TheAgitator.com
Bad Cases, Bad Lessons
Monday, July 27th, 2009Re: The Gates/Crowley fiasco.
Ever notice how the criminal justice incidents that seem to capture the national attention are those that are either amenable to drawing false lessons (Gates was wrong about Crowley profiling him, therefore all claims of racial profiling are bougs; the Jena 6 were inaccurately touted as saintly victims, therefore there is no racial injustice in Louisiana), result in outcomes that almost never happen (false charges against Duke lacrosse players resulted not only in a public pronouncement of their innocence, but actual criminal charges against the power-tripping prosecutor), or otherwise give completely inaccurate assessments of how the criminal justice system actually works (like O.J., violent crime suspects are able to win acquittal via slippery defense lawyers, high-paid and hackish forensic experts, and racially sympathetic juries)?
Not sure why or how it works out that way, but it certainly seems to. Unfortunately, the public’s education about the criminal justice system seems to come chiefly through these high-profile cases. That and prime-time TV series.
I was thinking about that too.
First of all, the media loves to put out stories where they can get both sides riled up, eg. blacks about racial profiling and whites about ‘being too soft on criminals’. The controversy helps with their ratings.
Clear-cut cases that show how corrupt the justice system is, or how extensive police abuses are, are less ‘fun’, both for the media and the ‘tradional’ public. People, especially the law-and-order crowd would rather simply not hear about these stories, and maintain their cognitive dissonance. The media then picks up on that and doesn’t air them.
I just love all the TSA recruiting ads on your blog.
Radley,
I remember a year or so ago you made a post about appearing on one of the all-news channels and they blanched at you for wanting to discuss “policy”, saying that the word “policy” made viewers reach for the remote.
Therein lies a large part of the problem. The news channels feel their viewers are too stupid to grasp the legal issues around high-profile cases and only frame them in a hot-button, emotional context.
Also, the media is still stuck in a left/right, conservative/liberal paradigm. If a legal issue can’t be framed beyond race, class, the Forces of Good vs. the Hordes of Scary Brown People Who Hate Us For Our Freedoms, then the media feels a need to wait for further details.
I can only stand to watch about 5 seconds of Nancy Grace (or Jane Velez Mitchell or whatshisdouche who precedes Velez Mitchell); Grace has a friggin’ law degree, yet she never discusses cases within the framework of the law. From what I gather, her stock phrase is, “Hello! If ________ is innocent, then why are they hiding behind a lawyer?!?”
I might be wrong about this – and feel free to edit/delete this if you find it libelous – but I’ve heard that on the day that Nifong’s house of cards came tumbling down in the Duke rape case, Nancy Grace flat-out refused to go on the air that night.
The Cheye Calvo case never made prime time because it can’t be summarized with a simple, “If you don’t want the cops kicking in your door, you shouldn’t do drugs/live with a drug dealer/dress like a drug dealer.”
The Ryan Fredrick case never made prime time because the disconnect level required for the public’s support of the Castle Doctrine and No-Knock Raids is way too much.
Bill Curtis used to do some pretty decent shows on A&E. I saw one where he did an in-depth study on crowd control techniques and it prominently featured LEOs who were highly critical of other cops.
I disagree with some of Catherine Crier’s views, but when she had her show on CourtTV, she discussed Constitutional issues from an intelligent standpoint. Of course, when they made the switch to TruTV, they dropped her like a hot potato, replacing her with Star “I Hate Atheists” Jones.
One of my guilty pleasures is a fascination with True Crime. I had to quit reading True Crime blogs because I got sick of all the people who advocate lynchings. I got disgusted with one blog in particular where there was a post about some teenagers who tortured a mentally retarded youth because a girl falsely claimed he had raped her. The teens were only meting out the vigilante justice that was championed on every single post at the same blog, yet none of the readers could make that connection. The teens who tortured the mentally challenged kid, of course, deserved to have their nuts crushed in a vice and then be hung from the highest tree.
One case I’m surprised that you didn’t mention is the Richard Jewel case. One would think that after that fiasco, the media would learn the value of adding some substance to their legal analysis. On 09/12/01, Jewel got relegated to the status of a Trivial Pursuit question.
