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  I Fought the Law...
“During the Roman siege of Syracuse, General Marcus Claudius Marcellus had ordered that Archimedes, citizen of the besieged city, should not be killed. The world famous mathematician, who was now around 78 years of age, continued his studies in his home after the breach of the city. His work was disturbed by a Roman soldier. Archimedes protested at this interruption and coarsely told the soldier to leave. The soldier killed Archimedes on the spot.” Some time has passed now since the incident between distinguished black Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge’s finest over a mistakenly reported burglary on July 16, 2009. Briefly, the reported incident went something like this. “On July 16, a woman in a Cambridge, Massachusetts neighborhood called authorities to report two black men attempting a home robbery. The black men were Harvard Professor Gates and his driver, and the home in question belonged to the noted academic. The duo resorted to jimmying the door open because it was stuck but managed to get inside through the back door. However, when police arrived on scene and found Gates there, they asked him to provide identification to prove that he was the homeowner. After viewing his ID and confirming that Gates indeed lived in the home, Sergeant James M. Crowley arrested Gates anyway, citing disorderly conduct on his part. After the charges against the professor became public, though, the police department dropped them, calling the arrest “unfortunate and regrettable.” I have known, worked with and had confrontations with beat officers over many years in at least a half a dozen major jurisdictions and I think I have a pretty good idea of the dynamics operating here. Humans in life threatening situations often resort to behavior dominated by the structures in the brain stem. That is the portion of the brain closest to the spinal cord. All neurological signals must pass and clear this part of the neural anatomy, often referred to as the reptilian brain. It holds a vital veto function, either allowing the neural impulses to clear its domain or denying access to the higher mental functions. Unlike the higher neocortex it is non-rational and sees situations in vastly simpler, clearer terms. Hunger, fear, rage, sleep deprivation and other forms of stress, often cause this lower brain to kick in shutting off access to the higher more sophisticated processes. Obstacles are seen in terms of clear “good or bad” or “for me or against me” and, often as not, treated with violence as the perceived first, best solution. In spite of their training, police officers (and soldiers) all to frequently inadvertently fall under the dominance of the reptilian brain. Many do not even know this is happening or has happened. After a high speed chase, or approaching a threatening situation, the officer’s fight/flight response is at its height. He must instantly make decisions and he really needs his more primitive brain to allow him to have the kind of reaction time that could well make the difference between life and death. It can be sometimes very difficult to quickly shut down this response when the action is suddenly defused by the capture of a pursued suspect or the revelation of a mistaken identity as in the case of Professor Gates. If the policeman, who may actually be in the process of transcending the commands of his brain stem and is in good faith attempting to rationally sort out the situation, is now confronted by verbal attacks and a “bad attitude” on the part of the suspect, it can be difficult for the officer to make the kind of distinctions necessary to truly “protect and defend.” Professor Gates allegedly responded to the officer’s presumably legitimate request for some identification to prove that he was indeed a resident of the home in question with, “Why, because I’m a black man in America?” Sorry Professor, wrong answer. Would it have made a difference if the “suspect” had matched the classically white professorial archetype wearing pince nez spectacles and Harris tweed? I am certainly not attempting to excuse the judgment or the behavior of officer Crowley in arresting the indignant professor. I am simply trying to understand it. Racist cops are more a symptom of the problem than the cause of it. As long as you have a racist Amerika, you will have racist cops. I do not like what otherwise decent people of any race become when they put on the badge and strap on their tasers and sidearms. This is as true in big cities like Chicago and New York as it is in my own small town of Jefferson City, Missouri. I have found most police I have had contact with to be lazy, uncaring, corrupt and criminally prone themselves. I have found them to regularly exhibit abhorrent behavior and rarely have I ever found any association with them to turn out satisfactorily. I find it impossible to believe that the example of one or two good apples can redeem the whole barrel of rotten ones. In order to adequately explain my reasons for having such a low perception of our men and women in blue I would need at least another article. Nevertheless, whenever I do find it my onerous and distasteful task to have to deal with a member of my city’s finest (either as a suspect or a complainant,) I am always on my most obsequiously respectful behavior. There is no more point in arguing with a man with a gun than it is to attempt to argue with a bullet fired from that gun. I have no idea why a seemingly intelligent person like Professor Gates would give the officer a smart-ass answer like, “Why, because I’m a black man in America?” Sorry Professor, that answer gets you an “F” in Streetsmarts 101. Who did he think was listening, God, the press, the NAACP, his driver, the cop? Racist cop or not, all that response of his could possibly have gotten him was grief. Now I could understand a statement like that if the press happened to be present. It would at least be good street theater for the cameras and validate his point about racism in Amerika. Absent the cameras, his statement was clearly deliberately provocative and the benighted academic was lucky it only merited handcuffs and not a taser jolt or a smart whack up the side of his head. Far be it from me to say that Professor Gates should have known that he got what he asked for. I cite only a scene from a contemporary movie that examined a similar situation. This is from a review I wrote for the film Crash a year ago. “One of the few compelling aspects of this otherwise overrated 2005 Oscar winning movie, Crash, was the interaction between the racist LA police officer played by Mat Dillon and the black couple played by Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton. During a routine traffic stop, a police officer who has pulled over a black couple driving an upscale vehicle is inspired, by their hostility and the verbal attacks he received, to humiliate the man and sexually assault the woman. I certainly don’t think it was the intention of the director, and I don’t think it is racist of me to say that, when viewing this scene, I felt the couple asked for what they got. Of course Matt Dillon’s character was behaving consistently with that of the all too common image of the white racist cop. It hardly takes a PhD in psychology to know that, when you confront such a character, if you want to avoid trouble, you put on your best Stepin Fetchit attitude—no matter who you are—black or white, rich or poor, guilty or innocent.” -- Bob Boldt for the Internet Movie Data Base
 Robert Boldt an editor of MWC News, is a freelance film/video producer living in Jefferson City, Missouri. He is active in local politics, worked on the Howard Dean and John Kerry campaigns and is a cofounder of The White Rose Collective. Articles by Bob Boldt at MWC News http://mwcnews.net/bob-boldt |
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