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The results of the suppression of the police report
(Note: I made an error in this entry: Gates did not follow Crowley to the street, but went to the porch and keep yelling at him from there. See discussion here.) Robert VerBruggen at National Review’s Phi Beta Cons blog, after initially taking the side of the police officer in the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, reverses himself and says:
Yeah, the yelling and carping about “racism” is obnoxious, but when you’re arrested for breaking into your own home, don’t you get a little leeway?VerBruggen is wrong. He doesn’t know the basic facts, because he hasn’t read the police report. Gates was not arrested for breaking into his own home. He was arrested for disorderly conduct, and the arrest occurred after he followed Officer Crowley out of the house to the street and continued yelling and screaming at him in front of the neighborhood and calling him a racist police officer. Crowley twice warned him that he was behaving in a disorderly way and told him to stop, and he didn’t stop. Then Crowley arrested him. And that was on top of Gates’s unbelievable behavior inside the house which Crowley had to endure, where each time Crowley started to leave the house Gates would ask for Crowley’s name but kept yelling and calling Crowley a racist police officer so that he didn’t hear Crowley’s answer. And now the news reports all claim that Crowley refused to give his name to Gates.
The news stories don’t have the facts, just as VerBruggen doesn’t have them, because the Boston Globe removed from its site both its copies of the police report, as I tell about here. I saved the second copy of the document at the Globe before the Globe removed it, and now the only copy of the police report on the Web that I know of at the moment is here, at VFR. Email entry |