Take it from a southern white guy.  Usually when a white guy says "this has nothing to do with race" it's a great big flashing "Danger Danger" sign that the speaker is about to say something incredibly racist. 

This time, however, it's got nothing to do with race.  And it has a lot less to do with "liberal" than with "libertarian."  At least for me. 

I am not excorcised about the Gates arrest because The Man was hassling a brother for doing nothing and my guilty white liberal heart bleeds for him. 

That's not to say I am insensitive or unsympathetic to what may (or may not) have set Gates off.  I get that black people, and in particular, black men, often, perhaps invariably, have a fraught relationship with the police.  I even recall the time it really hit home to me how bad it was.  During the very bad year of unemployment after I graduated from law school into the 1991 recession, I managed to total two cars in six months. My insurer tagged me as the at-fult party in both, cancelled my insurance and put me into the bad risk pool.  What with the joblessness and the injuries from the second wreck and the pittance I got for the second car and the impossibility of obtaining anything except very expensive liability coverage, I really didn't have any choice but to buy a cheap, POS heap.  Having been in two wrecks, I was also inclined to buy the biggest effing 70s Detroit battletank I could wrap around myself, at least until I got over the flashbacks. Even after I finally got a job, I had to keep that embarassing, baby pee yellow '77 Mercury main battle tank while I dug out from under the the worst of the debt, rebuilt my credit and waited for the wrecks to drop off my insurance record. 

So much for the background.  First year associates keep crappy hours sometimes, so one night, about two in the morning, I was driving the baby pee tank home after a long night rewriting a brief whose manifold deficiencies had been identified in red ink by older and wiser attorneys. I was boating down a deserted thoroughfare, my head still back in the office, and, suddenly, out of absofrakknglutely nowhere, I was surrounded by police cars and blue lights.  I hadn't been speeding.  I didn't have any burned out lights.  I hadn't swerved or driven erratically or run any lights.  As I pulled my car over, turned off the ignition and waited the seven or eight infuriating seconds it always took the heap's engine to stop chugging, I knew, with crystal clear certainty, that I had been pulled over for Driving While Black.  I thought that was funny. 

It didn't take a psychic to figure it out.  I was driving a gigantic 70's car with oxidized baby pee yellow paint in the wee hours of the morning. And I was doing this in a southern town where race relations were at a low ebb due to a couple of high-profile trials of black men accused of violent attacks (one fatal, one nearly so) on young white women.  So when I rolled down the window and the cops saw a young white professional in a suit and a silk tie behind the wheel, the change in their demeanor as they whiplashed through grim and on guard, to nonplussed, to partially concealed rueful amusement was comical.  They told me they'd been following me for two or three miles (yeah, I was that tired and distracted) and that I hadn't signaled when I turned onto the thoroughfare.  They told me to drive carefully and sent me on my way.  

And then, on the way home, it stopped being funny to me.  Failure to signal?  Are you kidding me?  In North Carolina, people use turn signals in two and only two situations:  when they're merging onto the Interstate (because otherwise, the folks on the Interstate might think your intention is to drive the car into the ditch to the right of the shoulder) and when they're in a dedicated turn lane (especially one with a a green arrow traffic light and a sign indicating that turns in the other direction are forbidden).  Other than those two scenarios, North Carolinians stubbornly resist committing themselves to a turn in advance.  Maybe they think its rude to go telling folks that they have to watch out for you 'cause maybe you're fixin' to turn, when there's a tiny chance you may change your mind before you get there.  Using a turn signal in this state anywhere other than a dedicated turn lane or an on-ramp is so rare that it is actually probable cause to pull you over and give you a field sobriety test. 

Those cops thought they saw a poor black man driving around at 2:00 in the morning and  equated that to a high likelihood of up-to-no-goodness in progress, so they used a completely bogus pretext to pull me over.  Which I already knew, but as I merged onto the Interstate (without signalling--I still wasn't fully assimilated in those days), it finally hit me, really hit me, what a lifetime's accumulation of episodes like that would do to me.  How much unreleased rage could build up over time as you had to swallow down your anger and fear and be polite to wary, taciturn cops who pulled you over for no reason other than to interrogate you about what you were up to and run your licence for warrants. 

So in my own Wilbur Whitebread walked in his brother-man's shoes for about .05 seconds way, I get the baggage that every police interaction with a black man carries. 

And that good white liberal's understanding of the plight of the black man has absolutely nothing to do with why the Gates arrest strikes a nerve with me and gets me pissed off enough to keep commenting long after I, and everyone else, should let it go. 

