Gatesgate: Let’s Go To The Audio Tape

Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr

We now have actual audio evidence of the 9-1-1 call that eventually led to the temporary incarceration of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. The tapes show that I was wrong about the caller’s culpability in the matter.

Last week, I suggested that we should take a closer look at the lady — who has now been identified as Lucia Whalen — who called the cops on Gates. I called the woman a “raving idiot” and I used bold type and capitalized letters to do so.

MY BAD.

Instead of a meddlesome do-gooder looking to lock up another brother, the tapes show a calm and earnest woman who literally didn’t even know the race of the men entering the house when she made the call. The police report claimed that the 9-1-1 caller said Gates and his driver were “black males … with backpacks.” But in fact Ms. Whalen said nothing of the kind. She said repeatedly that she didn’t know the race of the men — even when the person on the other end of the phone prompted her. And she certainly didn’t say “backpacks” — a word that I harped on in my previous post. Instead she told the police that the men seemed to be carrying luggage, and she said multiple times that she didn’t know what precisely was happening, but it could be that the men were just trying to get into their own home having misplaced a key. In my earlier post, I said that the lady should have taken into account all aspects of the situation before sicking the police on Professor Gates, and the tapes show that she clearly did.

Ms. Whalen, I’m not sure if you are invited to the Obama-Gates-Crowley kegger, but I for one would like to buy you a beer. You resisted the urge to jump to conclusions, unlike (ahem) myself, and I’m sorry for doubting you.

As for the Cambridge Police Department and the defenders of the Cambridge Police Department, you all get no beer. Instead, you need to come back into my red-headed step-child room and get beaten on the backside with all the audio evidence you’ve provided. Join me under the stairs after the jump.

Honestly, I feel like I have shamed my ancestors and my country for believing even one sentence of the police report. I know better than that. I’ve been black all my life and I have legal training. I should know that just because the police said that the caller said “black males … with backpacks” doesn’t mean that she said that, thought that, or used words that could be remotely confused with that.

I’m not saying that you can’t ever trust the police. Maybe they even get it right more often than not. But to take anything written in a police report “on faith,” to read one and not critically question the facts as stated is just dumb and childish. You should be smart enough to be skeptical about a police report right around the same time it occurs to you that frogs and pigs probably don’t have sex and then sing about it.

Still, the cops’ behavior here is more atrocious than normal. I’ve waded through the Cambridge Police Commissioner’s double talk, I understand that the police report is an amalgam of all the things the cops learned in the investigation. But to write that Whalen said “black males … with backpacks” when she simply did not say that defies explanation. Why did Seargent Crowley leave out the part where the witness was unsure whether this was a home invasion or a case of the missing keys? Why did Crowley use the word “backpacks” — which suggests that people were planing on filching Professor Gates’s Slap Chop — instead of luggage? Why did Crowley include the racial identification of the “suspects” at all, given that he had already determined that no crime had been committed that the witness gave him “Hispanic … maybe, I don’t know?” Why, why, why?

But there are of course, more tapes. CPD has also released the transmissions between the officers and dispatch. In the first days of this scandal, there were suggestions that the tapes who prove that Gates was being loud and belligerent. Instead, you can’t hear Gates and everything sounds totally routine. On the tapes Crowley can be heard saying that Gates was “uncooperative,” that’s about it.

Not that we really need those tapes anymore. If the police mangled the 9-1-1 call so badly, I don’t see why anybody would believe the police report when it comes to Gates’s actions.

How being “uncooperative” with a cop that is in your home after you’ve established that it is your home goes to “arrested for disorderly conduct” doesn’t even begin to make sense. Unless you inject race back into the conversation.

Which is someplace that the Cambridge police and defenders of the Cambridge police really want to avoid. But they can’t.

I instinctively knew to distrust Crowley’s account of what happened between him and Professor Gates. But when I read Crowley’s account of what the caller said, I assumed he was spot on. Why? Probably because I’m a little bit racist. I concluded that a white lady in Cambridge couldn’t resist calling the cops on black men trying to open their own door, and when Crowley’s report fit in with my preconceived notions about what went down, I didn’t bother to question it. That’s my fault.

But in my opinion Crowley’s probably a little bit racist too. He arrested a black man who was lawfully in his own home for “disorderly conduct.” That charge was so flimsy that the prosecutor dropped it more quickly than you can say “summary judgment for the defendant.” You almost can’t make sense of the arrest unless Gates probably fit into Crowley’s preconceived notions of “disorderly.”

Crowley is sticking to his guns and the department (including many minority officers) have rallied behind him. It’s what cops do, I guess. But as long as we live in a world where officers refuse to admit obvious mistakes, I’m going to keep believing that police reports are biased documents representing the police agenda that aren’t worth the paper they are scribbled on.

Thanks for reminding me why I’d be “acting stupidly” to believe you, officer Crowley.