http://wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com/501535.html?thread=5053983#t5053983
The Gates arrest was terrible police work above and beyond any kind of legal question.
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(Text of any linked articles under the cut.)

http://wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com/501535.html?thread=5054239#t5054239 – by Drewkitty (http://drewkitty.livejournal.com/)
I read the police report. Based solely on that report, and on what a court would call the prima facie facts of the case (Professor Gates is a professor at Harvard, this is his address, he has no warrants, and so on):

This is really, really bad police work. The officer wanted to provoke Professor Gates into behavior justifying an arrest and succeeded in his objective. The arrest is probably lawful, but in the “can the lawyers justify this?” sense, not the “good police work” sense.

The officer was responding to a report of a felony in progress. It was appropriate for him to come to the porch and to interact with Professor Gates and to ask questions such as how many persons are in the residence, etc. It is arguable that the officer had probable cause to enter the residence based on the citizen report of a break-in.

However, once Professor Gates has been identified, the probable cause for entry disappears. Absent any other reason to be present, the officer should have expressed regrets for the inconvenience (although at this point the officer had done nothing wrong or outside either policy or procedure) and left the house.

It is on the porch, where Professor Gates and the officer were clearly most upset, where I feel that his Federal civil rights and human dignity were grossly violated.

Ordering a person to calm down is widely known to be a serious error in police work. Dr. George Thompson’s seminal book “Verbal Judo,” which is widely used to teach police officers, states that ordering a person to calm down never works. This is consistent with training I have received and my own observations in the field.

Displaying a weapon (handcuffs) is also not a technique used to calm a person. It is an escalation which generally culminates in a use of force, as it did in this case.

Moving immediately from verbal arrest to overcoming physical resistance is also not a recommended law enforcement technique, in the absence of any urgent or threatening circumstances. The presence of several officers negates officer safety concerns.

Last but not least, it is not at all clear to me that the public conduct in question is not protected 1st Amendment speech. The officer’s prior accuracy in relating the contents of the speech is abruptly missing — calling him a racist and statements of self-importance (mislabeled by the officer as ‘threats’) suddenly turns to “yelling.”

The other officer states that Professor Gates shouted, “This is what happens to Black Men in America!” Sounds like protected 1st Amendment speech to me.

There are a number of different law enforcement techniques that could have been used to handle this problem. I will briefly list them:

1) remain present, hand off contact to another officer (“good cop, bad cop”)

2) punt and stall pending a supervisor on scene (“don’t know nothing, sir, my supervisor is on the way”)

3) hand off entire contact to the University Police and allow them to take the point on the contact (“hey, take care of this Harvard guy and translate for us, will you?”)

4) use Verbal Judo techniques to seek a win-win, for example by expressing regrets for inconvenience and then politely asking the contact not to shout at me for doing my job; another win-win would be volunteering my name repeatedly, writing it on a card and/or having another officer hand it to them on a card, then asking him for his name and writing it down myself

5) shut up, allow the contact to (non-violently) exhaust their fury, then sincerely thank them for expressing their opinion

6) use boundary-drawing techniques to assert that yelling in public is not OK and will result in arrest, but that the officer will listen if the subject stops yelling

7) start EMS for medical evaluation and neutral eyewitnesses

So going all the way to arrest as the first move is neither necessary nor desirable.

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Professor Gates missed a few tricks:

1) Anyone speaking to the police in a less than civil manner without witnesses is imprudent at best. Arrest for disorderly conduct is common in such cases.

2) Once his identity was established (and the officer radioing for a Harvard unit is proof of that so far as I’m concerned), the officer had no further need to be inside the residence. Professor Gates should have immediately asked him to leave.

3) The most reliable means of identifying a peace officer in the field is to have them write their name on a business card or a notebook page. The next most reliable means is to ask them for an event number (in this case #9005127) and to note the clearly visible unit IDs on the vehicles (careful records of which officer has checked out which vehicle that day are kept for a number of reasons). The least reliable means is to ask the officer for a name or a badge number.

4) The time to complain to the Chief, or the Dean, or whoever is later, as in a while later.

In Professor Gates’ defense, I must add that it is very intimidating for a layperson to come into contact with police as a criminal suspect. Due to my profession, I do it rather more often than the public, and it is never a light or frivolous matter.

This conduct by the police officer is inconsistent with community policing, customer service or cordial relations between the townies and the university community. I feel that the officer should be disciplined and the arrest rescinded, but acknowledge the wry fact that no discipline will take place because of the likelihood of litigation.

I will add that the officer’s conduct exposed his department not only to public censure and disrespect, but to considerable and completely unnecessary civil liability. Defending this lawsuit is going to be very expensive for the taxpayers of Cambridge.

Is it really worth a six figure lawsuit to enforce the disorderly conduct misdemeanor in an edge case like this?

Whether or not this misconduct was racist is a different question. Before the law, “which in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges,” probably not.

In terms of the total interaction between police and black men in America, you’d better *!@^ing believe it.

No person who is not sensitive to the racial implications of this incident should be a serving peace officer. The modern sheriff’s department has its roots in the “slave catcher” patrols of the pre-Civil War South. The vast majority of riots in American cities since World War II have been the result of a police-citizen incident.

Was Professor Gates out of line? Perhaps a little. The technical violation of disorderly conduct was because he shouted, not because of what he shouted. It’s not a “fire in a crowded theater” situation, nor is it a talk on the lecture circuit.

Being a brilliant scholar does not necessarily mean presence of mind or calm in the face of adversity. The police officer blew both of those, and had a lot more training and a lot more practice.

Note that I am about as pro-police as one can get.

Was the officer out of line? Oh, yeah, quite a bit. Way out of line. As in questioning his fitness to be a police officer at all.