Sorry about the word diarrhea, but this post offers me an opportunity to ask a question I’ve been meaning to ask: Have you ever been approached by one of the networks (TruTV, Discovery ID, etc) about bringing The Agitator to the small screen? If the answer is no, how would you respond if you received an offer?
I liken it as to how the MSM deals with science, they’ll put a creationist up against a scientist and give each side 3 minutes of airtime and then never bother to look into who was right, who was lying. And that’s if they even choose to show the other side, Fox News recently gave Casey Luskin about five minutes of air time to just spout Discovery Institute BS.
The point is to never investigate the claims of ANY SIDE in any issue. You see if they simply started doing research and saying “that guy is wrong and lying through his teeth”, then they could never get any more airtime out of the issue. So long as every issue, policy discussion, or scientific fact, stays a matter of opinion it can be endlessly debated. 24 hours is a lot of time to fill and the major networks have found that the cheapest way to do business is to give some people airtime to talk about their side of an issue and never bother with thorough, expensive investigations of the claims made on the air.
These types of cases fill that niche because they go against common knowledge. And that gets all of the special interest personalities riled up and wanting to go on tv and bitch about it. I can’t remember how many times during the duke lacrosse case someone said “you know if these had been young black men instead of young wealthy white college students they all would have gone to jail and no one would have asked any questions.” I heard that repeatedly. Everyone said that is if it would have been the better outcome, no one seemed to care that the young black men would have been innocent too. This country takes it for granted that black men get railroaded by the justice system so that’s not a story. That is a two sentence blurb on the little ticker at the bottom of the screen. But you get a case that’s the complete opposite of what we know happens, and that’s three weeks of air time. Guilt or innocence, right or wrong, never factor in. Its about selling papers and filling air time. The only way to do that is to say “This is New! You’ve never seen this before! The racist behavior of the LAPD will actually cause a guilty murderer to go free!”
It’s P.T. Barnum not Edward R. Murrow.
Holy crap, I’m really sorry about the word diarrhea. The post didn’t look near that long on the composition box. I won’t do that again, promise.
Another way to look at the Duke case that you might like better: perhaps if there hadn’t been so much media attention, the prosecutor might NEVER have gotten any punishment.
The cases that get lots of play generally have some actors that are powerful (e.g. rich and connected) and can defend themselves sometimes quite dramatically.
Cant say I understand your Jena 6 example though.
Maybe “therefore all claims of racial profiling are bougs” is false, but does anyone really take away that lesson? What about this alternative lesson: “therefore many, perhaps most claims of racial profiling are bogus”. That second one is much harder to refute. The first one is easy to refute because “all” statements require only a single exception to refute. But “many” and “most” statements are much more difficult to refute, requiring statistics. It’s obvious that lessons using the word “all” are false, but not at all obvious that lessons using the word “most” are false.
If the sampling of cases that saw the light of day turn out (often long after national attention was focused, such as the lacrosse case and the Jena 6 case) to teach certain lessons, the lessons may be right. Sure, lessons using the word “all” are surely wrong. But if people instead take away lessons using the word “most”, it’s not quite so easy to refute these lessons. And “many” (i.e. a significant fraction) is even harder to refute. I don’t know for a fact that such lessons are false. Since the attention was in many cases focused before the lesson was discovered (as in the lacrosse case), I don’t think we can easily say that the media have, in these cases, biased the sampling.
When I read this entry, what I am actually reading is something like, “it bothers me that the sampling of cases that are looked at with a microscope lead to conclusions sharply at odds with what I believe to be true.”
