Readers may notice that in the right hand margin there is a part that says,With all these connections, (see also above) Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was still arrested for entering his own home.
Here’s a snippet from a recent New York Times profile on Henry Louis Gates, the renowned Harvard professor of African-American studies, and Sergeant James Crowley, the stupid, belligerent, and violent Cambridge cop who stupidly arrested Gates on his own front porch, allegedly for committing disorderly conduct
in the foyer and front porch of his own home.
From 2 Cambridge Worlds Collide in Unlikely Meeting, in the New York Times, 26 July 2009:
Friends say he has a large circle of friends in Natick and in Cambridge, where he grew up. Sergeant Crowley plays on a men’s softball team and coaches his daughters’ softball and basketball teams.
I have always thought of him as the most noncop person that I know,said Andy Meyer, a friend who plays softball with him on a team named the Black Mariahs. Mr. Meyer’s wife, Betsy Rigby, said:When he has the uniform on, Jim has an expectation of deference. But when he’s not in uniform, he’s just a regular guy.
Yes. Exactly. And therein lies the problem.
Sergeant James Crowley believes that putting on a uniform and a badge puts him above just-folks like you and me and Henry Louis Gates, and so that it entitles him to special treatment — to deference,
that is, willing subordination — that he would never think of demanding from his friends, his neighbors, or any other of his equals when he’s living life out of uniform, like any other just-a-regular-guy.
And that’s why, when he is in uniform, he’s willing to bully, browbeat, and physically coerce you into handcuffs and jail, just to violently punish you if you should dare to tell him off in your own foyer — because he stupidly believes that his work clothes entitle him to command, and to expect obedience from, people he doesn’t even know. That’s stupid. But typical: stupidity, violence and petty tyranny are in fact his line of work as he has been led to understand it. And when he showed up at Ware St., he was indeed just doing his job.
(Via Jacob Sullum @ reason 2009-07-29.)
In Chicago, it’s called “creative writing”; in Dallas, it’s been referred to as the practice of occasionally telling a “noble lie”; and in Hollywood, Florida, it’s known as “doing a little Walt Disney.”
All of those expressions refer to perjury committed by police in official reports. The latest example, courtesy of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, was captured by the dash-cam in a Hollywood PD cruiser following a collision with a drunk driver last February.
After Officer Joel Francisco rear-ended a vehicle driven by Alexandra Gabriela Torrensvilas, Officer Dewey Pressley, a 21-year veteran, promised to falsify a report in order to protect his fellow police officer. Torrensvilas was drunk, but the accident was apparently Officer Francisco’s fault.
The qualifier “apparently” is necessary here because the official report is, by the admission of its author, a work of fiction — albeit one that led to Torrensvilas being charged with four counts of drunk driving and receiving a citation for an improper lane change.
As submitted by Officer Pressley, who made the arrest, Torrensvilas claimed to have been driving while carrying a large cat — one roughly the size of a small child — on her lap. She supposedly blurted, “It just jumped out!” after being stopped by the police.
Officer Francisco, per this invented narrative, was distracted by the cat, thinking that it might be a pedestrian. This momentary distraction, not Francisco’s carelessness, was responsible for the collision.
“I don’t want to make things up, ever, because it’s wrong, but if I need to bend it a little to protect a cop, I’m gonna,” explained Officer Pressley during a profanity-strewn conversation captured on video. “We’ll do a little Walt Disney to protect the cop because it wouldn’t have mattered because she is drunk anyway.”
In fact, the responsibility for the collision — which is what caused the only actual damage to persons or property in this incident — matters a great deal, both in terms of the severity of the punishment handed out to Torrensvilas and the professional standing of Officer Francisco.
The priorities on display in this incident are regrettably typical of contemporary police culture. For too many police officers the highest priority is protecting each other from accountability and serving themselves.
In Chicago, it’s called “creative writing”; in Dallas, it’s been referred to as the practice of occasionally telling a “noble lie”; and in Hollywood, Florida, it’s known as “doing a little Walt Disney.”
All of those expressions refer to perjury committed by police in official reports. The latest example, courtesy of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, was captured by the dash-cam in a Hollywood PD cruiser following a collision with a drunk driver last February.
