by
Dr. Christopher C. Cooper
, July 30, 2009
I learned fast as a cop that the catchall arrest is called disorderly conduct. When a citizen dares to disagree with an officer, he or she goes to jail. Astonishingly, the prosecutor and the judge and the whole criminal justice system accept the officer’s false account of events and probable cause. And, it happens again and again, but perhaps not anymore maybe now with less frequency because of an encounter between a small-city cop and a renowned university professor, Sgt. James Crowley and Dr. Henry Louis Gates.
Now the way has been paved, for the first time in U.S. history, for Americans to address the problem of a U.S. police culture that holds that arrest and harm should come to a citizen who dares question the authority of a police officer.
I worked in a police precinct/district in which some officers, in an effort to keep a citizen from knowing his/her identity, would intentionally punch out one or more of the numbers of their badges; alternatively they would destroy their department issued name tags. This, like the turning backwards of the marked police hat, was commonplace when the objective was to be unaccountable. So, it goes without saying that in 2009, to ask many police officers for a name and badge number is dangerous. Indeed, the citizen will ultimately get the badge number and name, but on their arrest report. There lies the problem.
The Gates-Crowley encounter illuminates that ours is a country in which the slightest disagreement with a police officer can have tragic results for the citizen. Any knowledgeable cop can tell you that Dr. Gates was moments away from being tasered or shot. And, that but for Henry Louis Gates’ friendship with the president of the United States, he would have been just another statistic. Take 15-year-old Dewey Elder, he was White and stood 5-foot-6 and weighed about 140 pounds. The handcuffed boy disagreed with three Bay City, Mich., police officers and a shouting match ensued. The boy, surrounded by the three burly male officers, was tasered and died. There is no shortage of documented, credible accounts of the elderly and even children tasered or pepper sprayed by the police for disagreeing with a police officer. In American police work, the taser, pepper spray and dark sunglasses have replaced courage and professionalism.
