disorderlyvision
08-03-2009, 12:11 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/01/liberty-and-lip/
A few minutes into the police encounter that ended with his arrest for disorderly conduct, Henry Louis Gates Jr. reportedly exclaimed, "This is what happens to black men in America!" It would be more accurate to say this is what can happen to anyone who makes the mistake of annoying a cop.
Whether or not race played a role in the incident, Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley clearly abused his authority, retaliating against the Harvard professor for his disrespect by hauling him away in handcuffs. The highly publicized arrest illustrates the threat posed by vague laws that give too much discretion to police officers who conflate their own personal dignity with public safety.
Sgt. Crowley, responding to a report of a possible burglary in progress from a woman who saw Mr. Gates forcing open a jammed door to his house, quickly realized he was not dealing with a break-in. Mr. Gates explained that he lived in the house, which he leases from Harvard, and supplied a university ID confirming that he was a member of the faculty. Mr. Gates says he became angry because Sgt. Crowley nevertheless continued to question him.
Even if we accept Sgt. Crowley's version of events, the arrest was not justified (a conclusion reinforced by the city's decision to drop the charge). Let's say Mr. Gates did initially refuse to show his ID -- an understandable response from an innocent man confronted by police in his own home. Let's say he immediately accused Sgt. Crowley of racism and behaved in a "loud and tumultuous" fashion. So what? By Sgt. Crowley's own account, he arrested Mr. Gates for dissing him. That's not a crime, or at least it shouldn't be.
In Massachusetts, as in many states, the definition of disorderly conduct is drawn from the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code. A person is considered disorderly if he "engages in fighting or threatening, violent or tumultuous behavior with purpose to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm" or "recklessly creates a risk thereof."
Sgt. Crowley claims Mr. Gates recklessly created public alarm by haranguing him from the porch of his house, attracting a small crowd that included "at least seven unidentified passers-by" as well as several police officers. Yet it was Sgt. Crowley who suggested that Mr. Gates follow him outside, thereby setting him up for the disorderly conduct charge.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that Sgt. Crowley was angered and embarrassed by Mr. Gates' "outburst" and therefore sought to create a pretext for arresting him. "When he has the uniform on," a friend later told the New York Times, "Jim has an expectation of deference."
As the Massachusetts Appeals Court has noted, "[T]he theory behind criminalizing disorderly conduct rests on the tendency of the actor's conduct to provoke violence in others." Yet police officers often seem to think the purpose of such laws is to punish people for talking back to cops.
"You don't get paid to be publicly abused," Michael J. Palladino, president of New York City's Detectives Endowment Association, told the New York Times last week. "There are laws that protect against that." A Brooklyn police officer agreed, saying, "I wouldn't back down if there's a crowd gathering. If there's a group and they're throwing out slurs and stuff, you have to handle it."
In this context, the relevance of the gathering crowd is not the potential for a riot but the potential for losing face. A policy of zero tolerance for public slights may be appropriate for a gangster, but it's not appropriate for a peace officer charged with enforcing the law.
Among other things, the law guarantees the right of citizens to criticize public officials.
Sometimes the criticism is justified. In fact, the more outrageous police misconduct is, the more likely it is to provoke an angry response that can be cited as the basis for a disorderly conduct arrest.
When a police officer faces unfair criticism, the best response may be to walk away. Sometimes swallowing your pride takes more courage than standing your ground.
Cops and turning the other cheek
By Robyn E. Blumner, Times Columnist
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/article1023645.ece
Salud. L'Chaim. Cheers. Whatever the toast, the beer summit seems to have engendered a detente between Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police. Forgive me for prolonging the controversy over Gates' arrest by Crowley, but as I see it, people have been focusing on the wrong thing. The issue is not so much race or class but the law itself.
Let's just say for argument's sake that Gates did raise his voice to Crowley and call the man a racist and talk about his mama. So? You should see my hate mail. Crowley got it mild.
People call me all manner of names, emphasizing colorful pejoratives associated with my Jewish heritage and female gender, but I don't think for a moment they should be arrested for their lack of couth. Nasty vitriol from certain types of readers comes with the territory.
Ask any woman about the insulting, sexualized comments and gestures she gets when walking down a city street. It's all part of living in a society where free speech is protected. In other words, any police officer who can't stand being angrily berated should find another line of work.
But we know that police are human. Some of them, including apparently Crowley, will resort to their trump cards of handcuffs and state authority when being affronted. The problem is that there is a law so vague and broad that police can use it to punish impertinence.
