Category Archives: Commentary & Forums

Discussions and analysis of special topics from a variety of experts

What's going on in Ukraine?

What’s going on in Ukraine?

One thing I’m a bit embarrassed by is how paltry our coverage of the events in Ukraine have been over the past few weeks.  I’m sure I’m not alone in watching from afar and being fascinated with what is happening, but I have no special expertise in the region.  Does anyone from our readership?

One thing that’s fascinated me in particular is how quickly the state of policing shifted, and what this potentially means for how we think about such things as “police,” “state,” “violence,” and “democracy.”  You know, all those classic elements of Police Studies that draw on Weber.

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Commentary & Forums

Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and the Anthropology of Police

I’m sure I’m not the only one on this blog who’s been trying to think of a way to approach the whole Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman fiasco.  Like a lot of scholarship, it’s just so hard to figure out what to add to the constant shit-storm of a media frenzy.  But in my Police & Society class at EMU we have broached the topic, and the discussion has been both passionate and useful.

I thought I’d share the online discussion question I just prompted my students with. I’m curious to hear what readers of this blog might have to say.  Here’s the prompt:

So our discussion seems to have gotten us to an interesting place: on the one hand, the question of what to do with George Zimmerman–did he have the right to be policing his neighborhood?  did he have the right to carry and use a gun?  did he have the right to suspect and pursue Trayvon?–brings us back to a question we’ve been asking repeatedly in the class…  What should be the relationship between “police” and “society,” especially when we consider the use of force/power/gewalt?  Should they be fully integral things, so that there’s no distinct institution of policing?  Should there be an absolute distinction, so that only a small community can claim the right to police power?  If the answer is somewhere in the middle, how would that work?

On the other hand, we’ve also been circulating around the question of freedom and security, norms and rights.  Was George Zimmerman policing legitimately when we acted upon his suspicions, regardless of any evidence of law-breaking? Should the goal, the ends, of policing be the maintaince of community norms at the expense of individual liberty, or is a technocratic focus on law enforcement and civil rights the necessary priority of a democratic police force?

Anyone have any thoughts on how we can use some of the ideas and/or authors from this course to help us answer some of these questions?

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Commentary & Forums

Some thoughts on the London “riots”: Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism and “police as a public service”

I have to say I resisted writing this post.  I have a visceral distaste for academic discursive hermeneutics performed from afar–this is partly why I’m an ethnographer, after all– and, that’s even more the case when trying to write au courant journalistically

However, despite having absolutely no ethnographic expertise among British police and only a concerned collaborator’s familiarity with the issues on the ground there, I’m going to just get over it–tempered still, hopefully, by a degree of humility and a recognition of our responsibility to ignorance.  The reason I’ve made this decision is to emphasize an ethnographic fact that I think is important for this blog: so much of what makes police a salient issue in broader terms are in fact riots and, conversely, so many riots, uprisings and rebellions are in fact about police.

All that was a way of putting a large preliminary asterisk on certain observations I’ve made following the news coverage via my own personal extended network of interwebs (BBC, CNN, NPR, Jeff Martin’s twitter feed…).  I’ve noticed a narrative dynamic emerging that I find a bit frustrating: on the one hand, news coverage presents the familiar “these are criminals/hoodlums without a politics,” with all its logical absurdities (is criminality innate and apolitical? If so, if these are innate tendencies and not the result of social conditions, how has London and then other cities in the UK suddenly–within the last several days– sprouted so many of this type? What would be the litmus test for whether determining this is a political act, by the way?).

On the other hand, often in an effort to show “the other side” or to emphasize some diversity of opinion on the events, news coverage includes another narrative which risks being equally tired and absurd, the “this is an expression of political-economic disenfranchisement” argument (with it’s equally non-falsifiable claims–what, again, are the criteria for deciding that this is political, and when where these events put to that criteria? what factors and/or data were considered? what would apolitical events look like? If at least one of these criteria should be statements of such from the protesters themselves, it does not seem to meet the definition…)

Even within stories framed in such a manner, however, I’ve noticed an interesting set of dissonances; some contradictions that, if properly attended to, don’t quite fit the dominant framing:

  • Generational conflict.  The “this is political” camp insists that the events are the result of the UK’s disinvestiture in social programs while experiencing wideing gaps in real wealth, but within that analysis there’s a type of inter-generational awkwardness, especially between what I think of as the Stuart Hall generation, associated with the Tottenham riots of the early 1980’s, and the present generation of protesters.  What’s interesting is to watch the older leftists struggle with understanding and/or translating the events; I’m thinking of some of the interviews with the MP from Tottenham and others, such as Darcus Howe, who seem to be attempting to work out some space for understanding them within a framework of social dis-investiture in the absence of an actually articulated voice of such a grievance.  The terms, or even the very language, seems to have moved somehow in the last 30 years.
  • Policing is a social program.  On the other hand, the “these are hoodlums” camp–set up as critics of the protesters (and thus anti-anti-dis-investiture)–emphasizes the affected business people and residents, often pointing to their calls for more police presence and in fact outrage at the lack of protection.  The contradiction here, of course, is that policing is a social program financed through government.  If anything, this is the voice criticizing dis-investiture.  What to make of that?

