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Officers behaved "stupidly" but may have been trained that way

You know when the President of the United States calls a police officer's decision "stupid" in a primetime press conference that your department has had a particularly bad day, one that's going to reverberate in the national conversation about racial politics for quite a long time.Obama was talking about the remarkable arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in his Cambridge home for disorderly conduct after a neighbor called police thinking he was a burglar.Having read several accounts of the incident, I think its root cause may or may not have been racial but was much more definitely the result of basic police training regarding how officers are taught to engage with the public. In this case, even after learning that Gates was in his own home and they'd been called out based on an error, officers still wanted to maintain a "command presence," in the policing lingo, and Professor Gates apparently was having none of it...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on July 23, 2009 (boomark / email).