Gates was charged with "disorderly conduct" (a charge later dropped). The courts in Massachusetts have said this statute is violated when a person engages in fighting, threatening, violent or "tumultuous" behavior in public. Crowley even used the term "tumultuous" in his police report to describe Gates' conduct. Its inherent vagueness invites police to use it as a catchall when there is nothing else to charge.
Back in 1972, one of the most clear-eyed civil libertarians to ever sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, William O. Douglas, wrote a decision invalidating a vagrancy ordinance from Jacksonville.
He said the ordinance violated due process and was "void for vagueness." "All persons," Douglas wrote, "are entitled to be informed as to what the state commands or forbids." But the ordinance was so broad that it failed to give a person of average intelligence notice of what conduct violates it. This, Douglas warned, "encourages arbitrary and erratic arrests and convictions."
Bingo. That's just what's wrong with disorderly conduct laws. There is no way to know ahead of time what conduct will land one in handcuffs.
Stories abound about the abuse of these statutes.
They are used to stifle protests, such those in Miami in 2003 where union members and elderly protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct during the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial meetings — charges that were later dropped.
They are used to punish people who annoy public officials, such as the case of Greg Kachka, a disabled veteran, who was charged last year with disorderly conduct for making a gun gesture toward officials from the village of Island Lake, Ill., during a public hearing. Again the charges were dropped.
And most frequently, disorderly conduct statutes are abused by police in what University of South Florida criminology professor Lorie Fridell describes as "contempt of cop" situations. "(The laws give) police way too much power and allow them to intervene with arrest for verbal abuse of state agents," Fridell says. "Police need to be able to put up with people yelling at them."
Eugene O'Donnell, professor of law and police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says disorderly conduct statutes encompass so much conduct that "the law becomes (the cops') gut reaction to where somebody crosses their line."
True freedom is the right to question authority, boisterously and even offensively, and yet be left alone. Living under a law that essentially punishes any conduct that a police officer doesn't like is no freedom at all. It condemns us all to the whims of police officer pique.
In the Dickensian telling of the Gates/Crowley affair, the law is a ass.
07/30/2009
EVERYONE HATES THE COPS
http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall (http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/)
After Professor Gates, Why Pretend?
NEW YORK--The current national conversation about race and the police reminded me about an incident that occurred when I was in Uzbekistan. As I walked into an apartment complex for an appointment I noticed the decomposing body of a man lying on the side of the road.
"How long as he been there?" I asked my host.
"Three, maybe four days," he said.
"What happened to him?"
"Shot, maybe," he shrugged. "Or maybe hit by a car. Something."
I didn't bother to ask why no one had called the police. I knew. Calling the Uzbek militsia amounts to a request to be beaten, robbed or worse. So desperate to avoid interaction with the police was another man I met that, when his mother died of old age at their home in Tashkent, he drove her body to the outskirts of town and deposited her in a field.
With the exception of New Orleans after Katrina, it's not that bad here in the United States. Consider Professor Henry Louis Gates: he shouldn't have been arrested by that Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer, but he came out of the experience physically unscathed.
Nevertheless, the Gates incident has illuminated some basic, strange assumptions about our society. Cops think they have a constitutional right to be treated deferentially. And black people think cops are nice to white people.
Yeah, well, take it from a white guy: we don't like cops either.
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. references "the African immigrant killed while reaching for his wallet, the Maryland man beaten senseless as he lay in bed, the Miami man beaten to death for speeding, the dozens of men jailed on manufactured evidence in Los Angeles and manufactured police testimony in Tulia, Texas, the man sodomized with a broomstick in New York. Are we supposed to believe it coincidence that the men this happens to always happen to be black?"
Of course not. Blacks are 30 to 50 percent more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crime. Their prison sentences are longer. In the notorious "driving while black" New Jersey trooper case, African-Americans made up 70 percent of those randomly pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike--but fewer than 17 percent of motorists. Blacks are more likely to be stopped, frisked, arrested, beaten and murdered by the police than members of all other ethnic groups. American racism against blacks remains systematic, pervasive, and murderous. When there's a policeman in the picture, it's best to be white.
Still, whites and blacks have more in common than they think when it comes to their feelings about the fuzz. When those flashing lights appear in the rearview mirror, even the biggest right-winger's day is ruined.
No one should be less scared of cops than me. I'm white, clean-cut, middle-aged, invariably polite: "Hello, sir. Is there a problem, officer?" Yet I can't point to a single positive experience I've ever had with a cop. Neutral ones, sure--basic, cold, bureaucratic interactions. But no great ones.
