Ruben Navarrete's Take On The Gates Affair

I really liked Navarrete's opinion. I hope the beer went well:

It has been two weeks since his arrest by Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley, and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. still needs an attitude adjustment.

That’s what my father’s generation of old-school law enforcement officers was known to provide now and then when someone mouthed off, or lobbed insults or challenged their authority. Today, folks on the job refer to this sort of thing as “contempt of cop.” It’s not illegal, but it’s also not a smart thing to do if you have an aversion to handcuffs and steel bars, since there are plenty of other things for which you can be arrested.

Just ask Gates, who was written up for “loud and tumultuous behavior” at his house.
What needs adjusting isn’t Gates’ attitude toward law enforcement; that’s between
him and the police. The real problem is his presumptuous attitude toward the rest of us. The professor needs to stop calling what happened to him a “teaching moment.” We’re not his students. More importantly, we’re not the ones who let our ego get the best of us and went ballistic over a simple and harmless request to provide identification.

...The only person who needs to learn a lesson from all this is Gates, and the syllabus for that course should include a few lines about the proper way to interact with police officers. I’m surprised that, with all the knowledge that Gates has acquired on the way to becoming one of the nation’s most renowned public intellectuals, he never learned how to talk to a police officer — and, more importantly, how not to talk to one.

...Besides, this incident wasn’t about racial profiling — a concept that Crowley is well acquainted with since, for five years, he has taught police academy recruits how to avoid it. What this incident was really about was Crowley trying to control a situation that was quickly getting out of control.

That point seems lost on President Barack Obama, who said that the Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” only to walk back on that statement a couple of days later.

...Obama tried to make peace with Crowley by inviting him — and Gates — to the White House for a beer. It’s a nice gesture. It’s not every day that a cop on the beat gets an offer like that. But what concerns me is that Obama also said that he sees this incident as a “teachable moment.”

Oh dear. Just what does the president think is the lesson from all this, and who does he think needs to learn it?

As Crowley enters the premises of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., he should be careful. I hope he doesn’t find himself cast as racially insensitive or on the wrong end of a lecture about how to do police work by those who have never had to do it.
After all, nothing ruins a good beer like the taste of condescension.