The Gates “profiling” case would have made the national news had the profiling been genuine, in fact the initial, knee-jerk assumption among many was that it was genuine – even here in this blog, whose initial reference to the case was,
“So if you’re going to be a pedestrian who mistakenly calls the cops because you see a black man trying to pry open the jammed door to his own home, and if you’re going to be the responding cop who then questions said black man for possibly burglarizing his own home, then arrests said black man for subsequently taking offense and getting uppity with you, both of you should probably make sure said black man is not Henry Louis Gates, the famed Harvard professor of African-American Studies.”
which implicitly predicts that Gates will emerge triumphant. This early sentiment was common in places of power (such as the White House) and in the media. So even though Gates’s claims were rapidly discredited, I think this actually should be lumped in with the lacrosse and the jena 6 cases, where the events took a twisty turn only after the media had selected the case as a “teachable moment”. In short, this forms part of the sample which the media cannot believably be said to have selected in a way biased in favor of the conclusion that is currently being drawn from it.
The sensational stories are what grab people’s attention. If it is sensational, then it is rare. If it is rare, it ain’t gonna happen to you. Pretty blond girls really aren’t in much danger; if they were, we would be bored with the stories and they wouldn’t get much air time.
Thus, what gets reported by the MSM is of necessity utterly irrelevant.
Samsam
It would help if the media were actually responsible in its reportings. Take the case of the Jena 6, for example. The initial, uncritical response was “ZOMG TEH RACISTS ARE PERSECUTING BLACK KIDS!” Then, lo and behold, it turned that not only were they not innocent, they were actually violent racists in their own right. So they swing the public wildly in one direction, and then snap them back into another.
They are agents of the status quo when you think about it. What they do is they agitate the public on safe issues like racism, but they don’t want the public to see fundamental holes like the way that Mike Nifong was just one of many great examples of how prosecutors are quite often so unethical they make the average defense attorney look like a saint.
I don’t think it is entirely (or even mostly) the media’s fault that all the high profile cases cause people to come to false conclusions. Take the Gates/Crowley case, for example. I found out about the case almost immediately. I found on from Facebook feeds. All my FB friends knew was that “Henry Louis Gates was arrested by a white cop.” And all the conclusions you mention were already made long before any details came out.
That’s not to say the media aren’t complicit, because they clearly are. I was once interviewed by the local CBS station to get a “local Republican” perspective on the Cheney/Edwards debate. The only thing the reporter wanted to know was my take on Dick Cheney claiming Saddam Hussein planned the 9/11 attacks. That was the only question she’d ask and kept asking it over and over with different wording. Aboutt 10 times, I responded that I wasn’t aware of anyone ever making that claim. That night, I’m on TV, cleverly edited to sound like I thought Saddam Hussein planned the 9/11 attacks.
But, why did she do that? Most likely, she wanted to provide her customers what they wanted. And if she aired a real interview, she’d be airing me discussing the policies both men discussed. Based on the clips I’ve seen, Radley is a much better speaker than I am; if Radley can’t say the word “policy” without people changing the channel, I surely can’t.
#3 and #4 should be required reading. I think there are many more extrapolations that one could feasibly make off of both of those posts that would completely take the discussion away from the main crux of the article, so I digress.
I’ll just say this — does all of this have anything to say about our education system? Just curious.
Again though, Bravo #3 and #4!
It’s a tangent the same principle as the old adage that “It’s not news when 1,000 planes land safely, only when one crashes”. The media usually only reports on the aberrant occurence in society, not the norm. The press doesn’t cover the average court case because the average court case is boring to the American reading/viewing public (who wants to sit through days of procedural crap before the interesting testimony comes on) unless it’s got some element to it that makes it stand out. And so, many people who get their information solely from the mainstream news get fooled into thinking that the exceptions are the rule…including, many times, the journalists themselves.
The only good thing I’ve seen come from this story is the original link from last year via Instapundit covering Radleys reporting on Cory Maye. I saw it in 2 different places so maybe someone, somewhere, at least learned something. Just because cops aren’t always wrong, doesn’t meant they’re always right.
(Nice to see crawford, thought you might have fallen off the planet)
The Professor Gates – Sgt. Crowley imbroglio is illustrative in many ways.
We find that a Ph.D. tenured professor at Harvard who in fact runs their Black Studies Program and is a close buddy of President Obama, is actually as racist as a white-robed KKK Klansman. Recordings of his racist lectures and speeches are already turning viral on the Internet, and just wait until the Cambridge police recordings are released.
