Police in Cambridge, Mass., defended a sergeant whose arrest of prominent black professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for disorderly conduct drew an unusually sharp rebuke from President Barack Obama.
“I do not believe his actions were in any way racially motivated,” Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas said of Sgt. James Crowley.
Crowley told a local Boston radio station, “It’s disappointing that [Obama] waded into what should be a local issue.”
The White House tried with no success to tamp down the race-related firestorm sparked the night before, when Obama was asked at a prime-time news conference about the arrest of Gates, a Harvard professor and personal friend.
“I don’t know — not having been there and not seeing all the facts — what role race played in that, but 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.”
The president had hoped the news conference and a follow-up town hall Thursday in Cleveland would give his health care reform effort a boost. Instead, coverage of both was largely eclipsed by the Gates saga. Gates, 58, is threatening to sue Cambridge police and demanding an apology from Crowley after he was arrested last week after breaking into his own home when his front door keys wouldn’t work.
The president had hoped the news conference and a follow-up town hall Thursday in Cleveland would give his health care reform effort a boost. Instead, coverage of both was largely eclipsed by the Gates saga. Gates, 58, is threatening to sue Cambridge police and demanding an apology from Crowley after he was arrested last week after breaking into his own home when his front door keys wouldn’t work.
Cambridge police say Gates was detained after officers responding to a call about a man breaking into the home found Gates uncooperative and unwilling to provide identification. The charges were later dropped.
The ensuing public outrage looked to be on the wane until Obama stepped in with his remarks. Now the White House risks having the president’s dust-up with police dominate the coming weekend news cycle.
On Air Force One to Cleveland, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs fielded numerous questions about the matter and tried to defuse it by largely repeating Obama’s less incendiary observation.
“He was not calling the officers stupid, OK?” Gibbs said. “He was … denoting that at a certain point the situation got far out of hand, and I think all sides understand that.”
Obama during the campaign delivered a landmark speech on race relations and wrote about his own experiences with racism in his books.
But since taking office, the president has largely sidestepped efforts to draw him into public discussions of racially charged issues.
Even so, the timing of the Gates arrest served as a jarring counterpoint for Obama, happening on the same day the nation’s first black president sat for a roundtable with black journalists aboard Air Force One.
Obama and Gibbs tried to turn the incident into a teachable moment, saying how far race relations in America have progressed but also how far there is to go.
“I think he’s mentioned, you know, being at the front of a restaurant where somebody hands him the keys to go get a car,” Gibbs said of Obama, before he was president.
