Gatesgate

Lotsa chatter today about the arrest of 58 year old Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for, er, “breaking in” to his own home in an upscale Cambridge neighborhood.  Even more chatter, especially on the right, about President Obama calling the arrest “stupid” during last night’s presser.

(If you’re not familiar, the facts are roughly these: an officer responded to a call that a house was being broken into; the house was Gates’s, and the supposed house-breaker was Gates; Gates provided documentation of who he was and that this was his address; the officer persisted; Gates got angry, asked for the officer’s badge number, and eventually gave him a thorough chewing out; the officer arrested Gates for disorderly conduct (aka, “contempt of cop”).)

This is the sort of thing that chaps me all over.  And by “this” I mean both the arrest and the breathless “defense” of the police by conservatives.

Citizens run this country.  Not the police.  Not the military.  Not the CIA.  Not the president.  Citizens.  All those other folks work for us.  Get paid by us.  And doggone well better respect us.

Arresting us in our own home because you don’t like the way we talk to you doesn’t cut it.  We don’t owe you deference.  You owe us deference.  We generally try to give you deference; not because we owe it to you as our superiors, but because we choose to do so in recognition of the work you do as public servants — which is to say, our servants.

When you royally screw up the work we pay you to do as public servants — like, say, by harrassing us for breaking into our own homes — you deserve to be read the riot act and we are well within our rights to do so, personally and right on the spot.

We’ve long had this respect relationship upside-down in American culture.

We think we’re supposed to respect the police, when it’s the police who are supposed to respect us.  But we’ve had that so thoroughly upside-down for so long that our police officers now have the mindset that citizens owe them something; that they are public superiors rather than public servants; and even that if we don’t give them what they feel they’re owed, we’ve committed a crime — a crime — and they are entitled to clap us in irons and throw us in jail, as they did Mr. Gates.

Officers, we understand you have a hard job.  We understand most of the citizens you come in contact with every day, day after day, accord you no respect, at best.  We’re aware of that, we understand it, and we take it into account.  It’s why the rest of us show you deference.

But you’ve got to fight this mindset that we owe you that deference.  And you’ve really got to fight this mindset that anytime we do something you happen not to like, you can use the power we gave you against us.

You don’t have a badge and a gun to make your day go smoother or to avoid the consequences of your actions; you have a badge and a gun to prevent crime.  When no crime has been committed, as in this case, you have no authority to do anything, and therefore any action you take is beyond your legal authority, an offense to the dignity of the citizens you serve, and well deserving of an ass-chewing from the citizen(s) in question.

You should accept responsibility and apologize.  If you can’t do that, you can walk away.  But arresting us is not one of your options.

Tags: Henry Louis Gates, policing