Academic

More on Arresting Harvard Professors

By Jacqueline Lipton

I've been following the discussions of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr's arrest on the blogs and elsewhere, including today's report on CNN quoting President Obama saying that the police had "acted stupidly" in arresting a man at his own house after it became clear that it was Prof Gates' house.  The question that I keep thinking about is who the heck called the police in the first place?  If it was his neighbors, didn't they know what he looked like?  If he was there with his driver, presumably in a taxi or airport limousine or something like that, with a suitcase, and a neighbor happened to see the attempt to struggle with the door, wouldn't it have been perfectly obvious who he was and what he was doing?  While the focus has been on the police conduct - rightfully I would say - why hasn't anyone said anything about how this happened in the first place?  Someone has to have called the police.  And although the police probably have to keep the identity of the person confidential (or may not even have kept a record of it), shouldn't there be some discussion of how this situation came to be in the first place?  What were the police actually told by the anonymous informant?  And if it was indeed a neighbor, when they heard the ruckus, why didn't they come out and identify Gates and apologize for the mistake?

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on July 23, 2009 (boomark / email).