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KKKambridge?

Last week when I read in the Boston Globe that a prominent black Harvard professor was arrested outside of his Cambridge home for disorderly conduct stemming from a bogus breaking-and-entering call to the cops from a white neighbor, my intuition whispered that this story would eventually escalate to international news.

My premonition came to fruition when President Obama made harsh remarks towards the Cambridge PD at the tail-end of his press conference on Wednesday night. The next day on BBC.com, “Black scholar arrest angers Obama” was the most popular story. Congrats, Cambridge! You’ve made the big time!

“Did Obama admit that he didn’t know all of the facts of the case, yet go on to call our police department ‘stupid?'” was the general incredulous Cantabrigian reaction to Obama’s speech. Yes, here in Cambridge country, we are Liberal elitists, we pride ourselves on our diversity, and so of course we resent the President’s implication that our enlightened police force has racial profiling tendencies.

I cannot speak to how inherently racist Cambridge cops are. Yet I am deeply mistrustful in general of anyone who decides to become a cop. (Did you know that real pigs are colorblind? It’s true!)

Something went awry right before Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates. Gates said that Crowley walked into his home without permission, refused repeated demands by Gates to provide his badge number, and should have left after Gates showed his ID. Crowley said that Gates was uncooperative and insulted his mama. Like Judge Judy says, when two litigants present different versions of the same event, the truth is probably somewhere in between.

My concern is that Sergeant Crowley has quickly become a working class hero, with many Bostonians applauding Crowley’s refusal to apologize for ‘just doing his job.’ What? Since when is it a crime in American to yell at the police in your own home, when no crime is being or has been committed? How is that disorderly conduct? Since when is a cop ‘just doing his job’ when he refuses to provide his badge number to a citizen simply because that citizen is angrily yelling at him?

Posted in In the News, Massachusetts.

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