You Won’t See This on “Cops” 0

But you can see a lot of stuff that fits the bill when you look beyond the surface and the dramatic overheated cops-can-do-no-wrong narratives.

A black thing? A racial-profiling thing? A racist thing?

Those are the motivations most often proffered in the saga of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. vs. the Cambridge police. What other possible explanations are there for a white officer stopping a 58-year-old black man with a cane, in the heinous act of trying to open the door of his own house? But it wasn’t a black thing. Or a racial-profiling thing. Or a racist thing.

It was a cop thing.

(snip)

They are cops. And if you have dealt with a cop in your lifetime, you know their propensity, the nervousness you feel in even approaching one for a traffic direction and the look given in return, as if you have just interrupted the study of the Talmud. You know that the interaction has too many times been unpleasant, unless you are some law and order right-wing radio show snake-oil salesman crafting your beliefs to the reactionary masses who would like to change the name of the tooth fairy to the tooth don’t-ask-don’t-tell.

As I’ve told a couple of people, I’ve thought from the start that the Gates thing had more to do with Sgt. Crowley not getting subservience from a citizen than it did with race. It certainly wasn’t “racial profiling,” which refers to stopping someone because of his or her race or ethnicity, though I can understand why an angry man, tired from flying home from China, being harassed in his own home, might say the first fool thing that comes into his mind.

There was a legitimate 911 call, but, as the tapes have shown, race or ethnicity did not figure significantly in the call. Nevertheless, Sgt. Crowley’s report claimed that it did.

Where did it come from, then, if not from the caller and not from the dispatcher? It came from Sgt. Crowley.

This leads me to two related questions:

• How did Sgt. Crowley come to make up the reference to race as being part of the initial call?
• Was Sgt. Crowley even aware he made up the reference to race as being part of the initial 911 call?

Frankly, I think the answer to the second question is “No.” If I’m right, the answer to the first question becomes a subject for a dissertation in sociology.