Sgt. Crowley had his two-way remote radio link HOT when he was talking with the good Dr………..
Right now, you can be sure that Axelrod and Emmanuel are trying to SPIKE the release of those recordings, and they’ll be embargoed as tightly as Obama’s original long-form birth certificate and his college transcripts.
Also very illustrative during the Presidential news conference is confirmation of a suspicion that I have long suspected about Obama:
Obama’s ALL about race. Has been an agrieved black radical since his college days, followed by his years as either a race agitating “Community Activist” for ACORN-affiliated causes, or as their actual attorney in ACORN initiated legal actions.
Obama also chose to attend a Black Liberation Theology church for the past 20 years for a reason:
The Church and its minister the ranting Reverand Wright preached to Obama’s core values.
Very illustrative…..
Whim, your post is ridiculous on a number of levels.
Why don’t you give us a link to one of these viral racist speeches? As I understand it, Gates is pretty mild-mannered, and in fact is sometimes criticized for being more of the Booker T. Washington school than the W.E.B. DuBois school of black activism. Moreover, to compare him to a Klansman is sheer ignorance. As far as I know, Gates has never lynched anyone, or called for the murder of people of other races, creeds, or religions.
Your statement on Obama is also absurd. This is the first time he has made a controversial statement about race in six months in office. In my opinion, Obama has been wrong in about just about everything he’s done so far, but he’s hardly “all about race.”
Finally, I’m not going to allow birther BS on this site. Bring it up again, and you’ll be banned.
Whim, you can complain about Professor Gate’s racism until you’re blue in the face and for all I know you might actually be right.
The problem is, it’s totally irrelevant to this story. A man (black, white, hispanic, asian, I don’t care) was arrested IN HIS OWN HOUSE for mouthing off to a police officer. That is the only relevant fact in this story.
I don’t care if Professor Gates spewed every curse word in the book while simultaneously tossing out both of his middle fingers. Such actions are not becoming, but they certainly are legal.
Any attempt to draw a moral equivalency here between Gates and Crowley is ludicrous. No matter what fault you can find with Gates, Crowley’s actions were far worse.
There’s a show on TNT you might want to watch if you haven’t seen it already: Raising the Bar, which is a court room drama, but it’s being watched from the viewpoint of the defense. It does a good job of showing the various ways that the justice system completely screws people (for instance last week there was a guy who got acquitted on a charge, but then got sent to prison anyways based on a parole violation for the charge he’d just been acquitted of. The parole review was held in an administrative law court which had no jury, permitted hearsay evidence, etc.) The show’s DA is particularly odious, regularly pressing to get convictions for people he knows are innocent in order to pad his stats.
Ever notice how the criminal justice incidents that seem to capture the national attention are those that are either amenable to drawing false lessons (Gates was wrong about Crowley profiling him, therefore all claims of racial profiling are bougs;
One big narrative that I’ve read over and over again in the Right end of the blogosphere is “Gates is an ideologically bad man, so I’m glad that he tossed in jail, regardless of the justification.” It’s rather disturbing to see tribalism trump the rule of law.
Even Glenn Reynolds, who identifies as a libertarian, seems hardly disturbed that a man was incarcerated as punishment for backtalking a government agent.
Not sure why or how it works out that way, but it certainly seems to. Unfortunately, the public’s education about the criminal justice system seems to come chiefly through these high-profile cases. That and prime-time TV series.
While I’ll admit that’s not ideal, it may be for the best. After all, if you’re not working in the legal profession, the only other way to get an intimate look at the system is rather unpleasant.
Radley:
You wanted it, you’ve got it:
Here’s just one of the Gates racial rants from Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRlIdFcWd5k
I’ll let you turn it into a hypertext link for our viewing enjoyment.
Regarding the embargoed Obama documents: I’m not a “Birther”.
There are other reasons why these documents have been buried from the light of day.
There is something very embarrassing with his original long-form typed birth certificate circa 1961.
Likewise, think of a GOOD reason why the supposed smartest President ever doesn’t want his college transcripts released….
