overreaction
I don’t know anything really about the incident with Prof. Gates, the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard. Apparently he was arrested at his house, and it looks likely to be an incident of gross racial profiling.
Then the president made a comment, which upset people, then he made this clarification:
I continue to believe, based on what I have heard, that there was an overreaction in pulling Professor Gates out of his home to the station. I also continue to believe, based on what I heard, that Professor Gates probably overreacted as well. My sense is you’ve got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way that it should have been resolved and the way they would have liked it to be resolved.
I have an opinion about this statement. Someone with actual legal background may tell me I’m being a little silly and naive, but I sort of don’t care.
If these two men were two guys outside a bar, or even two neighbors in someone’s front lawn, then the “they both overreacted” line might be plausible. But they weren’t. One of them was a cop, and cops should be given no leeway for “overreacting.” But it’s a sentiment I hear all the time.
Sure, police officers are people too, and at best equally as prone to overreaction as the general population. In their institutional role, however, they cannot be. Cops are given special privileges not available to the general population, specifically in the use of force and suspension of another’s right to freedom, in the name of maintaining the larger peace. Of course, use of these privileges should be severely constrained, and granting them to a person should be predicated on the fact that they will never use them in a way motivated by something other maintaining the peace, whether it be personal prejudice or just hotheadedness in the moment. Abuse of these privileges is a breach of a social contract of the highest order, and should not be tolerated by anyone, especially the police departments which grant these privileges.
Given this, and given the fact that the power dynamic in police-civilian interaction is so severely skewed, the “they were both overreacting” line does not stand to reason.
I heard a surgeon once say that what they do would be considered a felony if consent were not given. If a surgeon were to leave a little tear open to give a patient a little pain later on, or snuck in a little sucker punch while they were under anesthesia, due to some kind of personal prejudice or disagreement with their patient, their medical license should be torn up. I think the specialized privileges we grant police officers approach those we grant surgeons, and similar, harsh disciplinary action should be taken against officers who abuse them.
