I really don’t have a problem with Gates being arrested, but I’m also glad they dropped the charges.

I think we’re both on the side of “Law & Order” here, Floyd. But your focus is on the law, and I put (maybe too much?) emphasis on order.

The law is great after a crime has been committed, while a sense order is what can prevent crimes from happening.

I worked a number of DUIs where people would meet the description of a burglary, robbery, etc. get pulled over (not be the suspect), but get arrested because the WERE loaded. Whoops!

We’re getting so caught up in the trees of race that we’re losing the forest of liberty (not least because we’re not talking about Obamacare). If Gates was in the parking lot and had not been asked to leave his home to go to the parking lot this is a slam dunk. I don’t blame Crowley — he’s enforcing the law as written and doing what he’s trained to do.

Dunphy is 100% accurate except in this case there is no Hupmobile… the suspect was IN HIS OWN HOME, asked to exit the house by the PO, had already been ID’d as the lawful resident of that house — and thus no longer a suspect.

I’m not sure exactly when modern bureaucracy crushed the notion that a man’s home is his castle, but I’d rather put up with the Gates of the world than all the well-meaning police officers in the world able to take me out of home and then arrest me when I have an emotional meltdown — especially if the PO has back-up. I’ve worked with, trained and educated cops for 15 years so I am neither ignorant of nor unsympathetic to the difficulties they face. This highlights a systemic problem not an individual officer problem.

R.R. Reno at First Thoughts has a good post about this, which is an answer to the strictly Libertarian view (which I think is Floyd’s view) that the cop should not have arrested Gates for the way he was acting.

We can debate the finer points of the Gates/Crowley encounter, but on the larger point surely we can agree. Policemen need to project authority in order to minimize their use of force. As anybody who has tried to keep order in a schoolyard or classroom knows, a person in a position of authority cannot consistently tolerate verbal abuse and at the same time retain authority. Crowley arrested Gates in order to assert his authority, in order to maintain the image of the policeman as an officer of the law who has the power to control all situations. Obviously, we want all sorts of legal constraints on how policemen reinforce their authority and exercise control. But at the same time, we should want their authority and power to control situations to be real.