After Officer Joel Francisco rear-ended a vehicle driven by Alexandra Gabriela Torrensvilas, Officer Dewey Pressley, a 21-year veteran, promised to falsify a report in order to protect his fellow police officer. Torrensvilas was drunk, but the accident was apparently Officer Francisco’s fault.
The qualifier “apparently” is necessary here because the official report is, by the admission of its author, a work of fiction — albeit one that led to Torrensvilas being charged with four counts of drunk driving and receiving a citation for an improper lane change.
As submitted by Officer Pressley, who made the arrest, Torrensvilas claimed to have been driving while carrying a large cat — one roughly the size of a small child — on her lap. She supposedly blurted, “It just jumped out!” after being stopped by the police.
Officer Francisco, per this invented narrative, was distracted by the cat, thinking that it might be a pedestrian. This momentary distraction, not Francisco’s carelessness, was responsible for the collision.
“I don’t want to make things up, ever, because it’s wrong, but if I need to bend it a little to protect a cop, I’m gonna,” explained Officer Pressley during a profanity-strewn conversation captured on video. “We’ll do a little Walt Disney to protect the cop because it wouldn’t have mattered because she is drunk anyway.”
In fact, the responsibility for the collision — which is what caused the only actual damage to persons or property in this incident — matters a great deal, both in terms of the severity of the punishment handed out to Torrensvilas and the professional standing of Officer Francisco.
The priorities on display in this incident are regrettably typical of contemporary police culture. For too many police officers the highest priority is protecting each other from accountability and serving themselves.
The LAPD officer who writes under the pseudonym Jack Dunphy and blogger and prosecutor Patterico have each put up posts taking issue with my Reason colleague Brian Doherty’s and my criticism of one of Dunphy’s posts at National Review Online. Doherty and I both summarized Dunphy’s post to say that Dunphy believes the lesson from the Henry Louis Gates affair is that anyone who asserts his constitutional rights when confronted by a cop risks being shot. Patterico and Dunphy both say Doherty and I misread Dunphy.
If Dunphy didn’t intend for that to be the point of the post, he should retract it. Because it’s difficult to interpret it any other way. Here is the meat of Dunphy’s post:
And now we are told, in a further attempt at damage control, that the Gates arrest can serve to educate all those mouth-breathing cops out there who may yet stumble into an unpleasant encounter with some other Ivy Leaguer. It’s our hope, said Gibbs, invoking that insufferable locution that one hopes will soon fade from common usage, that the Gates arrest can be “part of a teachable moment.”
So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.
When the officer has satisfied himself that it was not you and your Hupmobile that were involved in the Piggly Wiggly heist, he owes you an explanation for the stop and an apology for the inconvenience, but if you’re running your mouth about your rights and your history of oppression and what have you, you’re likely to get neither.
Emphasis mine. Patterico and Dunphy argue that Dunphy’s “lesson” here applies only to the specifics of his hypothetical—that the only time he meant to imply that you risk getting shot for asserting your rights is in the limited circumstance that an officer is looking for an armed, dangerous felon, and you happen to fit the very specific description of said felon given to police. I can’t speak for Doherty, but I stand by my original characterization of Dunphy’s post, for several reasons.
First, if this was Dunphy’s point, it’s unclear why he would invoke it in response to the Gates case, where there was no armed robbery, no getaway car, and no specific description of any unusual characteristics. Either he meant for his “lesson” to be applied more broadly, or his entire post was a red herring.
Second, as emphasized in the excerpt above (a portion that Patterico neglected to include in his post*) Dunphy explicitly sets up the hypothetical by stating that its lesson should be taken to heart by “anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer.” In other words, not just people driving 1932 Hupmobiles.
Third, Dunphy was responding negatively to the idea that the “teachable moment” in all of this ought to be for the police to be more cognizant of our rights, and not make rash arrests or employ racial profiling (we now know of course that the latter most likely didn’t play a role in the Gates arrest). Dunphy’s counter to that sentiment clearly seems to be that if there’s a lesson in the Gates arrest, it isn’t for cops, it’s for everyone else, and the lesson is to avoid “running your mouth about your rights and your history of oppression” when you’ve been confronted by a police officer. Again, to say that Dunphy only intended for that lesson to apply in the very limited scenario in his hypothetical would completely ignore the hypothetical’s setup, as well as the national discussion that inspired him to put it up in the first place.
