Gatesgate

  

            So I am not talking about discrediting the police report.  I am talking about how reports are written to put the writer in the best light possible and the subject in the worst light.  If we could take police reports as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, we could do away with criminal courts altogether.

            All the reporting person has to do is use vague terms such as 

"tumultuous manner" to muddy the waters.

            The Daily Howler evaluates how the media is doing its job.  (Actually, how it is not doing its job!)  It doesn't report on the facts per se, but it shows how the media gets things wrong, and how they make up stories instead of gathering information, and how they pick up each other's misinformation and repeat it without ever checking for veracity. 

            People that are related to policeman or are personal friends of policemen are excused from jury duty because they tend to take the word of  a police officer over the testimony of anyone else.

            That being said, the police report says a witness described two black men with backpacks.  The woman that called 911 says she didn't say black men or backpacks, and the tapes back her up.

            The second reporting officer does not mention the woman telling the color of the men or the backpacks. 

            Again, all this is irrelevant to what the press is doing.  They are creating stories about the incident based on what they think happened, or what they want to have happened.  It is the media that has turned this into an issue of racial profiling.  Any judgment about what really happened cannot come from the scant information the news media has at hand.

            Police and judges both know that eyewitness testimony is the least reliable of all evidence.

            It is the media and Obama haters that have made this a national issue.

            Think about this.  How many times daily in America does a white cop talk to a Black man through his front door? I would guess several times a day in New York City alone.  Multiply this by all the Black communities in the country and you have a lot of incidents that never made news anywhere.

           

            This is national news only because Obama aired his opinion, which was almost as dumb as when Nixon claimed that [Charles] "Manson is guilty".  Obama should have stopped when he said he didn't know the details of the incident.  If he had, the story would be over.

               My opinion is that white men in America don't know how sensitive Black men are about the way police talk to them because they have never experienced it themselves.  Regardless of what actually happened, and what words were actually said, we should keep this in mind.

         The other side of the coin is the charge of “disorderly conduct”.  This has been a tool of officers at the scene for over a century.  The courts have given police leeway to break up or prevent riots using disorderly conduct as a misdemeanor charge, allowing them to arrest people that could conceivably incite or touch off a riot.

         The officer must consider if the disturbance is drawing a crowd, and if the crowd is becoming alarmed by what they are witnessing.

         The officer at the scene makes the judgment, the desk officer or judge make the call as to whether or not to press charges.  Just because the police release the arrestee without charging him does not indicate that the arrest was improper, but it also doesn’t indicate that is was proper.

         Do police abuse this power because of racial bias?  Of course they do.

         Do police use this power to stifle dissent?  Yes they do, and many times they infringe on 1^st Amendment rights. 

         What we do know in the Henry Gates episode is the crowd was seven  “unidentified passersby”. What we don’t know is was that too many people for safety and was how alarmed were they?
These are both judgment calls. Remember, the police don’t have to wait for a riot to start. They have been allowed to arrest someone before things get out of hand if they feel the situation warrants it.

         Did Professor Gates overreact? Probably.  Did Sergeant Crowley overreact?  Maybe.  Did President Obama overreact? Yes, as a sitting President he did, as a Black American, probably not.  Did the media overreact?  Absolutely!

        

         What bothers me is that Gates told his daughter in an interview that the police report was untrue. “Well, the police report was an act of pure fiction. One designed to protect him, Sgt. Crowley, from unethical behavior. I was astonished at the audacity of the lies in the police report, and almost the whole thing from start to finish was just pure fabrication. So yes, I felt violated all over again.”

         Now, it is not a serious abuse of police power to arrest and release someone on a disorderly conduct charge.  It is understandable that Gates could forgive Sgt. Crowley for that, and sit down and have a beer with him.  After all, most people would agree that it is bad public policy to allow citizens to shout at and insult police officers in public, and it is proper for police to demand respect, especially if that disrespect may escalate into unruly conduct.  Maybe having a beer in the White House compensates for having his constitutional rights violated.  Or maybe he exaggerated just a teensy bit, and so did Sgt. Crowley, and they are both willing to forgive and forget.        

         But writing a police report that is an act of pure fiction is a serious abuse of police power, and a serious crime, as well.  Why hasn’t Gates pursued this? More importantly, why haven’t the media pursued this?  Why haven’t reporters even attempted to find out what happened on the porch?  Why have reporters picked one side over the other and made up justifications to support their guy?  Why hasn’t someone other than Gate’s daughter asked him that question?

          This answer is easy.  It’s because the entire system of journalism in America is broken, that’s why.  It is broken because newspapers, TV networks, TV and radio stations, are no longer independent entities.  They are owned by large corporations run by powerful CEOS, and they obey the orders of their masters.

Gravymeister Aug. 3, 2009