Racial Profiling and Gates

Here is the police report on the Henry Louis Gates case:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0723092gates1.html

I have read 10,000s of police reports as a forensic expert. This police report is clearly a self-justification report (as I call them). That is, the report is written in order to justify the officer’s behavior by exaggerating Gate’s behavior and minimizing their own. I have seen police reports about robberies that were shorter than this one. The depth of this report indicated to me that the officer was covering his behind.

This is not a case of racial profiling by the police. The police were called by a citizen who was the actual “profiler.” Though she can’t be blamed for calling the police when she sees to men trying to break into a house.

The real issue here is that the officer made a big deal out of nothing. In his own report he acknowledged that he realized that he was probably talking to the resident of the house. At that point he should have backed off, apologized for he inconvenience and left it at that. But instead the incident became a macho stand off. Once the officer felt disrespected, it was all over. The police officer, given the usual psychology of police officers (I have interviewed and psychologically tested 1000s of them), was incapable of standing down and walking away.

Police reports like this never contain the facts of the police officer’s conduct and non-verbal positioning. There is not doubt in my mind that this officer acted out with Gates as well. It is in the middle of the first paragraph on the second page that the officer stated that he knew that he was dealing with the resident of the home but that he was being “very uncooperative.” This is the key sentence in the entire report. The officer could not tolerate that the person he was confronting was being uncooperative despite the fact that he was standing in the person’s own home.

There was absolutely no need for this situation to escalate the way it did and quite frankly I believe it was the officer’s responsibility to stand down and walk away. I believe that is where the racial issue entered into the situation. I read this police report and I thought “this is stupid.” Remarkably similar to Obama’s reaction actually.

So in the end the situation was about nothing real, nothing criminal, nothing at all – but about a socially constructed acting out scenario based on racial history and politics in the end.

This reminds me of the many situations in which much is made about nothing forcing people to act out upon assumptions that then create consequences. The first example that came to my mind was Bill Clinton being forced to justify his personal behavior in a public setting and then being prosecuted for lying. He would not have been in the position to lie if the issues were not raised in the first place. This same scenario happens over and over.