critical links: Gawker’s story, twitter “Skip Gates”

(This article assumes familiarity with events.)

EDIT (7/28): In the interest of fairness, the headline here is formulated based on inaccurate information. More than one peckerwood idiot was involved (at the very least the moronic dispatcher and arresting officer, possibly the other cops at the scene), and the caller was actually very reasonable about it - she was calling the police on the insistence of an older woman who evidently watched two men forcing their way into a house without saying a word and then summoned someone else to call the police for her - so not just a racist cunt but a chickenshit one as well.
The caller not only noticed and pointed out the presence of luggage, but the 911 dispatcher responded dismissively to it (’What do the suitcases have to do with anything?’) in addition to demanding a racial category for the entrants and botching other details of the call. So I stand by the headline, but I feel it casts aspersions unfairly on the caller and sincerely apologize. As opposed to almost everyone else in this sorry story, she made the best she could of a nasty situation. -ack

1) What the police do is essential, but the Broken Windows school of criminology along with the modern trajectory of American conservatism has turned them into a stalking-horse for authoritarianism; in the new ideology, we always need more police funded better and nothing they do is inappropriate enough to merit criticism. And what they are made to do, rather than keeping the peace and furthering public goodwill, is harass anyone who sticks out, make arrests on instinct rather than fact, and aggressively dehumanize everyone. While the massive influx of police did have a tonic effect on the crime rate for a time, it’s also generalized the antipathy for and fear of the police once limited pretty exclusively to minorities in large cities and the Border South. Worse, that antipathy and fear has become regarded as positive rather than damning.

2) We have all seen this happen over and over again. Some punk kid at a Kerry speech gets tased for acting a bitch; some skateboarder gets tased for using the word “dude” while cooperating fully with an angry officer’s unreasonable scrutiny; a young man having a seizure after enduring a heavy beating is tased repeatedly with electrodes stuck in his nipple and scrotum; riot cops at the RNC casually pepper-spray peaceable demonstrators (including a woman doing nothing but holding a flower), anti-terrorism resources are used to tail and intimidate journalists. We know this is happening. Why do we tolerate it at all?

3) If Henry Louis Gates Jr. wasn’t named that, and wasn’t a Harvard professor, he’d still be in jail and nobody would care.

4) When my dad was some punk kid and social neoconservatism was just the peculiar way things were done west of the Jello Belt, he had feathered long hair and a scraggly moustache; his parents had basically abandoned him and he lived a block from his fiancee in a house he had to take care of himself. One day, shortly after having a cast put on his leg, he was hanging around on his own lawn when a passing police officer, evidently believing his hair meant he was obviously a drug-dealing filthy hippie scum (mind you, it was 1980 or so!), harassed him, and in spite of his cooperation struck him repeatedly on his casted leg, breaking it more severely and inflicting an injury that remains painful to this day for no real reason. If he were black, he probably would have at least spent the night in jail for the privilege.

5) We have all been locked out of our house; we have helped strangers into theirs; and Gates is old and was accompanied by another elderly man helping him with luggage. When would you possibly see that and think anything but “man stuck outside of his house”, let alone call the police rather than asking him? Answer: when he’s black and you’re a racist. [EDIT 7/28 - Hilariously, the lady that watched them break in and move in their luggage didn’t even call the police herself, let alone establish the basic contact necessary to either scare off burglars or establish validity of presence.]

6) Even if we take the police report at face value (it overemphasizes his belligerence and omits several details that the lawyer’s statement and the reality of a police-home intrusion both support, i.e. the badge number, basic cooperation, etc.), it’s striking to read its general tone and sense of events - throughout the report, the officer is affronted by this awful man insisting he’s a figure of dignity and importance, this angry black man who calls racism at the first sign of a police officer barging into his own home, refusing to believe he has any right to be there, and automatically gainsaying everything he bothers to explain. In what seems most obviously like a fabrication, he uses broad and political language, overcompensatorily and non-specifically denouncing the officer’s behavior. If this officer has ever heard someone righteously angry, he has evidently never paid attention - he casts an elderly academic who is being harangued in his own home as a typical angry black criminal. In the officer’s version, Gates knows he has done something wrong and is truculent because that’s how those people are. How in the fuck could that even be possible?

7) Finally, note the fashion in which the officer treats the arrest - it’s perfectly reasonable, in spite of how terribly things have gone, to haul this man into custody. He sneeringly describes the pathetic old man whining about needing a cane to walk and the handcuffs being too tight. Shoulda thought about that before you started acting like you had rights, buckwheat.

8) Because this is a fantastic case, the officer responsible may well wind up falling on his sword. (In spite of an inevitable countersurge of hagiographies, aspersions, and race-baiting by the bigotry industry; in the Republican mythology he will become a sort of put-upon Aryan hero, a crass metaphor for the way they believe America thinks about Obama, rather than a jumped-up dipshit.) However, what he did was the result of how all of these cases normally go - the local community at most gets angry, the officer gets a slap on the wrist, the department has his back.

9) So here you have America: a country fallen so far into depraved authoritarianism that the police consider it their prerogative to mock old men for needing a cane on official documents.