Fourth, even within Dunphy’s hypothetical, the innocent driver of the Hupmobile has no idea why he has been pulled over. He doesn’t know about the armed robbery, or that the getaway car resembles his own car. This is precisely Dunphy’s point. He’s arguing that you can’t possibly know what’s going on in a police officer’s head when he stops you or confronts you. You can’t know what circumstances led him to stop you. So you’d best just shut up and submit, even he asks you to do something that you aren’t obligated to do under the Constitution. Dunphy’s using his unlikely hypothetical to plant the threat that any noncompliance with an officer’s demands may end with him shooting you. Put another way, because you can’t possibly know the reasons why the officer has stopped you, giving lip about your rights may well endanger your life.
Finally, I’d add that I, Doherty, and L.A. Times editor Paul Thornton (also mentioned in Patterico’s post) were hardly the only ones who interpreted Dunphy’s post this way. Dunphy wrote something rash and provocative (and, frankly, pretty outrageous). He now wants to retreat to a very narrow interpretation of his hypothetical to attack the people who called him on it. The problem for Dunphy is that such an interpretation really makes no sense given the context in which he wrote it.
(*Note: Patterico insists he included this portion of Dunphy’s post in his initial post.)
Thursday, December 4th, 2008
Who can forget this horrible video of a black man getting Electrocuted While Black in a Georgia police station a few years ago. Well, this may be become common place throughout Georgia if rogue police have their way.Visit the Blog Tasered While Black.
David Simpson of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports about the gradual trend toward the use of Tasers by metro Atlanta police could dramatically surge soon with a plan to give the controversial stun guns to more than 1,000 DeKalb County police officers.
Hat Tip to JONATHAN TURLEYThe victim's name is Antonio Love. Was he Black or Latino and what role may that have played in the treatment he received from police?
"MOBILE, Ala. — Police in Mobile, Ala., used pepper spray and a Taser on a deaf, mentally disabled who they said wouldn’t leave a store’s bathroom." Undercover 4 Liberty
"When Antonio Love failed to heed orders to come out of a bathroom at a Dollar General store, Mobile police used pepper spray and a Taser on him — ultimately arresting him for resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and failure to obey a police officer. The problem is that Love, 37, is deaf and mentally disabled.
Store employees called officers complaining that Love had been in the bathroom for more than an hour with the door locked. When Love did not respond to their knocks, police used a tire iron to pry open the door — which Love tried to keep closed. They then used pepper spray and once inside shot him with a taser." JONATHAN TURLEY
"After forcibly removing Antonio Love from the bathroom of the Azalea Road store, officers attempted to book the 37-year-old, on charges of resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and failure to obey a police officer, but the magistrate on duty at the jail refused to accept any of those charges." Goat Hill NewsThere are some devices that are simply to inherently dangerous and subject to abuse for police to be allowed to carry them. Most people recover from pepper spray. But many "suspects" never make it to court after being electrocuted. Electrocution devices are too inherently dangerous to be entrusted to police.If the rear seat of police cars were turned into electric chairs, is there any doubt that some police officers would execute arrestees and then try to justify the actions afterward?
Hat Tip to JONATHAN TURLEYThe victim's name is Antonio Love. Was he Black or Latino and what role may that have played in the treatment he received from police?
"When Antonio Love failed to heed orders to come out of a bathroom at a Dollar General store, Mobile police used pepper spray and a Taser on him — ultimately arresting him for resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and failure to obey a police officer. The problem is that Love, 37, is deaf and mentally disabled.
Store employees called officers complaining that Love had been in the bathroom for more than an hour with the door locked. When Love did not respond to their knocks, police used a tire iron to pry open the door — which Love tried to keep closed. They then used pepper spray and once inside shot him with a taser." JONATHAN TURLEY
"After forcibly removing Antonio Love from the bathroom of the Azalea Road store, officers attempted to book the 37-year-old, on charges of resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and failure to obey a police officer, but the magistrate on duty at the jail refused to accept any of those charges." Goat Hill NewsThere are some devices that are simply to inherently dangerous and subject to abuse for police to be allowed to carry them. Most people recover from pepper spray. But many "suspects" never make it to court after being electrocuted. Electrocution devices are too inherently dangerous to be entrusted to police.
If the rear seat of police cars were turned into electric chairs, is there any doubt that some police officers would execute arrestees and then try to justify the actions afterward?