No, I am exorcised about this episode because THE GUY WAS IN HIS OWN GODDAMNED HOME.  Yes, he somehow managed to piss off the cop.  Yes, the cop in question may be the greatest cop who ever lived and the greatest humanitarian since Mohandas K. Ghandi.  Yes, he may have been a great cop and a great human being  who just was having a rare bad day and was really annoyed and Gates may have been acting like a complete asshole who was dumping a lot of grievance-laced dung on a solid guy who was just doing his job. I don't know any of that, but I am willing to assume it for the purpose of my point, which is that even if Gates was being a complete asshole to Sgt. Ghandi, he was being an asshole after his identity had been established, after it was clear that no crime or emergent situation was in progress and--this is the important part here, so follow along with me, please--IN HIS OWN GODDAMNED HOME.

Being an asshole, even to a cop, is not a crime.  And I'm not just saying that that's a thing that oughta be true.  As I noted in a comment on another post, under Massachusetts law, "to be disorderly, within the sense of the statute [that Gates was charged with violating], the conduct must disturb through acts other than speech; neither a provocative nor a foul mouth transgresses the statute." Commonwealth v. LePore, 40 Mass. App. Ct. 543, 546, 666 N.E.2d 152, 155 (1996).  Similarly, in Commonwealth v. Lopiano, 60 Mass. App. 723, 805 N.E.2d 522, 525 (2004), the Massachusetts Court of Appeals found no "violent or tumultuous behavior," where the defendant, "flailed his arms and shouted at the police" about alleged violations of his civil rights upon being informed he was being summonsed to court (but not arrested) for assault and battery.  (And, unlike Gates, Lopiano was in a public place.)

Further, I definitely don't want anyone to take away from this post that I've got a problem with cops per se.  My dad was a cop until I was about five, when he was asked to take some classes on fire fighting and start a fire department for the tiny (pop. 6000) town I grew up in.  Even after he became fire chief, the fire and police deparments faced each other on opposite sides of the garage that housed the fire trucks. Even as the town grew explosively and both departments grew busier, day in and day out, they shot the shit with each other between calls, played rough jokes on each other, ate each other's food, drank each other's coffee. 

And even after he moved on to other things, my Dad's long association with the local P.D. got me out of many a youthful misadventure without an arrest or a mortifying escort home.  Many's the time that a local cop looked at my license, put my name with my Dad's, asked me if he was his boy and then sent me on my way with an admonition to get home and stay out of trouble.  That probably would not have been enough, however, if not for my Dad's lessons in how to behave if you're stopped by the police.  He trained all of us from a very young age to be polite when them, to never give them a hint of attitude and always act respectful.  And I do respect cops as a rule.  I respect them immensely.  I appreciate them for keeping us safe.  I know how many of them are fundementally good-hearted men and women who hide a genuine desire to serve and protect behind a shield of machismo. I get that they have deal with a parade of stupid mopes so I don't have to.  I  appreciate that they encounter dangerous situations and deal with the stress created by not knowing which situations are going to turn out to be dangerous.  I particularly understand that they deal, day in and day out, with horrible situations that range from the merely emotionally draining to the utterly devestating, situations that would turn me into basket case in a week.   

And all that being true, I still think the important thing to recognize here is that even assuming Gates was being a complete turd--which I don't know--he was also an old man whoi walked with a cane who was, and--I hate to say it yet again, but people don't seem to be grasping the that this is the critical ssue here--HE WAS IN HIS OWN GODDAMNED HOME when he was arrested.  Sgt. Crowley's report clearly states that Gates' identify and ownership of the house had been established before he was arrested as had the lack of a crime to investigate.  And even if Gates followed the the cop outside, and even if he continued to berate the cops after he got out there, Gates was still, under the law, IN HIS OWN GODDAMNED HOME.  That's right, his porch and his sidewalk were still his home.  Contrary to what a lot of people here seem to believe, your porch, your front yard and all of the property surrounding the house, and not visably separated from it are, to use the legal term, "curtilage."  Curtilage is the area outside your home that the law treats as identical to the interior of your home for purposes of the Fourth and Fifth Amendements and for purposes of determining the scope of a police officer's license to be on your property. 

