As everyone on OS knows by now, I have voted for exactly one Democrat in my whole life, and he’s one of my state’s senators.  So when I agree with President Obama on an issue, you know that our shared position must be correct. 

I have never, ever liked or trusted law enforcement.  Some of the reasons are quite personal and I don’t wish to go into them here (and I’ve never personally been arrested, nor has anyone I know so far as I’m aware, so don’t start assuming), but some I don’t mind sharing.   The first such reason is my traditional American distrust of government.  All of our founding documents limit the powers of the government, protect citizens from government, and so on.  The police are a part of the government apparatus; ergo, my default setting toward them is suspicion and distrust. 

The next reason is that I am fortunate.  I grew up in one small town, went to college in an even smaller one, went to grad school in another small town, and now live in a town about the size of the one in which I grew up.  I have never been in a place where the local police force has any actual police work to do.  Now, that’s good for day-to-day life, but it also means that the cops become like high-school seniors with too many study hall periods.  They get bored and go around trying to create things for themselves to do, wasting taxpayers’ money and provoking law-abiding people. 

The third reason is a mix of life experience and literary reference.  The first police officer I knew well was our high school’s DARE officer.  He was an arrogant SOB, hit on married women . . . and his son, a year ahead of me in school, was a known drunk and pothead.  Yup, that’s gonna instill early respect for the Men in Blue, right there.  As an adult, I’ve realized that a lot of cops are . . . not exactly intellectual giants.  A colleague who teaches in our Administration of Justice program admits as much (and is a nice guy but evinces a disgustingly superior attitude toward the public when telling stories about his own police days), stating that recent increases in educational requirements for cops are not about the subject matter but about the fact that a lot of police captains, sergeants, and so on don’t want 18-year-olds running the streets in taxpayer-provided cars and carrying weapons.   Gee, I trust a minimally educated, intellectually disinterested (at least most of my students who’ve wanted to be cops have evinced these qualities, even if they’re nice kids), 21-year-old driving around in a car I paid for, carrying a gun I also paid for, and having authority over me, don’t you?

The literary reference?  Albus Dumbledore, over all the years of the Harry Potter series, taught us that you need to be very suspicious of those who actively seek power.  I am actively suspicious of adults who want to carry guns and have the authority to tell other adults what to do.  

Anyway, after my initial outrage at the Cambridge PD cooled down, I got to reflecting on the whole situation and its broader meanings.  In the back of my mind, I can hear my dad (who makes me look left-wing, or at least centrist) shouting, “Boston’s supposed to be so liberal?  Boston is the most racist city in the country!”  I remember being in said city, watching my beloved Red Sox (who of course lost, because I was there), totally focused on the game, and having my dad nudge me and say, “Look around and you’ll see my point.”  I tore my eyes away from the diamond and scanned the crowd.  Every non-white face belonged to either a player or a security staff member.  So anyone who thinks that this incident has no racial component whatsoever is either sheltered, lucky, or just willfully lying.  And that includes a lot of the professional writers on my side of the political aisle, and they’re making me really, really mad right now for that reason. 

Though I have nowhere near his stature in the profession (nor would I want it; I’d hate to live a public life), I am—like Dr. Gates—an academic.  Let me assure you, we are not a physically intimidating bunch.  So this police officer who, instead of de-escalating the situation as I would hope he was trained to do, lost his cool and went at it with an older guy who walks with a cane.  Charming.  Good use of tax dollars. 

I also got to reflecting on one of the points of contention in this whole issue, with so many people blithely saying, “Dr. Gates should have just stepped outside.”  EXCUSE ME?????  Isn’t it part of American Life 101 that you do NOT leave your home at the request of a police officer you did not call, unless said officer is there as part of some sort of natural disaster rescue effort?

The “two black men with backpacks” part of the neighbor’s call to police reminded me of this essay by Peggy McIntosh, about the “invisible backpack of white privilege.”  And I realized to my shame that, as far as public officials and my home, I do carry that backpack. 

Last summer, I was in my office doing some grading and got a call from my security company that the alarm on one of my upstairs windows had tripped.  Based on the recent golf-playing habits of some of my dear college-aged neighbors, I thought I might be dealing with a broken window and need to file a police report for insurance purposes, so I said, “Yes please, put in the call to the police department, and tell them I’ll be there in about 15 minutes.”  I met the officer in front of my home, he followed me inside, and we went upstairs to check.  A locked window had popped open in the 100-degree heat.  The officer said, “Yeah, that happens sometimes.”  I apologized for taking his time, and he said, “No, that’s why you have a security system.”  L’affaire Gates made me remember that in no point in all of this was I asked for identification.  Now granted, I pulled the house key out of my purse and didn’t seem uncomfortable being there, but had I not been a preppily-dressed white person who drove up in a nice car, would I have been bloody well asked for ID before entering a house with a tripped alarm?  Would he have been so polite about having wasted time and tax dollars for nothing?

On another occasion, due to the ridiculous construction of my kitchen (one of those lovely oven fans that empties right back into the kitchen rather than through a wall to the outdoors), I set off the fire alarm.  This happens frequently (said construction idiocy), but I can usually fan the smoke alarm off before the security company calls.  This time I couldn’t, and a fire truck was already in my neighborhood, on the way home from another call, so they got there before I had a chance to cancel the alert.  The head crew guy very respectfully explained that he did need to come through into my kitchen to make sure that no one was back there holding a gun on me or something to make me send the fire truck away.  I was more than happy to let him do so.  However, he didn’t even try to check other parts of the house.  A gun-weilding madman could, after all, have dragged someone else upstairs at gunpoint—how did he know I was telling the truth about living alone? 

At the conclusion of the encounter, the firefighters commiserated with me about the silly design of my kitchen, and I apologized and asked whether I needed to pay some sort of nuisance fee.  The head guy said, “No, this is what you pay taxes for.”  There’s a hole in my ceiling where the original smoke detector was; I yanked it when the battery beeped because it doesn’t call for help and the one from the security company does.  The head guy asked me about this, and I explained, and he said, “Makes sense” with no suspicion at all.  I had to sign some kind of checklist for him, I think releasing the fire department from liability if the house burned down later that night or some such.  He simply accepted my statement that I was the homeowner and let me sign my signature, never requesting any ID or other verification.  Would it have gone that way if I hadn’t been white, preppily dressed, in a house full of books and decorated with flowers, with a nice car out front? 

Keep talking, President Obama.  This is just a prominent example of the racist double standards that structure so much of everyday life.