Review (of Cambridge police department) finds no links to race, arrests

Boston Globe ^ | June 17, 2010 | Rochelle Sharpe and Maggie Mulvihill

[reaganaut1]

When Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard professor of African-American studies, was arrested for disorderly conduct by a white Cambridge police officer last summer, President Obama led a chorus of critics denouncing the local Police Department.

Gates, who is African-American, described his arrest as a “teaching moment’’ about race relations in America.

His case drew national attention to the relationship between policing and race. Obama wound up hosting Gates and the officer who arrested him for a so-called beer summit at the White House. And the arrest, for some, raised the question of whether officers disproportionately arrest blacks for disorderly conduct, considered one of the most discretionary and most abused charges in the nation’s criminal justice system.

But a review of the Cambridge department’s handling of disorderly conduct cases from 2004 to 2009 finds no evidence of racial profiling. Instead, the analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting finds that the most common factor linking people who are arrested in Cambridge for disorderly conduct is that they were allegedly screaming or cursing in front of police.

Of the 392 adults arrested for disorderly conduct, 57 percent were white, and 34 percent were black. That racial breakdown almost exactly mirrored the racial composition of the population that Cambridge police investigated for disorderly conduct, the center’s analysis shows.

Cambridge is 68 percent white and 12 percent black, the latest US Census data show. But multiple racial profiling specialists said the fairest way to analyze the Cambridge Police Department’s conduct was to compare the racial makeup of those charged to that of those investigated and not to the racial makeup of the overall population.

The most striking conclusion of the review of Cambridge police data is that the majority of those arrested for disorderly conduct were allegedly yelling [...]

[pepsionice]

So what we are saying here...is that it’s a higher chance to get arrested if you lose your cool...scream...and yell obscenities at cops? And we needed a special study to conclude this?

I’ll offer some additional “facts”...women with low morales get arrested more often than women with high morals. Dogs with no leash get their owner in more trouble than dogs with a leash. Heavy folks tend to frequent buffet food places more than skinny folks. And drunk folks tend to have more DWI’s than tee-totalers.

[Venturer]

What it say’s to e is that this college professor is a racist bigot and so is the Presidnet of the United States and they are borh full of crap.

[Gondring]

Proposed report title: "Obama Acted Stupidly"

[DrC]

“this college professor is a racist bigot and so is the President of the United States and they are both full of crap.”

Of course, that’s not the way liberal academics view the situation:
“Ogletree is promoting a new book about racial injustice, entitled “The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America.’’

It’s ironic that most Americans without an axe to grind saw this incident for exactly what it was: a presumption of guilt on the part of Skip Gates and the president directed towards the WHITE cops involved. It’s a fair bet that had the cops been black and behaved in the identical fashion, it’s highly improbable the first mulatto president would have characterized their behavior as “stupid.”

No doubt the president will view this exoneration of the police in question (which quite obviously calls into serious question his leap to judgment) simply another illustration of the stupidity and racism of the Cambridge police department. Liberals tend not to let inconvenient facts get in the way of their self-serving world view.

[muawiyah]

No doubt hanging around with that Morales guy is gonna’ get’em in trouble ~ kinda like yelling and screaming “mo fo mo fo mo fo mo fo” at a cop over a parking ticket.

[Rebelbase]

Beer summits are deeply saddened.