Any message Obama was trying to convey about health care last night is being quickly eclipsed by his o'er-hasty answer to a question about the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates:
Obama answered a question about his friend Henry Louis Gates's run-in with the Cambridge cops, after acknowledging "not having been there and not seeing all the facts," by nonetheless asserting that "the Cambridge police acted stupidly."
Well, at least he asserted his ignorance before embarrassing a police officer about whom he knows nothing on national TV. It'd be more convenient for Obama if the officer would take his lumps without question, but Sgt. James Crowley doesn't believe he was out of line, and is acquitting himself very well in the national media spotlight:
Though he harbors no "ill feelings toward the professor," a calm, resolute Crowley said no mea culpa will be forthcoming.
"I just have nothing to apologize for," he said. "It will never happen."
Crowley also commented specifically on Obama's comments:
"I support the President of the United States 110-percent," he told WBZ Radio.
"I think he's way off base wading into a local issue without knowing all the facts, as he himself stated before he made that comment. I don't know what to say about that. I guess a friend of mine would support my position to."
The official report on the arrest, filed by fellow officer Carlos Figueroa, who was on the scene with Crowley, is here. Crowley also offers details of the exchange with Gates that led to the arrest:
"Mister Gates was given plenty of opportunities to stop what he was doing. He didn't. He acted very irrational he controlled the outcome of that event."
"There was a lot of yelling, there was references to my mother, something you wouldn't expect from anybody that should be grateful that you were there investigating a report of a crime in progress, let alone a Harvard University professor."
Now that Obama has brought the story onto the national stage in a big way, we're finding out more about Crowley:
The Cambridge cop prominent Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. claims is a racist gave a dying Reggie Lewis mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a desperate bid to save the Celtics [team stats] superstar's life 16 years ago Monday.
"I wasn't working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star. I wasn't working on a black man. I was working on another human being," Sgt. James Crowley, in an exclusive interview with the Herald, said of the forward's fatal heart attack July 27, 1993, at age 27 during an off-season practice at Brandeis University, where Crowley was a campus police officer.
It's a date Crowley still can recite by rote - and he still recalls the pain he suffered when people back then questioned whether he had done enough to save the black athlete.
"Some people were saying ‘There's the guy who killed Reggie Lewis' afterward. I was broken-hearted. I cried for many nights," he said.
Dr. Boyce Watkins, another black academic and the son of a police officer, is far more circumspect about the case than the president, cautioning:
Whenever a Black man is shot, officers are typically accused of racism, sometimes by those who don't even know the facts of the case.
My, who does that sound like?
If a crime goes unpunished, we complain about police not doing their jobs. But when officers arrest the wrong person, we complain that they are being overzealous and perhaps racist. Sometimes they are being racist, even when they don't intend to be; racism is a disease that affects us all. All of this is compounded by the officer's fear that he/she might not come home for dinner that night after taking on the most dangerous elements of our society...
Basically, this situation may have been a battle of two egos: One of them from a Harvard professor who seemed to feel that he should not be disrespected by a lowly police officer; the other from an officer who seemed to feel that a powerful Black professor could be treated differently from a powerful White professor. What is abundantly clear is that this is NOT the case of a poor Black male being exploited by the racist, classist power structure.
There's a lot to unpack in this story, and every American brings to it his own set of baggage. Obama would have been wise to leave the whole thing alone. There will likely be a review of the incident, at which point we will find out who was most imprudent-Crowley, Gates, or the president himself.
Update: Jim Geraghty wonders, is yelling at an officer automatically a crime?