I think a less contradictory framing is possible if we make use of Foucault’s geneaology of liberalism (which I’ve written a bit on before), itself formulated during a crisis-point in global capitalism, which identifies neoliberal efforts to “reduce government” as one strategy, within a longer history of liberal political thought, which attempts to find external principles of limitation on government.  Part of why Foucault spends so much time on this is that it offers a prescient insight into so much of the nature of policing, security & surveillance today: namely that it springs from the same concern and theory of government.  Although often misread, I think, Foucault’s point is that the policing techniques of surveillance (much used in Britain) which skeev many of us out are not efforts to achieve a tightly controlled police state, but the opposite: it’s a strategy of governance which, for many reasons, sees such totalitarian aspirations as ineffectual and unnatural.  In this sense, security strategies of surveillance are attempts to provide a “policed” state (in the older sense of “happy, well -ordered and thriving”) with minimal police (in the sense of a specialized political organ claiming the monopoly of legitimate violence) interventon; police without policing.

In this sense, the policing strategies so heavily relied upon by Britain over the last several years are both part and parcel of a political rationality that also focused on finding more “economical” forms of government.  The same rationality which leads to a dis-investiture of the social programs targeted by “austerity measures.”  The two sides of the framing in the popular news-framing, then, are certainly not contradictory, nor is the one an effect of the other: they are two sides of the very same political rationality; one that more and more seems diseased.  What will be the alternative? I’m not sure, but finding a useful answer, I think, depends on understanding the political logic in which we find ourselves.

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Commentary & Forums

Deja vu all over again: the recurring problem of post-social policing in France

An update along the lines of our continued interest in policing “after the financial crisis”…

Le Monde reports that, come January 2010, there will be a full stop on the deployment of the unités territoriales de quartier (UTEQ), the socially-oriented policing groups developed by Nicolas Sarkozy after the banlieue riots of 2007 (and after he had virtually eliminated another socially-oriented style of policing, in 2002, known as the police de proximité).

The reason? Minister of the Interior Brice Hortefeux explains that he doesn’t have the means (“moyens”) to implement the program in light of the loss of 2,000 posts this year.  This doesn’t mean a complete loss of on-the-ground policing, however (the translation is my own):

Le rapport prône également l’élaboration d’un diagnostic “approfondi” dans chaque territoire et un “partenariat sérieux” avec les élus. Un tel scénario présenterait l’avantage de combler les trous, mais mettrait à bas la philosophie même du dispositif : être en contact régulier avec la population.

[The report also argues for a “deeper” diagnostic analysis in each territory, and a “serious partnership” with elected officials. This scenario has the advantage of filling the holes in the budget while having at its core the same philosophy: to be in regular contact with the population]

So we’re back to exactly the point we were at in 2002, when Sarozy dismissed the police de proximite as irresponsibly uneconomical even while those on the left emphasized that close contact with those being policed is essential for proper police work.

This is the “problem of a post-social police” that I wrote about in my dissertation (and which I’ve been trying to develop in an article I’ve been working on): how to devise a style of policing once the object to which its been oriented (which it helped create)–the social, as represented in a population–becomes only one in a larger array of governing objects?  This is the question police, and we as social scientists, still face and for which there are as yet no adequate answers…

