I saw a darkie breaking into the house across the street...Follow

"The clothes maketh the man."

I've seen a photo of the professer as he was lead away in cuffs from his house. He was in a red and white striped polo shirt, jeans, was looking a tiny bit overweight and a lot tired. His short hair and beard were grizzeled. The combination doesn't HAVE to be bad, but on camera, on that day, Henry Gates was looking bad. In fact, whether you changed his skin to white or left it black, quite frankly on the day he looked rather like a "deadbeat". If he was white, he would have been "white trash".

I've crawled in from camping trips looking that frazzled, I'm certain. In fact there's a camping trip involving a huge hike, an enourmous storm and a gruesome allergic reaction that had me crawl into the car with my long hair whipped into wild streamers sodden in equal parts of water and snot. Had bad hair days, unwashed days, sick days, and months where I've lost weight and had all my clothes hanging off me in a very unsightly way until I've been able to rustle up some "thin" clothes and a different belt.

I've also now seen Henry Gates on TV in his pin-striped suit, and also quite frankly, I only knew it was the same man because the TV said so. I'm not familiar with his face, so a shave, a wash and a suit suddenly made him look like a completely different person. A million bucks better. I have to admit that I doubt the neigbour/passer-by would have called the police if she'd seen him in his pin-stripe suit trying to break into the door. Maybe we shouldn't judge each other by our covers, but we surely do.

All in all, my biggest lesson from this is that I really should go introduce myself to my 10 closest neighbours in each direction.

Thank god I've got a system that means I rarely lose my keys any more. But during my teenage and early 20's, I'd have to estimate that I left my keys in the house and had to break into my own home a minimum of 200 different occasions. (Yay for dissociation!) Most places I lived in I worked out a handy window I could lift in and out of it's frame, but the last one I had to resort to carefully destroying a corner of the fly-wire, and then carefully mending it before I handed in the keys and got my bond back.

I guess I was always too small and fluffy looking back then to have the cops called on me, although each new time I had to figure out how to break into a new place of mine, I'd get painfully nervous about how it looked.

Edited, Jul 25th 2009 10:47am by Aripyanfar

She wasn't doing her duty. She was wasting the police's time. She ended up wasting the President's time. I'm pretty sure that's about as bad as you can get in the area of wasting other people's time.

If I thought I was witnessing a crime, I'd try to make sure I actually was witnessing a crime before calling it in. In the same way, if I saw a column of smoke, I'd try to see if it was an out-of-control fire and not someone's barbecue before calling the fire brigade and ruining everyone's day.

No, she did exactly the right thing. Some people after witnessing something like this will go, "Nah, it can't be. Besides, it's not my problem", then walks off. This is exactly the type of people who are a waste of space.

What she witnesses could well have been a crime in progress. Calling for the authorities for them to investigate is exactly the correct course of action. The only way she could've 'made sure' it was a crime is to go up and say 'hey, are you guys burglars?" and risk getting shot in the face. It is not her place to 'make sure' if it was a crime. It is her place to make a report on suspicious activities, and have the trained authorities to investigate.

No, because unlike you, I've lived in the area and know what type of people live in Harvard Square--i.e. well-off people affiliated with Harvard University, you cow abortion.

Edited, Jul 25th 2009 1:04pm by Annabella

If the witness didn't know him or the area, it's pretty damn obvious that they didn't know the homeowner was or wasn't on a trip...

Well, that elevates the discussion !

I belive Gates was in the same frame of mind as normal people,who snap on flight attendants, and end up being arrested/thrown off the plane.

Stressful travel syndrome,usually alcohol involved,paying a lot of money for travel & maybe being ordered around or refused something by who they percieve to be a "peon" (service staff).

And maybe, if there wasnt a crowd Crowley wouldve let it go, maybe not, we'll never know.

Gates cant have been in the best state of mind: tired,door jammed,etc then being confronted by an authority figure(white)......

As MSNBC has called it "A Perfect Storm"

I don't why you're surprised someone doesn't know all of their neighbours. I know what the people in the houses directly across from me look like, neighbours to the right and left by one house and two houses up on the left. I have no idea what anyone else on the street looks like because I never talk to them. Out of 35 houses on my street, I know what 5 of my neighbours look like.

It was a bear you wench.

Is a cow abortion an abortion from a cow mother, an abortion of a cow baby, an abortion by a cow doctor, an abortion with four stomachs, an abortion witnessed by multiple sombre faced-individuals, an abortion that's so ugly that it's a cow through pejorative, or an abortion that makes the doctor yell "Holy cow!" due to it's repugnance?

I'm sure this has already been mentioned, but i'm tired of reading and thought I'd point out that black or white or hispanic or asian [fe]male is usually followed by an approximate weight/height/clothing description when information is relayed from a 911 operator to a police dispatcher, and from there on to the police (if the caller is intelligent enough/has time to provide this information to the operator). This is done to eliminate the black male, 5'7", white shirt and blue jeans from being detained when the suspect is a white male fitting the rest of the description.

No ones talking about the initial report or information you would pass when searching for someone, we're talking about the officers description, from his statement, when he entered the house and saw Mr Gates. In the situation his colour is irrelevant.

In your opinion.

There's no definitive answer either way as the officer is unlikely to confirm the fact even if it were true. You can form your own opinion as to why it was mentioned in his report.

A few years ago the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Condon, got into hot water for stating "the majority of muggings in the capital are carried out by black males". One corner argued that the statement should be "the majority of muggings on the capital are carried out by males" and the other that if they statistics are correct then there should not be an issue stating what race or creed carry out offences.



Your very absolute in your comments, I've noticed this before.

I know exactly how these reports are written and your final paragraph is the correct way to do it.

This was mentioned preciously in this thread.

And that's the logic your using. My argument is that if one of the first facts that officer thinks to write about his experience of entering the house is that he saw a 'black man' could suggest that he is predisposed to think of him as a 'black man' not just a 'man', and this is not just my opinion. There are many articles about our perceptions of races and people, and one of the underlying suggestions for ridding the world of racism is that we stop looking at people as different, in our immediate thought, but look at them as just people.

It's a little bit out there for me and I'm not totally signed up to it, but I can see the argument and what they are suggesting.

I understand what you are saying about the statistic example I gave, but I also refer you to my previous paragraph and can see why people object to this focus on individual groups, it does nothing to beat racism in a country if people hear the highest ranking police officer in the country say that most crime is committed by black people.