I've been discounting all racial-profiling allegations in the Gates incident, and that's in part because I accepted as true reports, based on police statements, that a witness who called 911 had volunteered the two "suspects" were black. So the suspicion that fell on the Harvard professor was at least reasonable in the investigating officer's mind.

But the Cambridge police have now released audio recordings of that 911 call and the dispatch to officers heading to the scene. There is no mention of the "suspects" being black. The dispatcher in fact says "race unknown." So somebody has fudged the facts in the police summary.

Not only that, but the 911 audio has been edited to remove the question the police operator asks the witness as to race. We hear just the ending: "...spanic?" To which the witness replies that "one of them might be Hispanic." The other one, she didn't clearly see. I would suggest the police operator asked something along the lines of, "Are they black, white or Hispanic?"

As it turns out, both of them were black, and one was professor Gates. But the police officers did not, as initially reported, have reason to believe that going in. In fact, the witness had explicitly avoided any suggestion that they were black. So at least in this minor aspect, the police summary has been cooked -- and that calls into doubt all other parts of it.