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Commentary & Forums

Reflections on Police Violence at Berkeley

I’ve been meaning to provoke a bit more discussion regarding the confrontation between police and protesters at UC Berkeley a couple of weeks ago (although I did post something on the matter before the Nov 20th occupation), but the demands of teaching and preparing for AAA’s have been forestalling my best intentions.  On top of that, to be honest, i’m not sure what I think about it.  I’m left, mostly, with a bunch of half-articulated questions.  Aaron Bady, a graduate student in English at Berkeley has some reflections along that line over at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Some sort of administration response to the occupation was inevitable, of course. But why was it necessary to direct police violence against the students outside Wheeler Hall? (In fact, the university has called for an independent investigation of police actions and the university’s own decisions that resulted in the police being called onto the campus.) The more the riot police surrounded Wheeler, the more students came out to watch. But the police treated that assembly of peaceful spectators like a clear and present danger, pushing and shoving back students whose crime seemed to be their very presence on their own campus. I cannot overstate how pointless and stupid it was. The police had marked off a perimeter around the building with crime-scene tape, and I have yet to hear the allegation that a single student ever tried to cross it. But when the police began to set up metal barricades, they ordered students to move back as they smashed the barricades into the front row of students. Students who didn’t respond instantly were beaten with batons; students who touched the barricades had their hands pounded with force enough to break bones.

via Making Sense of Senseless Violence at Berkeley – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In response to these questions Bady makes some gestures towards both Althusser and Weber and, while I think both are important routes to traverse, I think the tone in the passage above is probably the most appropriate–simultaneously critical and perplexed.  How can we proceed and maintain its tenor?

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Commentary & Forums

Jonathan Simon’s provocative thoughts on the UC Strike

Over at Governing through Crime, UC Professor Jonathan Simon has some provocative words for those participating in the current 3-day UC strike:

….We ought to be united in mobilization to save higher education in California. But in choosing to make the fight a convenient and ideologically satisfying (but for the most part phony) story about privatization, down-sizing, and pernicious, corporate minded university leadership, UC’s unions and their student and faculty allies are missing a historic opportunity to engage our fellow citizens in a critical dialog about our state’s future.

That future has been mortgaged to expensive dysfunctional prisons and a bipartisan law-enforcement establishment that is committed to mass incarceration at any price. But across three decades in which that project of exiling tens of thousands of largely poor and minority Californians to a prison archipelago of mammoth proportions (which yet remains grotesquely overcrowded) has been constructed, the supporters of higher education in this state have remained silent, assuming that the incarceration of people who don’t go to college anyway is not our problem. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

via Governing through Crime: Strike Against Prisons not Education.

I think Simon is dead on here, and offers a framing that explains some of the ambivalence I’ve had about the political mobilization that’s been developing.

Most of that ambivalence, I think, revolves around my hesitation at some of the explanatory narratives that have been used as organizational and motivational tools by unions and protesters… what Simon calls the”convenient and ideologically satisfying (but for the most part phony) story about privatization, down-sizing, and pernicious, corporate minded university leadership”.

Part of what I’ve been trying to point out, both vis-a-vis the strike and in my work on French policing, is that–as both Max Weber and Walter Benjamin have shown–all politics is necessarily about violence.  This includes, especially includes, such mundane acts of governance as budgetary allocations.  As everyone from Michel Foucault to Nikolas Rose have also tried to show, these decisions are literally choices between life and death.  This is one aspect of what scholars are referring to when they talk about the biopolitical.

On the other hand, Californians are not completely comfortable with this violence and, for good reasons which I’ve also tried to explore, have tried to devise ways to limit it as much as possible.

What Jonathan’s work in Governing through Crime has shown, however, is that one of the few remaining–maybe the only remaining–domain in which the violence of governance seems legitimate to American voters is in the domain of crime control and punishment.  It therefore has become the trope through which all American governance is filtered.

What we’re left with is, on the one hand, a massively inflated, impractical and unjust incarceration system and–importantly–on the the other hand, no way of conceiving any other legitimate form of governance.

This is not a question of corporate greed versus educational egalitarianism, or even good guys versus bad guys (as much as I’d like to hate on Mark Yudof along with everyone else), but of finding a way–literally–of justifying the very real kinds of violence involved in supporting education; of including higher education into the political calculus of life and death.

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Commentary & Forums

Control as Explanation and as Topic to be Explained

Peter Moskos wrote a great editorial, “The Cop’s Eye View” in the Baltimore Sun in which he discusses a number of issues related to the Gates arrest. He describes the well known tactics for making someone arrestable by convincing them to step outside of their house in to the public space. But more importantly he describes the salience of control to himself and other police officers.  I think it is worth quoting Moskos in extenso:

“As police are almost always outnumbered, personal safety depends on a little bravado and a little bit of bluff. When I was a police officer in Baltimore, and somebody hanging out on the corner mumbled he was going to “get me,” he had to be confronted with swift, certain and appropriate deterrence. If there was a threat to my face, jail was automatic. If somebody said he was going to kick my ass, he probably could.

