Dear Editor,
The recent alleged racial profiling by a white policeman of black professor Louis Gates in Cambridge, USA, has evoked worldwide attention, moreso as President Obama has recently commented on the matter and now we have a peace pipe, or rather beer drinks, to broker peace and of course undertake damage control from the White House.
I would like to share with your readers another view (ex Africana Studies Group-Listserv on behalf of jon-christian suggs,professor emeritus,English, the City University of New York) as to why the incident took place. This was authored by a professor who said that he had taught police, would-be police, and former police for 35 years. He said that as a specialist in African American literature, culture and the law, “I have thought long and hard about the intersection of these worlds. As a white man with an African American son, I have worried at that intersection many nights.”
He offered a legal explanation as to what he thought happened on that particular day. He claimed that Gates had been the victim of discretionary abuse.
He asserted that the one true variable in law enforcement was discretion. In policing the law doesn’t tell you what to do in a given situation; it gives you a range of responses which you can choose; the law, he said, tells you what you can do, and not what you must. He further stated that it was not against the law to insult a police officer or to speak harshly to him, but it is a bad bet to assume you could do it without dialling up the discretionary costs.
He closed his thesis by stating, “Skip Gates ran afoul of the abuse of discretion that is a daily problem in micro-policing. Race didn’t cause it but it sure didn’t help it.”
I do not agree with his closing view, but I respect his contention on the discretionary interpretation which is problematic.
Had the boot been on the other foot the outcome would never have been the same, but we must congratulate the parties for wishing to resolve all this with the media in focus. As I write a white cop has opened his mouth with racial remarks directed towards Gates which he has since publicly apologized for on CNN – and there is more food for the media.
Yours faithfully,
VO Patrick.
