Professor Gates and a Slow News Week

How can you possibly turn on the news or surf the news sites on the Web without hearing about Professor Gates and his run in with a slow news week? Don’t I mean “the law” you ask? No. I mean a slow news week. Corporate owned news media has become all about the advertising. If there isn’t a juicy story out there to tell, they’ll manufacture one, and that is just what they did here.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I turned on the new Jerry Springer show…errr…I mean CNN. Here we had three talking heads all manufacturing a story. Well, not all of them. Two were trying to make the story go away, one because she was a lawyer and paid to do that, another because he was a fame whore with the unfortunate quality of having been a personal friend/co-worker of Professor Gates, but another, whose fame and income is sadly tied to keeping race anger alive was out there trying to tie the incident to Rodney King and a host of other police brutality. (Oddly enough, people from Chicago old enough to have been around when the current mayor wasn’t the mayor, just over the police department, didn’t find that video so shocking. It was one of the common interrogation techniques used on anyone who found themselves in police custody and deemed “uncooperative”, but that is a different subject.)

Ah yes, they spent a good deal of time yacking needlessly about how the police report said the witness stated “two black men were trying to break into a house” and calling it an abuse of police power. It wasn’t, but once again, continued air time and income mandate it had to be, at least for one more round of commercial breaks.

Do you want to hear what I’ve pieced together on this, being someone who has seen very similar situations many times over? Too bad, you’re going to.

Professor Gates was having a bad day. One of those days where most everything he touched turned to shit. He came home early with his friend/driver only to find that (&_)*ing sticky door was even worse now and it took both of them to shoulder the damned thing open. Why can’t the weather dry out so this thing will start working again?

A few minutes later, while Professor Gates is still complaining/venting to his friend/driver, our, now famous, police officer shows up. He keeps the witness out away from the scene and goes to the door. When he asks to see Professor Gate’s ID, the Professor loses it. He really starts venting then.

“Oh, you get a phone call stating two black men are breaking into a house so we must be criminals! Get the (&)_)*( out of my house you (&()*()_(* racist. I’m Professor Gates and I own this house!” (or something very similar. The vent would have went on quite a bit longer)

Then you get the follow up call requesting backup. We all got to hear that yesterday. The now famous police officer didn’t sound excited, pissed, or anything else.

What nobody in the talking head crowd bothered to pipe up over is the fact Professor Gates was already going to get to wear the handcuffs at this point. He was pissed off, uncooperative, and initially refused to show identification. Anybody who has ever known a police officer with professional training knows that the fastest way to contain the situation is to put that person in cuffs. 99.99% of all the bad things which happen during a police response are taken out of the equation when you put that person in cuffs. The shootings, the stabbings, and the unnecessary police chases get taken out of the question when the irate individual(s) doesn’t(don’t) have use of their hands.

Once they are in cuffs, what happens to a person is really up to them. Keep handing out the mouth and attitude, and you are going to the station. Get really mouthy and you will most likely hit your head getting into the back of the squad.

I’ve seen this go down many many times. Okay, not with police responding to a home invasion call, but with police responding to calls from bars and restaurants where someone had a rough day, came in looking to vent, then after a few decided to make someone feel worse than they felt. Doesn’t even have to be a rough bar. There are some guys who simply haven’t had a good time until they’ve been thrown out of the bar.

Perhaps the best person to ever explain it was a DOT (Department of Transportation) inspector who came to visit a group of new truck drivers. He took a pen out of his pocket, held it up to the group and said “My pen isn’t filled with ink like yours, it is filled with attitude. The more attitude it receives, the more it responds with.”

“The two black men” thing in the police report was an honest point of confusion, it wasn’t the witness who said it, but the person in cuffs…okay…they screamed it. This wasn’t an abuse of power, it was a case of “so much was said in a short span of time it was hard to keep it all straight.” Until someone ran to the media and tried to play the race card, the police report didn’t matter. As long as the guy really was the home owner, he was only going to be held until he cooled down. This wasn’t a case of police brutality or racial profiling, it was a case of a cop being a Peace Officer. “Let them cool their heels in a cell for a while, then kick ‘em loose.” That’s a practice which saves a lot of lives. If you want a great example of a worst case situation when that practice doesn’t happen, rent “Falling Down”. It’s a great movie about a guy having a bad day that just keeps getting worse.

The only sad part of this entire thing is that the President got sucked into it. The press set him up for a Jesse Jackson Moment, and he wasn’t focused enough to step aside. They had to set him up, it’s been a slow news week, and it’s all about the ratings you know! Hopefully that won’t happen to him again. Oh, I’m sure the press and others will try it again, but I hope both he and those around him are smart enough to never walk into it again. What is a Jesse Jackson Moment? You have to be old enough to understand that Jesse Jackson is a moth, whenever there is a camera out he flys to it like a moth to a flame, the rhetoric spews, and usually the situation implodes. Probably one of the more spectacular Jesse Jackson Moments where when those high school students got expelled for getting into a fight at a football game. That story wasn’t hours old before he was in front of the news cameras marshalling the troops and denouncing the administration…then the high school released the security camera video and we saw the fight in all its brutality with what looked like little old ladies falling through the plank spacings of the bleachers, some seemed quite hurt, or at least looked as if they should have been given what happened to them. Then we got to watch the back peddling, the stammering, the stuttering, and all other crash recovery attempts. Most everyone who saw the video found themselves saying “if they got so much fight in them let a dozen cops take them into a room with billy clubs and kick the shit out of them while their still young enough to both heal and learn something from it. You don’t go starting a fight in the middle of a crowd of little old ladies, I don’t care who you think you are.”

At the close of Jerry Springer…errr…I mean this segment of the CNN show, the one who wanted to keep it burning said “it is all very well that they are going to have a beer, but that is not how we solve this issue in the country”. He just doesn’t get it. Are their police who are racist and hand out abuse, probably. Was that involved in the current situation? Nope. What happened here is someone had a bad day, they vented at the wrong person and got to spend some time in cuffs cooling off. Now they are going to have a beer and laugh about it.

Anyone who doesn’t understand that never read their copy of The Guy Rules.