Obama Regrets Referring to Police Stupidity
A multiracial group of police officers stood in support of the white officer who arrested black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Friday. They emphatically voiced that both President Obama and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick should apologize for comments union leaders called insulting.
When first informed about the incident, Obama said the officers “acted stupidly.” Patrick, the state’s first black governor, said the arrest was “every black man’s nightmare.”
According to USA Today, police union leaders called a press conference where they affirmed that Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley acted appropriately when he arrested the scholar for disorderly conduct. Police say Gates flew into a rage when officers responding to a report of a burglary asked him to show identification.
“What we don’t need is public safety officials across the country second-guessing themselves,” said David Holway, president of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, which represents 15,000 public safety officials around the country. “The president’s alienated public safety officers across the country with his comments.”
Crowley said he’s grateful he has the support of his police force. He said he’s not worried about any possible disciplinary action.
Although all charges against him were dropped, Gates said he was “outraged” by the arrest, wants an apology from Crowley and would use the experience to help make a documentary about racial profiling in the United States.
“There will be no apology,” Crowley said outside his home Wednesday.
As reported by USA Today:
Crowley has shown no sign of backing down. He has gotten a flood of support and emotional posts on law enforcement websites, including PoliceLink. The officer is himself an icon of sorts in the Boston area: 16 years ago, he tried to save dying Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when the basketball player crumbled on a practice court with heart problems.
“I wasn’t working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star. I wasn’t working on a black man. I was working on another human being,” Crowley, then a Brandeis University police officer, told the Boston Herald at the time.
This week the 42-year-old father of three told the Herald, “I just have nothing to apologize for” in the Gates incident. “It will never happen.”
“I support the president of the United States 110 percent,” he told WBZ-AM. “I think he was way off base wading into a local issue without knowing all the facts, as he himself stated before he made that comment.”
The New York Times reported that the president on Friday afternoon made a surprise visit at the daily White House briefing and said that he “could have calibrated” his words more carefully in the racially-charged controversy over the arrest of a Harvard professor.
Mr. Obama said he had talked to the arresting officer and hoped the case could become “a teachable moment” to be used to improve relations between minorities and police officers.
