Not Taught
Randy Balko at Reason deals with what should have been the real issue in the Skip Gates incident. Thanks to a lot of other accusations, the "teachable" part of the moment may have been missed.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:23 AM
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12 Comments:
So the President was not accurate- the police aren't necessarily stupid- just arrogant and evil
Wait, am I remembering wrong, but isn't that what I originally suggested and you disagreed with, LAGuy?
There's nothing in this post that contradicts anything I've said in the past week.
My main (original) point was the President was foolish to say what he said. Almost everything he's said and done since has shown the accuracy of that claim. (Though the beer summit to settle things is pretty amusing.)
First, he was not, as he admitted, in full possession of the facts, so that alone should have kept him out of it.
Second, as the most powerful leader on the earth, it's not his job to act like some community organizer and comment on a local scuffle. It was fairly obvious early on the Duke frat boys were being railroaded, but I wouldn't have expected President Bush to jump in on that.
Third, Obama (like Gates) immediately injected race into the issue.
As a side note, I also commented that Gates' actions predictably got him in trouble. Perhaps if he and the President and other powerful political figures who backed him hadn't insisted this is about race, maybe we could have had an intelligent discussion about what are the duties of the police, and citizens, in these sorts of situations.
I might add that it looks like Gates was uncooperative from the start, challenging and threatening and throwing his weight around. No matter what you think one owes a police officer who is investigating a potential break-in, this is not a wise strategy. On the other hand, the impression the President gave was of an officer who knew his suspect was innocent but just stuck around so he could arrest him because he didn't like his attitude. This is probably wrong, but even if it were correct, the President couldn't know this.
That is a really terrific article. This is the discussion that has been short-circuited, because, no matter the justifications for the individual behaviors, President Obama's ill-considered comment has overridden the topic.
But on the actual issue presented in the article, I would point out to libertarians that there is the concept of "fighting words" - words which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. (Chaplinsky v. new Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568, 62 S.Ct. 766). Police can arrest people for merely shouting things that tend to cause fights - it is a crime not protected by the 1st Amend.
Besides the question of fact in this case (did Gates' words rise to the level of fighting words?), an excellent Constitutional question would be whether words directed at the police can ever be deemed "fighting words," since police officers arguably should be trained to never be incitable.
Thanks for your comments, Bukama.
The Fighting Words Doctrine, as an exception to the First Amendmnent, is, as presently understood, extremely narrow. I don't believe the Supreme Court has upheld a single fighting words claim since Chaplinsky. It is essentially unimaginable that any utterance a person makes inside his own home to a police officer during an investigation would be considered fighting words.
Personally, I wish there were no fighting words doctrine. I can imagine a lot of monstrous statements that could start a fight, but in every case, I'd still blame person who throws the first punch.
Forget the Obama part. I think everyone -- especially Obama -- recognizes that he should have stopped after "I don't know all the facts." But are you just mentioning the Balko piece out of curiosity, or agreeing with his premise? Earlier this week you said:
"I don't care if you're the governor--challenging an officer in a tense standoff is stupid... Cooperation in general is probably the best way to avoid false arrest. And even if it does happen, there's not much you can do until afterward. As for claiming the police are trained to deal with irate people...apparently their training told them this was the right thing to do."
Isn't that an example of precisely the "misplaced deference to authority" Randy Balko is arguing against? Or are you disagreeing with Balko? I'm seriously confused here.
On a marginally related note, wasn't there an anecdote in Freakonomics about a black researcher who was ostracized from the drug dealers he was trying to study because he had stood up to the police for his right to stand on a street corner? In my experience the only people who stand up to the police are hardened felons and those with graduate degrees. (These are, in recent years, increasingly overlapping sets).
p.s Wasn't "champagne-sipping bum" the original fighting words insult that no reasonable person would be expected to tolerate? Heck, I've been called worse every time I tried to park on the street in Manhattan.
I generally agree with Balko, and have argued as he has before. That doesn't stop me from pointing out the predictable endpoint of Gates's actions. It also doesn't mean that you shouldn't cooperate with the police during an investigation. Gates seems to have been angry and uncooperative from the start. He may know he's innocent, but what is the officer who's investigating a potential break-in supposed to do? If he doesn't properly ascertain what's going on, he's not doing his duty.
As for false arrest, I was correct. If you are being falsely arrested (or falsely investigated, for that matter), if you don't go along, but struggle against the officer, then you actually will be breaking the law. You may get off anyway (especially if you have a lot of power, like Gates), but you are stil potentially committing a crime.
The Chaplinsky case featured the phrases "damned fascist" and "goddamned racketeer." Any given era has its version of what's unbearable. My fear is the hate speech crowd would use the "fighting words" exception to criminalize certain epithets if they thought they could get away with it.
No, I was wrong. Chaplinsky called a cop "a fucking pig." It was Feiner who called the Mayor of Syracuse a champagne-sipping bum.
Yeah, you're right about what Chaplinsky said. Which one was it that called the cop a fucking pig, then? Robinson? I'm trying to do this without The Google as an anti-Alzheimer's exercise.
what is the officer who's investigating a potential break-in supposed to do? If he doesn't properly ascertain what's going on, he's not doing his duty
The officer is supposed to conduct his investigation. If, during the course of that investigation he learns that the person he's speaking with is the homeowner, he's supposed to leave. The attitude, profanity, tone of voice, volume, or anything else short of physical confrontation that come along with such information shouldn't change that conclusion, and shouldn't lead to an arrest. "Fundamental" rights mean they still apply when you'd be smarter to do otherwise.
"The officer is supposed to conduct his investigation. If, during the course of that investigation he learns that the person he's speaking with is the homeowner, he's supposed to leave."
What's your evidence the officer had determined Gates was the homeowner? Gates was belligerent and uncooperative from the start. He regularly did not respond to requests from the officer throughout the whole incident.
He may have claimed it was his place, but so would a guy breaking in. According to the officer, Gates only showed his Harvard ID, which has no home address on it.
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