I’ll leave it to your active imagination to pontificate as to what might be embarrassing about release of these documents to the American public……
My suspicion regarding his original birth certificate is that it would cause a profound embarrassment to the POTUS.
Like, under the Race category: WHITE.
Remember, this was 1961, and pre Civil Rights era. And, technically, he’s as White as he is Black.
Or, maybe the Father is left: [ ].
Likewise, his college transcripts: GPA: 2.8?
Or his courses:
Marxism 101
Marxism 201
Marxism 301
Marxism 401
Critical Theory of Marxism
Independent Study: Saul Alinsky and Rules for Radicals: A Primer.
Or……..?
Actually, he was arrested on his front porch, for a misreading of the disturbing the peace statute. He was an idiot for mouthing off to the officer because his earlier behavior had given the officer probable cause to believe that he was a criminal breaking into someone’s home, and his initial unwillingness to identify himself would have quite legitimately resulted in him getting hauled down to the station for identification.
Seriously, dude, do you think the police shouldn’t be able to arrest people that look like they just broke in a door and don’t belong on that property? If Gates weren’t such as an asshole, he might have appreciated the fact that unlike 150 years ago, the police were actually **protecting** a black man’s property from private acts.
Gary:
Regarding the confrontation in Gates’ house:
Sgt. Crowley responded to a 911 call: Burglary IN PROGRESS, involving TWO men forcing they way through the door of a home. He CONFIRMED this with the neighbor woman. Lucia Whalen, upon his arrival.
He did NOT know:
–WHO Mr. Gates actually was.
–WHERE Intruder #2 was actually located.
When confronted by police, intruders/prowlers/burglars sometimes try to bluff the police that they are the actual resident/homeowner/business owner.
Crowley was probably also apprehensive about having NO BACK-UP on his police call. He was alone in a house when confronting ONE of TWO suspects of the burglary.
Where was Intruder #2, might have been going through his mind?
Gates gave exactly the wrong reaction to the circumstances.
Yes, it WAS his house.
However, he was an active SUSPECT in a reported Burglary-in-Progress.
The policeman’s calm deportment and professionalism under the circumstances are commendable.
Most people are ok with Americans being thrown in jail or even beaten by an agent of the government for sarcasm.
Don’t intentionally confuse the issue. The problem occurred when the cop arrested Mr. Gates, and at that point in time, all parties involved agree that the cop knew Mr. Gates owned that house.
And, of course, once he knows that Mr. Gates owns the house, unknown #2 becomes completely irrelevant, as obviously if two guys are working together to break into a house, and one of them owns the thing, then guy #2 isn’t doing anything wrong either.
Zargon:
Mr. Gates is lucky he lives in Massachusetts.
In the Retro southern state where I reside, Mr. Gates would have been taught some manners by the policeman’s billy club.
AFTER being handcuffed…….to minimize the danger of police injuries….
Regarding the arrest, by coming outside to continue his rant against Sgt. Crowley, he gave the policeman a pretext for the disorderly conduct arrest.
The charges were dropped not because they couldn’t be proven, but rather because Prof. Gates was a semi-somebody in a College Town.
A Public Relations move in the eternal Town-Gown tension.
“Seriously, dude, do you think the police shouldn’t be able to arrest people that look like they just broke in a door and don’t belong on that property?”
Of course not, but you’re creating a giant straw man. In the Gates case, that didn’t happen. Gates was arrested after it was made completely clear to the officer’s satisfaction that Gates owned the house. Nobody disputes that fact, neither Gates or the officer.
Gates was arrested for a charge of disorderly conduct that was in no way, shape, or form related to a suspicion of him having broken into the house and even Officer Crowley freely states that at the time of the arrest he fully believed that Gates was the owner of the house and was there lawfully.
“Most people are ok with Americans being thrown in jail or even beaten by an agent of the government for sarcasm.”
Sadly enough, I suspect that this is what it comes down to. It’s kind of appalling.
If Gates went outside his house, and started screaming obscenities at the police, then I don’t see why it would be an issue to arrest him if the law allows that.