And lots and lots of negative ones.
Where to begin?
I'll never forget the New York traffic cop who stepped off the curb in front of my car on Madison Avenue and ordered me to turn right. He wrote me up for illegal right turn. "But you told me to," I protested. "Wrong place, wrong time," he smirked. $165 plus three points on my license. I appealed. The cop lied under oath. The court believed him.
Or the Nevada highway patrolman who pulled me over. I was doing 80 in a 70. He wrote me up at 100 mph. My brother-in-law, never the suck-up, confirmed I was going 80. I was so furious--the fine would have been $400--that I spent double that to fly back and challenge the ticket in court. I won.
When my 20-year-old self forgot to turn on my headlights as we pulled out of a parking lot while on a road trip with my druggie roommate, a Massachusetts cop pulled us over. I couldn't begrudge him probable cause; pot smoke billowed out the window, "Cheech and Chong"-style, when I opened it. Still, what came next was unforgivable: he handcuffed my arms so tight that the metal cut to the wrist bone. (The scar lasted ten years.) When we got out of the town lock-up the next morning, $400 was missing from my wallet. (A judge, examining my wrist a few months later, dropped the charges. My $400, of course, was gone forever.)
An LAPD cop--it bears mentioning that he was black--arrested me for jaywalking on Melrose Avenue. I wasn't. I didn't resist, but he roughed me up. Upon releasing me, he chucked my wallet into the sewer, laughed and zoomed off on his motorcycle. I filed a complaint, which the LAPD ignored.
And so on.
I admit it: I don't like cops. I like the idea of cops. The specific people who actually are cops are the problem. My theory is that cops should be drafted, not recruited. After all, the kind of person who would want to become a police officer is precisely the kind of person who should not be allowed to work as one. But I didn't start out harboring this prejudice. It resulted from dozens of unpleasant interactions with law enforcement.
Race has long been a classic predictor of attitudes toward the police. But high-profile cases of police brutality, coupled with over-the-top security measures taken since 9/11 that targeted whites as well as blacks, have helped bring the races together in their contempt for the police. In 1969, the Harris poll found that only 19 percent of whites thought cops discriminated against African-Americans. Now 54 percent of whites think so.
Don't worry, Professor Gates. We don't care what you said about the cop's mama. A lot of white guys see this thing your way.
A few minutes into the police encounter that ended with his arrest for disorderly conduct, Henry Louis Gates Jr. reportedly exclaimed, "This is what happens to black men in America!" It would be more accurate to say this is what can happen to anyone who makes the mistake of annoying a cop.
Whether or not race played a role in the incident, Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley clearly abused his authority, retaliating against the Harvard professor for his disrespect by hauling him away in handcuffs. The highly publicized arrest illustrates the threat posed by vague laws that give too much discretion to police officers who conflate their own personal dignity with public safety.
Sgt. Crowley, responding to a report of a possible burglary in progress from a woman who saw Mr. Gates forcing open a jammed door to his house, quickly realized he was not dealing with a break-in. Mr. Gates explained that he lived in the house, which he leases from Harvard, and supplied a university ID confirming that he was a member of the faculty. Mr. Gates says he became angry because Sgt. Crowley nevertheless continued to question him.
Even if we accept Sgt. Crowley's version of events, the arrest was not justified (a conclusion reinforced by the city's decision to drop the charge). Let's say Mr. Gates did initially refuse to show his ID -- an understandable response from an innocent man confronted by police in his own home. Let's say he immediately accused Sgt. Crowley of racism and behaved in a "loud and tumultuous" fashion. So what? By Sgt. Crowley's own account, he arrested Mr. Gates for dissing him. That's not a crime, or at least it shouldn't be.
In Massachusetts, as in many states, the definition of disorderly conduct is drawn from the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code. A person is considered disorderly if he "engages in fighting or threatening, violent or tumultuous behavior with purpose to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm" or "recklessly creates a risk thereof."
Sgt. Crowley claims Mr. Gates recklessly created public alarm by haranguing him from the porch of his house, attracting a small crowd that included "at least seven unidentified passers-by" as well as several police officers. Yet it was Sgt. Crowley who suggested that Mr. Gates follow him outside, thereby setting him up for the disorderly conduct charge.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that Sgt. Crowley was angered and embarrassed by Mr. Gates' "outburst" and therefore sought to create a pretext for arresting him. "When he has the uniform on," a friend later told the New York Times, "Jim has an expectation of deference."
