President Obama has now drawn a lot of attention to the recent controversy regarding Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s arrest as he was breaking into his own home.
“I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry,” Obama said. “Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three — what I think we know separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.”
Now that the officer who made the arrest suggested that Obama’s comments were “way off base,” the story has gained momentum to drive the day.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs played cleanup this afternoon, insisting that Obama “was not calling the officer stupid.”
In the meantime, a copy of the original police report has surfaced leading some to question whether the officer acted that stupidly to begin with. . .