The one has no bearing on the other. If he broke the disorderly conduct law, then the officer was justified in arresting him. The fact that he belonged there doesn’t give him a get out of jail free card for other acts.
Re: The Gates/Crowley fiasco:
When @ssholes collide – nobody wins. :(
“If Gates went outside his house, and started screaming obscenities at the police, then I don’t see why it would be an issue to arrest him if the law allows that.”
I don’t know how Massachusetts defines disorderly conduct, however I was on a jury for such a case in New York and it was defined as something like “acting unruly, etc, etc, with the intention to create or with the risk of creating public unrest”. It was stressed numerous times that both elements must be met, i.e. not only must the person be acting “disorderly” but they must be doing so in a way that risks public unrest. Acting disorderly in and of itself does not meet the requirements of the statute.
Again, that’s New York. I don’t know how MA defines it. In my opinion, an arrest of someone for disorderly conduct on their porch (or in their house, or on their front yard) where nobody else is around except the person and the officer (and no, I don’t believe that spying neighbors count) risks public unrest.
I have no doubt and I don’t dispute that Gates was acting “disorderly” per the common usage of the word.
The thing is, in this country that’s not illegal.
Correction: in my previous comment, I should have said “In my opinion, an arrest of someone for disorderly conduct on their porch where nobody else is around except the person and the officer *is inappropriate because there are no risk of public unrest*”. My original phrasing wasn’t clear.
Gary: http://www.slate.com/id/2223379/
What do you people not understand the cop made a false police report…He reported that two Black men with backpacks in his original report did anyone forget that the 911 call actually backs Gates claim.
The issue here is that life is messy. Most of these cases don’t involve the little old lady who doesn’t do anything but volunteer with her church because if they did, things would be resolved very quickly. The cases we see in the media are the ones where both sides feel they’ve been wronged in some way; i.e., where everyone’s done something wrong. These are the conflicts that get so heated that violence or lawyers get involved.
The ones that don’t fit that pattern have an element of social class involved as well, like with Gates, or with the Duke case.
Let’s see… Gates, Jenna 6, OJ Simpson, Duke lacrosse team… what do these cases of wrong lessons and unlikely outcomes share in common? They all affirm the populist white narrative that black people aren’t ever victims of discrimination or police misconduct; white people are the victims. That’s why people get so worked up about these stories–they are the populist’s favorite fairy tales.
Whim – YOU are a totally retrograde racially unaware cretin. Even aside from the racial issue though, right wingers like you constantly whine about the ever expanding power of the state (They’re coming to take ur guns) and yet when an egregious example happens in real time, you never even consider the possibility that law enforcement has crossed the line… I barely can stomach the authoritarian tendencies on the right so I very infrequently read people like Balko, but I pop over to see if anyone makes sense. I have known a lot of successful upper middle class African-Americans and lets face it, they are not generally given the benefit of the doubt. Was Gates stupid for being impolite to an officer, yes, is it illegal, no. Crowley works for the citizens of Cambridge, not the other way around.
Whim, I watched that Gates video you linked to, and to describe it as a “rant” is kind of like describing the storm that hit the NE today as a “blizzard”. I doubt Gates’ heart rate got above 90 during that whole speech. He’s relaxed, making jokes (and laughing a bit too much at those jokes) and basically articulating the standard liberal position on affirmative action and other issues. He also makes a few racially tinged jokes about watermelons and n***s to what is clearly a sympathetic (and presumably largely black) audience. Oh, and he makes some mildly disparaging remarks about North Carolina.
I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to be exercised about. From the headline, I guess it’s the phrase “racist institutions”. But is anyone seriously claiming that Harvard, Yale, etc. were NOT historically racist institutions? I mean, long before Jesse Helms ever uttered the word “quota”, those universities all had them for blacks, Jews and any other group that wasn’t part of the White Protestant elite.
I think we both know the goal of whoever posted that video was to lump Gates with Sharpton, Wright and West (the latter of whom appears in the video) as yet another “angry black man”. But as Radley pointed out above, anyone who’s seek Gates speak (including anyone who actually watches that video) will know that shoe doesn’t come close to fitting.