As the Massachusetts Appeals Court has noted, "[T]he theory behind criminalizing disorderly conduct rests on the tendency of the actor's conduct to provoke violence in others." Yet police officers often seem to think the purpose of such laws is to punish people for talking back to cops.
"You don't get paid to be publicly abused," Michael J. Palladino, president of New York City's Detectives Endowment Association, told the New York Times last week. "There are laws that protect against that." A Brooklyn police officer agreed, saying, "I wouldn't back down if there's a crowd gathering. If there's a group and they're throwing out slurs and stuff, you have to handle it."
In this context, the relevance of the gathering crowd is not the potential for a riot but the potential for losing face. A policy of zero tolerance for public slights may be appropriate for a gangster, but it's not appropriate for a peace officer charged with enforcing the law.
Among other things, the law guarantees the right of citizens to criticize public officials.
Sometimes the criticism is justified. In fact, the more outrageous police misconduct is, the more likely it is to provoke an angry response that can be cited as the basis for a disorderly conduct arrest.
When a police officer faces unfair criticism, the best response may be to walk away. Sometimes swallowing your pride takes more courage than standing your ground.
Cops and turning the other cheek
By Robyn E. Blumner, Times Columnist
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/article1023645.ece
Salud. L'Chaim. Cheers. Whatever the toast, the beer summit seems to have engendered a detente between Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police. Forgive me for prolonging the controversy over Gates' arrest by Crowley, but as I see it, people have been focusing on the wrong thing. The issue is not so much race or class but the law itself.
Let's just say for argument's sake that Gates did raise his voice to Crowley and call the man a racist and talk about his mama. So? You should see my hate mail. Crowley got it mild.
People call me all manner of names, emphasizing colorful pejoratives associated with my Jewish heritage and female gender, but I don't think for a moment they should be arrested for their lack of couth. Nasty vitriol from certain types of readers comes with the territory.
Ask any woman about the insulting, sexualized comments and gestures she gets when walking down a city street. It's all part of living in a society where free speech is protected. In other words, any police officer who can't stand being angrily berated should find another line of work.
But we know that police are human. Some of them, including apparently Crowley, will resort to their trump cards of handcuffs and state authority when being affronted. The problem is that there is a law so vague and broad that police can use it to punish impertinence.
Gates was charged with "disorderly conduct" (a charge later dropped). The courts in Massachusetts have said this statute is violated when a person engages in fighting, threatening, violent or "tumultuous" behavior in public. Crowley even used the term "tumultuous" in his police report to describe Gates' conduct. Its inherent vagueness invites police to use it as a catchall when there is nothing else to charge.
Back in 1972, one of the most clear-eyed civil libertarians to ever sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, William O. Douglas, wrote a decision invalidating a vagrancy ordinance from Jacksonville.
He said the ordinance violated due process and was "void for vagueness." "All persons," Douglas wrote, "are entitled to be informed as to what the state commands or forbids." But the ordinance was so broad that it failed to give a person of average intelligence notice of what conduct violates it. This, Douglas warned, "encourages arbitrary and erratic arrests and convictions."
Bingo. That's just what's wrong with disorderly conduct laws. There is no way to know ahead of time what conduct will land one in handcuffs.
Stories abound about the abuse of these statutes.
They are used to stifle protests, such those in Miami in 2003 where union members and elderly protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct during the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial meetings — charges that were later dropped.
They are used to punish people who annoy public officials, such as the case of Greg Kachka, a disabled veteran, who was charged last year with disorderly conduct for making a gun gesture toward officials from the village of Island Lake, Ill., during a public hearing. Again the charges were dropped.
And most frequently, disorderly conduct statutes are abused by police in what University of South Florida criminology professor Lorie Fridell describes as "contempt of cop" situations. "(The laws give) police way too much power and allow them to intervene with arrest for verbal abuse of state agents," Fridell says. "Police need to be able to put up with people yelling at them."
Eugene O'Donnell, professor of law and police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says disorderly conduct statutes encompass so much conduct that "the law becomes (the cops') gut reaction to where somebody crosses their line."
True freedom is the right to question authority, boisterously and even offensively, and yet be left alone. Living under a law that essentially punishes any conduct that a police officer doesn't like is no freedom at all. It condemns us all to the whims of police officer pique.
In the Dickensian telling of the Gates/Crowley affair, the law is a ass.
07/30/2009
EVERYONE HATES THE COPS
http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall (http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/)
After Professor Gates, Why Pretend?
NEW YORK--The current national conversation about race and the police reminded me about an incident that occurred when I was in Uzbekistan. As I walked into an apartment complex for an appointment I noticed the decomposing body of a man lying on the side of the road.
