I_Urge_You_Not_to

I Urge You NOT to Apologize
7/24/09 – President Obama – I hope you will not cave in to pressure from the right and the law enforcement organizations supporting Sergeant Crowley who are calling upon you to apologize for your “true” remarks about the unfortunate arrest of Professor Gates.
I also do not have all of the facts in this case, but I agree with you that, once Sgt. Crowley determined that Gates was the homeowner, he, as a policeman, should have attempted to cool the situation down rather than place Gates under arrest.
At their press conference this morning a lawyer for the Massachusetts Police could not give a clear definition of “Disorderly Conduct.” This “crime” is often used by police to simply scoop up people who disagree with them. [The courts confronted with cases stemming from these arrests have from time to time had occasion to restrict the broad and vague definitions of the statute to make certain that freedom of speech and assembly and other forms of protected expression under the First Amendment were not affected. They also have had occasion to curb its scope to make certain that people were (or could have been) aware that their conduct was, in fact, within the prohibition of the statute, as required by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.]

Frankly I'm glad that you weighed into the fray as police misconduct is a subject which is completely under reported. If you would like to conduct an interesting and informative experiment, have the Justice Department for a Commission and then offer total immunity to any and all police officers (particularly retired officers) to testify about police misconduct. As a newspaper publisher and reporter I have done this off and on the record a number of times and was amazed at the amount of information retired police and public officials would like to get off their chests. The claims run from murder to entrapment, to beatings, to filing false reports backing up other officers protected by the Blue Line.The spokesmen (all white) for Massachusetts Police Organizations all said that racial profiling was not a problem in their departments. I'm willing to bet there are hundreds of thousands of Blacks and Latinos in Massachusetts who would disagree with that statement.Police have tremendous power and, like military personnel, tend to blindly follow orders without thinking nor caring about the consequences of their actions. “I was just following or enforcing the law,” is a common refrain. A perfect example of this in the recent Democrat and Republican Conventions held last year. Police activity was outrageous. Anyone who speaks out against them is immediately labeled as “soft on crime.” Unfortunately Congress, who has the power to change a lot of this abuse, is trapped under this “soft on crime” myth and refuses to introduce any legislation that might negatively affect their reelections.
I don't think Sgt. Crowley is a bad cop, but I think he made a poor call when he decided to arrest Professor Gates. I wonder if he would have done the same thing if the situation had occurred at the home of Ted Kennedy? I doubt it. I think cooler heads would have prevailed and no arrest would have been made.