Lol, Radley is authoritarian…? Quite an imagination you have…
ksmiami:
I admit, I rarely think of anything in racial terms.
I wasn’t reared around racial minorities, had little interaction until adulthood, and thereafter dealt with my interactions in generally a professional setting only with similarly educated and vocationally experienced racial minorities, who like me chose to live somewhere else than “the Hood”.
Regarding police profiling, several police departments, New Jersey comes to mind, have been found to have committed serial racial profiling.
Profiling involved PRE-TEXT stops of African-American males to see if the police could find a reason to escalate the traffic-stop venue to find some illegalities: Bench Warrants, drug possession, expired license, lack of liability coverage insurance, etc.
Sgt. Crowley did not in any measure commit racial profiling, despite I’m sure as a veteran police officer having intimate knowledge that DOJ statistics show that African-Americans as a SOCIAL GROUPING are both heavily prone to crime, as well as prone to being a crime victim. Check the DOJ crime stats.
As a social grouping, African-American males ages 18-35 seem to find themselves in prison, jail or on supervised probation in astoundingly high statistical anomalies.
Crowley was doing his job, responding to a 911 call:
Burglary in progress.
What happened thereafter speaks volumes about Professor Gates and HIS apparent ranting racism……..Crowley as a very experienced police sergeant kept his cool.
whim- you want to be perceived as unbiased but the word “prone” gives you away. btw- where does SOCIAL GROUPING come from? are we blessed to be present at the birth of a new code word? what precisely does the little tidbit about 18-35 African-American males have to do with Gates? His age exceeds that range by the full spread of the range.
********************
I admit, I rarely think of anything in racial terms.
I wasn’t reared around racial minorities, had little interaction until adulthood, and thereafter dealt with my interactions in generally a professional setting only with similarly educated and vocationally experienced racial minorities, who like me chose to live somewhere else than “the Hood”.
****************
please be honest, change that first sentence:
I admit, I am only comfortable around people who act exactly as I do.
@#40
“Crowley was doing his job, responding to a 911 call:
Burglary in progress.”
Actually, the 911 caller was unclear about what was going on She said that it could have been someone fumbling with his keys, but she did see him push against the door with his shoulder, so she wasn’t sure what was going on. That is not “burglary in progress.” She also said that she saw two suitcases beside the man.
And she didn’t say that it was two black men, as has been widely reported because of a statement Crowley made in his report. She only said that one of the men might have been Hispanic.
Lots of things have been said about the 911 call that were a matter of inference based on the police report. Now the tape is out. Two bad the whole thing isn’t on tape. Police reports can be very interesting when you’ve got audio and video to go with them.
I think in many instances the cases become famous precisely because they’re ambiguous. That’s what keeps them in the headlines for more than a day or two, as new evidence comes in, or new opinions are broached. The meantime, people who have too hastily staked out a position in the early days are left defending themselves in the light of new developments, and often do so with increased vehemence. So matters get increasingly polarized even as they’re hanging on through news cycle after news cycle. If either the Duke or the Gates case had turned out to be a more obvious example of bias, the story would have naturally concluded, before most people would have had a chance to invest in the outcome.
Regarding Goldberg, Dunphy, et. al., for many on the Right, laws and enforcement against criminal acts is a legitimate function of government. Couple that with the autoritarian notion of many on the Right that there are “right” ways and “wrong” ways to live, and you get a world view that sees the law and police as a sort of super-parent. Those folks living the “wrong” way need to be shown the error of their ways, and the laws and police are the instrument used to achieve this worthy (in their eyes) goal. It would be a perfect world if everyone would just “obey the law”, and we wouldn’t have to sic the police on you. When someone on the Right talks about “law and order”, the goal is “order”.
It seems very often that these types are less concerned about the acutal actions involved, but rather focus on whether a law has been broken. For example, when marijuana is the subject, the fact that someone is using MJ is not as important to them as the fact that they broke “THE LAW”.
When you have this sort of attitude about laws, it’s no wonder that LEO’s are given the benefit of the doubt in nearly all police actions.