And for those saying that, even if he was legally deemed still in his home, Gates was properly arrested because he was disturbing the peace by taking the ruckus outside where people could hear and see it?  Please.  It's not like saintly Aunt May next door was disturbed in the quiet enjoyment of her tea and knitting by whatever Gates was saying to Sgt. Crowley.  Instead, she like everyone else in the vicinity, was already outside watching the show.  How do I know that?  Besides the fact that its in Crowley's report?  I know it because when a bunch of police cars pull up in front of your neighbor's house with the piercing, seizure inducing arrays of twenty or thirty blue and white flashing strobe lights and with all the unmistakable beeps and fascinating snatches of cryptic, but loud, radio chatter, it draws people out onto the street like iron filings to a magnet.  That magnetic effect is why they invented yellow police tape and the phrase "move along folks, show's over, nothing to see here."  If Gates' neighbors had any peace, it had already been disturbed long before Gates and Crowley took it outside, and, at that point, the neighbors were just spectators at the freakshow.  To suggest that whatever additional ruckus Gates might have added when he took his rant outside was distrubing to them is absurd.  If anything, it was just a bonus attraction to the show. 

What probably was disturbing to them, however, was seeing their aged neighbor cuffed, put in a patrol car and driven Downtown for booking simply because he was vigorously expressing his low opinion of the cops on his property.  He was arrested for pissing off an ordinarily good cop who had to know the arrest was bogus but who also knew he had the ability to humiliate and inconvenience the annoying old man, free of consequences. 

My Dad taught me to respect cops and to be respectful and polite to them.  He also, however, made it clear that one reason you do that isn't necessarily because you actually respect all of them, but, rather because some cops come to expect obsequiousness and instant obedience as their due, as their right.  And if the ones who think they're entitled to it don't get it, they can and will abuse their authority by running you in on some bullshit charge--disturbing the peace being a favorite--or, worse, busting your head.  Worse still, whether it's a bogus arrest or a busted head or both, they know that as long as their partner tells the same story, they will always beat you in court unless someone gets it on tape.  Hell, sometimes they win despite someone getting it on tape. Some of them feel that way all the time.  Most all of them feel that way once in a while. After all, they're human beings doing a tough, hard, dangerous job for society for too little pay.  Even for hte best of them, it would only be human to occaisionally feel underappreciated and to succomb to the temptation of the power they are given.    

And that, in a nutshell, is what bothers me about this episode. It's not about race, or about charges of racism, or about being a good liberal.  It's not about whether Sgt. Crowley is a good guy or a bad one or whether Gates was calm or over the top.  And it is most definitely not about old fights over whether charges of deliberate race-baiting during the primaries were justified or whether Obama cynically and mendaciously played the race card.  

Instead, it's about the simple, important, fact that, cops, by and large and most of the time, deserve our respect, but they are not entitled to it.

That easily overlooked distinction between "deserve" and "entitled" is critically important. That distinction is one of the sticks in the bundle of  important little things that, in the aggregate, distinguish a democracy from the authoritarian shitholes that were the plague of the 20th Century.  We, as free citizens, have a right to be secure in our homes and in our persons from unreasonable searches and arrests.  The sanctity of the home as a place where the individual is sovereign and the power of the state is limited is something precious.  It's a concept that our political forebears clawed away from the state, a tiny bit at a time, often at great cost, beginning with a bunch of bullying aristocrats who forced a bullying king to sign a Great Charter acknowledging some limitations on his own power. 

Within the confines of his home, including the curtilage, Gates had a right to be an asshole to anyone, cops included, as long as he wasn't threatening imminent physical harm.  This entire notion that he "deserved it" or "asked for it" because he should have known better than to mouth off to a cop is an implicit endorsement of the notion that cops are entitled to respect and cringing, obsequious obedience and, therefore, are justified in misusing the power entrusted to them if they don't get it. 

This is a minor episode.  It is a negligable, and lamentable, distraction from the most important and pressing issue of the day.  But the underlying principal is important.  At some point during the Reagan years, a lot of big-chilled boomers started dealing with their generational guilt over having called police officers just doing their very important and necessary jobs "pigs" and "fascists" by over-compensating.  In the 80s, a lot of them began trying to turn the notion that cops don't merely deserve respect, but rather are categorically entitled to it--merely by virtue of wearing the badge and irrespective of whether they individually deserve it--into a cultural norm. 

God forbid.  That attitude is unworthy of the citizens of a republic dedicated to the proposition that a person is entitled to his or her opinion.  It is one more step on the road that leads to a day when the microcosmic police states we've turned our airports into break out of the terminals and onto the streets of our cities.