, one of the complexities of the current Gates case it that for some people with or sympathetic to legitimate historical grievances, it is not complex or perspectival at all: it just definitely IS an exemplar of the grievance. This simplifying polarization or ‘splitting’ is certainly symptomatic of the larger grievance but obscures this particular case in a haze of unsupported certainties and dubious analogies.
It’s likely from what we’ve seen so far that both institutional racism and movement anti-authoritarianism, along with many more contingent factors, played roles in the particular dynamic at the Gates house. The apparent disproportion of the escalation looks like the product of embattled righteousness on both sides, which short-circuited both Gates’ and Crowley’s normal better judgment. The discussion of the event on this blog and at other venues has reflected similar polarized righteous position-taking, for which complexity and perspective are either beside the point or craven attempts to obfuscate the real issues.
In short, knees started jerking the moment the witness dialed 911 and haven’t stopped yet. As for credibility, for better or worse when facts are in dispute most of us on the left are more disposed to take the word of a movement hero like Skip Gates over that of a local pig.
I loved the get off my lawn thing too. I thought the Prez did an awesome job of humanizing Crowley. I hope they do get together and have that beer.
July 24, 2009 at 2:37 pm
bitchphd
I’m convinced that Obama totally plotted with Skippy to set up the cop so that Obama could come out of it looking like the messiah.
July 24, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Carl
Right! And you know the one thing lacking in Skip’s street cred was a personal takedown by The Man, so now he’s like totally a regular guy and not just some jetsetting toff who takes his pick of cushy Ivy League gigs.
July 24, 2009 at 2:46 pm
N Merrill
Come to think of it, do we have Gates’ birth certificate? On the other hand, his actions are street-cred-evaporating, so it’s a bittersweet victory.
The lawn stuff kills me.
July 24, 2009 at 7:03 pm
JPool
Cambridge must have a very distinctive system of justice if police unions can reasonably expect to be consulted on whether charges are prosecuted or dropped. Perhaps we simply haven’t appreciated the degree of autonomy that police have there.
Carl, I’m feeling all conciliatory with the President, but you’re trading in false equivalencies again. The African-American grievance is that cops presume criminal intent in them and hassle or arrest them where they would let white folks go, and would therefor for other folks to understand how frustrating this can be and also to have less of it happen in the first place. The police grievance is that they have a very hard job that civilians aren’t sufficiently appreciative of, and therefor they ought to be able to arrest and charge people who they feel have disrespected them. These are both grievances, yes, but only one of their conclusions is compatible with a free society.
July 24, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Martha Bridegam
No history of Cambridge police racism? Ha.
A small sample from my era in the late 1980s:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=144532
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=139798
July 24, 2009 at 8:02 pm
TF Smith
The thing is, if the sergeant can’t laugh off a senior citizen who is ticked off at being challenged in his own home, I’d have some concerns about how he handles something more serious out on the street…
Call in an air strike?
July 24, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Carl
I agree with you, JPool. I do not think the grievances are substantively equivalent. I think they are dynamically similar, which is a different analysis.
July 24, 2009 at 8:55 pm
saintneko
I’m pleasantly surprised to find out ya’ll Jay Smooth fans.
July 24, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Mario
This case, I think, is actually more interesting in its illustrative qualities than as a question of normative ethics or legal or moral rights or whatever.
On one hand, you have Barack Obama, the *President of the United States*; a man who is a hero to *literally* hundreds of millions of people worldwide–and as GWB showed, the two are not definitionally contiguous; a man who foreign heads-of-state cannot piss off (see: Ahmedinejad, Bashad al-Assad) for fear of losing credibility with their own subject populations; a man who must be the most powerful man anywhere; and a man whose foremost soft power lies with his moral authority; telling a police officer that a certain, specific action was stupid and wrong.
The action from the police officer is not to humble himself, not to accept the statement or judgment as you might a talking-to from the boss at your fuzzy-cubicled office or from your ruddy-cheeked high school football coach; but instead, with his Police Officers Union, to instead demand an apology from the President. Consider what this says about the relative power dynamics in play, both symbolic–in terms of what and who Obama symbolizes and what and who the police symbolize (since the officer is, in this formulation, effectively anonymous)–and manifest in coerced or semi-coerced action.
Obama does not apologize to the officer, exactly, but he de-escalates, gives the officer something of what the officer wants. He does.
July 25, 2009 at 5:52 am
Pug
The police union should back off here. Their boy arrested a man in his own home for mouthing off and the charges were dropped before the mug shots were developed. Yes, that’s pretty stupid.
This is not exactly one of the great, shining moments in policing history.
July 25, 2009 at 12:30 pm
JPool
Carl,
I was misreading you then. Thanks.
saintneko,
From way back.
OK, last year sometime. I’m not so good with the google.
July 28, 2009 at 7:28 am
margarita
Sgt. Crowley would be happy for you to stop trampling his grass.
Poetic justice. It’s the richest kind.