Police have a strong, justifiable need to control the situation. I didn’t want to be loved. I didn’t mind being feared. Respected was OK. But all that really mattered was to be obeyed. To have authority, police need a legal, all-purpose charge to arrest people when nothing else will do. In Baltimore, it was loitering. In New York (and, I suspect, Cambridge), it’s disorderly conduct. Police also need smart officers to not abuse their discretion.”

Often discussions of police conduct forget that police officers are social beings who play social games delimited by a peculiar set of spatial and temporal realties.  Policing is an “on the field” gig. Cops are engaged in face to face interactions in which there is little or no “time out” to reflect, deliberate, or work by committee. Temporal restraints come in the form of high call volume (the need to rapidly complete one situation so that a officer can move to the next); the fact that there is enormous uncertainty in how others will engage with the officer  means that officer do not have a stable set of temporal expectations for how any given encounter will unfold; and the strip of behavior (sequential exchange) that makes up any given police-citizen encounter tends to occur on the plane of micro-interactions in which gestures and movements are the fabric of reality and are themselves unfolding rapidly. The fact that cops work with citizens and suspects in close physical proximity also means that there is little time to act and react. Hence police officers have cultivated a set of situational perceptions and practices for managing their temporal reality; they call it “control.”

In this setting “control” is not about an authoritarian personality,  motives, intentions, or a psychological need for dominion and respect. Rather, control and its attendant categories like obeying and authority are, from the cops point of view, methods of stabilizing interactions and creating order. The lessons of social psychology and ethnomethodology is that social order, i.e. stable predictable interactions, are an ongoing and highly contingent accomplishment of active social agents. “Control” is very much about creating some kind of stable footing in a unstable social encounter in which there is not time to build mutual understandings of the situation.  Seeing “control” as a folk method having everything to do with social stability and mutual understanding may not be popular but may be sociologically necessary to understanding police behavior. In other words, what Peter sees as the procedural “working acts” of navigating a situation, bystanders see as a quality of the actor.

The need for the police to bluff, bluster, and beat their chests is not something to be denigrated. Peter is absoultey right about how much officer safety depends on the ability to project not simply an authoritative presence but one that must be taken “seriously.” When out numbered no single officer can physically control a group. But the performance of being able to “do what it takes” to maintain “control” is a strategic presentation of self that is often necessary. It is no different than the need of gang leaders or “bad asses” described by Jack Katz in The Seductions of Crime to present a front of danger and unpredictability that will keep dangers opponents and underlings at bay.

According to Katz, the “bad ass” has to be willing to “go all the way” and must occasionally engage in frenzied violence so that violence is not situationally necessary the majority of the time. What bad asses or gang leaders do is similar to cops “controlling” gang members or generating fear on the street (for example see Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street). Respect is a fragile thin on  the streets and to the extent that face must be guarded and continually restituted, violence becomes the “bangers” answer to slight. Without respect bangers loose standing and their power. Sadly for cops this is often the world they are operating in. Officers don’t get to define “the street,” they are visitors who learn to operate according to similar principles, i.e.  routine grounds of interaction.  Similarly, cops need the ability to make an arrest when challenged in doing their job. Cops can’t “thump” people for disrespecting them, challenging their legitimacy, or threatening them. It is not about control for controls sake. It is about quilting together a patchwork of interactive strategies that are, like it or not, are the fabric of face-to-face interactions on the street.

All of this is necessary, as Peter indicates, because officers need to be able to enter and exit situations swiftly and safely. There can’t be debate each time about the definition of the situation or the relevant systems of classification that are going to be deployed in each encounter (this is the conflict that Jonathan Wender describes eloquently in  Policing as Poetry). We may not like police “control” at a visceral level. But before we judge it it is worth understanding how police use “control” as a folk methodology for negotiating order and maintaining their safety at the micro level.

To see “control” sociologically is not to look down on social action, but to see the complicating position of the method of actors. “Control” thus has to be understood as belonging to the realm of practical activity. When cops talk of control they do so within a realm of action different than the world of activity in which outside spectators use it. Control can exist in different  language games, so to speak, and it is critical that outside commentators beware of the dual existence of “controls” use in speech. We can judge it at a distance but before ridiculing it we must also make some attempt to understand the officers practical relationship to the concept and practice of control and see what it does for the office in situ. This is what seeing policing sociologically must mean.

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Commentary & Forums, Pedagogy

Steering the Teachable Momentum of the Gates Arrest in an Anthropological Direction.