"How long as he been there?" I asked my host.
"Three, maybe four days," he said.
"What happened to him?"
"Shot, maybe," he shrugged. "Or maybe hit by a car. Something."
I didn't bother to ask why no one had called the police. I knew. Calling the Uzbek militsia amounts to a request to be beaten, robbed or worse. So desperate to avoid interaction with the police was another man I met that, when his mother died of old age at their home in Tashkent, he drove her body to the outskirts of town and deposited her in a field.
With the exception of New Orleans after Katrina, it's not that bad here in the United States. Consider Professor Henry Louis Gates: he shouldn't have been arrested by that Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer, but he came out of the experience physically unscathed.
Nevertheless, the Gates incident has illuminated some basic, strange assumptions about our society. Cops think they have a constitutional right to be treated deferentially. And black people think cops are nice to white people.
Yeah, well, take it from a white guy: we don't like cops either.
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. references "the African immigrant killed while reaching for his wallet, the Maryland man beaten senseless as he lay in bed, the Miami man beaten to death for speeding, the dozens of men jailed on manufactured evidence in Los Angeles and manufactured police testimony in Tulia, Texas, the man sodomized with a broomstick in New York. Are we supposed to believe it coincidence that the men this happens to always happen to be black?"
Of course not. Blacks are 30 to 50 percent more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crime. Their prison sentences are longer. In the notorious "driving while black" New Jersey trooper case, African-Americans made up 70 percent of those randomly pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike--but fewer than 17 percent of motorists. Blacks are more likely to be stopped, frisked, arrested, beaten and murdered by the police than members of all other ethnic groups. American racism against blacks remains systematic, pervasive, and murderous. When there's a policeman in the picture, it's best to be white.
Still, whites and blacks have more in common than they think when it comes to their feelings about the fuzz. When those flashing lights appear in the rearview mirror, even the biggest right-winger's day is ruined.
No one should be less scared of cops than me. I'm white, clean-cut, middle-aged, invariably polite: "Hello, sir. Is there a problem, officer?" Yet I can't point to a single positive experience I've ever had with a cop. Neutral ones, sure--basic, cold, bureaucratic interactions. But no great ones.
And lots and lots of negative ones.
Where to begin?
I'll never forget the New York traffic cop who stepped off the curb in front of my car on Madison Avenue and ordered me to turn right. He wrote me up for illegal right turn. "But you told me to," I protested. "Wrong place, wrong time," he smirked. $165 plus three points on my license. I appealed. The cop lied under oath. The court believed him.
Or the Nevada highway patrolman who pulled me over. I was doing 80 in a 70. He wrote me up at 100 mph. My brother-in-law, never the suck-up, confirmed I was going 80. I was so furious--the fine would have been $400--that I spent double that to fly back and challenge the ticket in court. I won.
When my 20-year-old self forgot to turn on my headlights as we pulled out of a parking lot while on a road trip with my druggie roommate, a Massachusetts cop pulled us over. I couldn't begrudge him probable cause; pot smoke billowed out the window, "Cheech and Chong"-style, when I opened it. Still, what came next was unforgivable: he handcuffed my arms so tight that the metal cut to the wrist bone. (The scar lasted ten years.) When we got out of the town lock-up the next morning, $400 was missing from my wallet. (A judge, examining my wrist a few months later, dropped the charges. My $400, of course, was gone forever.)
An LAPD cop--it bears mentioning that he was black--arrested me for jaywalking on Melrose Avenue. I wasn't. I didn't resist, but he roughed me up. Upon releasing me, he chucked my wallet into the sewer, laughed and zoomed off on his motorcycle. I filed a complaint, which the LAPD ignored.
And so on.
I admit it: I don't like cops. I like the idea of cops. The specific people who actually are cops are the problem. My theory is that cops should be drafted, not recruited. After all, the kind of person who would want to become a police officer is precisely the kind of person who should not be allowed to work as one. But I didn't start out harboring this prejudice. It resulted from dozens of unpleasant interactions with law enforcement.
Race has long been a classic predictor of attitudes toward the police. But high-profile cases of police brutality, coupled with over-the-top security measures taken since 9/11 that targeted whites as well as blacks, have helped bring the races together in their contempt for the police. In 1969, the Harris poll found that only 19 percent of whites thought cops discriminated against African-Americans. Now 54 percent of whites think so.
Don't worry, Professor Gates. We don't care what you said about the cop's mama. A lot of white guys see this thing your way.