Its fun being in states, the news is sheer entertainment. They have developed a miraculous ability to keep bringing new juicy bits into the latest gossip.
What’s on now is a Cambridge, Ma police officer cuffing a Harvard professor in his own home after a good citizen reported seeing two black men trying to break in.
Looking at the photos and hearing the scant first hand accounts from Sgt James Crowley and Gates gives a very clear impression – two rampaging alpha males waving highly overdeveloped and engorged egos at each other.
My own very minor brushes with police in the UK lead me to believe that the standard bedside manner for an officer is to try and establish personal authority over any member of the public they are engaging with, particularly if they are considered a suspect for something. Its easy to see how this could become the normal defensive approach for perfectly decent people who regularly have to confront the guilty with crimes large and small, many of whom would have no compunction about resorting to extreme verbal, psychological or physical violence.
On a personal level – I am happy to admit that a sizeable (although I don’t think abnormally so) ego lurks not too far beneath the surface. When faced with the aggressive, psychologically and physically dominating approach adopted as standard by the police, I have to forcefully restrain myself from responding in the way that I would be perfectly happy to if any other individual treated me in that way – namely with a mirroring level of aggression. I have to bite my tongue and be explicitly subservient, complying and agreeing until the officer moves on their way.
This is understandable, but ultimately to my mind not excusable. It may be a superhuman calling to ask officers to deal with very aggressive and abusive people daily, and maintain a normally polite demeanour but that is at the heart of the job and what the public has a right to expect of them.
I think that Gates was very likely treated like a criminal from before he said a word, because that is my experience of how the police act, and instead of having the good sense to be meek and subservient, he allowed his own ego to get the better of him.
Possibly because he was tired, possibly because he had a little alcohol in him – I don’t know. The situation is nothing more than what the police spokesman called it, regrettable.
It highlights the defects in cultural norms for male ego, defects in cultural norms for police attitudes and behaviours, defects in cultural norms for interpreting the behaviour of black people in public (would the lady have reported an older white gentleman with a walking stick struggling with his front door?) and defects in the President’s willingness to abuse his position of public authority.
In itself however, as the President is banking on, the press and the public well knows, it’s a storm in a teacup.