Public discussion of the Gates arrest is all over the place: people with a stake in race issues insist on speaking about race, analysts of governing technologies attempt to bracket race and focus on procedure, libertarians focus on citizen rights, etc. The aggregate effect has been to generate an argument in which the various sides work on reinforcing their respective positions by talking past each other, seemingly avoiding confrontation over any potentially conclusive point of direct disagreement.

For the purpose of teaching anthropology, I think this public cacophony could be channeled into a good class discussion of the nature of social facts, and some of the ways that “symbolic relays” operate in contemporary American culture to structure the outcome of politically tense situations.

For example, we could take a page from the sociology of policing and start from a theoretical distinction between what the police do and what policing does. This means that we can look at “the police” ethnographically – as individuals acting in real-time contexts – and thereby describe them as engaged in an order of interaction (Goffman’s “interaction order”) which exists at several removes from the larger institutional level in which “policing” functions as an element in the reproduction of macro-historical social order. This distinction is a useful framework for asking questions about how these two levels of phenomena – real-time social action and institutionalized social facts – actually relate to one-another in particular instances. In this case, we have a situation where a central point of dispute is whether or not the social fact of race is relevant to the situation on the ground. To focus discussion of the event onto the cultural dynamics by which larger issues are made relevant to social action, we can usefully borrow Marshall Sahlins’ concept of the “symbolic relay,” i.e. symbols which are deployed to “endow the opposing local parties with collective identities and the opposing collectives with local or interpersonal sentiments. In the occurrence, the small-scale struggles are transformed into abstract and irreconcilable causes-to-die-for, their outcome depending now on the larger correlation of forces” (quoting here from the abstract to his short 2005 paper in Anthropological Theory titled “Structural Work,” (password required) more extensive discussion of the concept can be found in his 2004 monograph Apologies to Thucydides). It is, in other words, cultural work that imbues day-to-day events with larger historical significance.

A classroom exercise could be developed around analyzing how various tropes and categories are mobilized by various commentators and participants in the event as “symbolic relays” to frame the larger historical significance of the event of the arrest itself as being “about” race, common-sense, civility, class, citizenship, police procedure, etc. As cursory examples, consider:

“This isn’t about me; this is about the vulnerability of black men in America,” (Gates).

“[Y]ou probably don’t need to handcuff a guy, a middle-aged man who uses a cane, who’s in his own home,” (Obama)

“Gates, as a citizen, has the right to challenge the authority of the police – all Americans have that right.” (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/25/752126/-Disorderly-Conduct)

“Gates automatically “profiles” white men in uniform as a threat to his outsized ego, even when they are trying to protect his own house!.” (http://www.pr-inside.com/was-barack-obama-crying-in-his-r1407475.htm)

“A good cop respects your rights when you show them their rights. A bad cop tries to convince you to do something stupid so they can put you in jail… They will take advantage of your belligerence, they will take advantage of your anger, they will take advantage of your fears.” (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jNR4dcq5sivgbez2rttRVWtTMXoAD99JQMJG0)

“The report alleges that Gates became belligerent and yelled at the officer that “this is what happens to black men in America.” The report further states that Gates called the officer a racist and declared that the officer had no idea whom he was ‘messing with.’ Assuming the prosecution could establish that those factual allegations are true – which Gates vehemently says it could not – it does not appear the government would have any realistic chance of proving its case in a courtroom.” (http://blogs.masslawyersweekly.com/news/2009/07/22/making-legal-sense-of-the-gates-arrest/)

From the obvious point that people disagree as to what this event is “about,” we could move to a finer-grained discussion of how and why various accounts diverge, what kinds of audiences they might be aiming for, and what kinds of pragmatic purposes they might be intended to serve. Ideally, the discussion would leave students with a deeper appreciation for the complexity of the socio-cultural processes which are involved in forming prevailing interpretations of the larger significance of events, and how the work of cultural mediation (i.e. the deployment of symbolic relays) is embedded in and inflected by political and economic circumstances.

Cited references available online

Sahlins, M. (2005). Structural work: How microhistories become macrohistories and vice versa Anthropological Theory, 5 (1), 5-30 DOI: 10.1177/1463499605050866

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Commentary & Forums

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Researcher of Racial Profiling, Arrested.

NPR Article on Gates Arrest

Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard professor who studies racial profiling, was arrested for “loud and tumultuous” conduct after officers responded to his residence to investigate a possible “B&E” (breaking and entering). Supposedly a white female passerby saw gates and his African American driver trying to force open the front door. Gates had just returned from a trip to China to find his door swelled shut.

A Cambridge PD officer arrived to investigate. At this point the stories that the PD and Gates offer begin to differ. Gates claims tat he was arrested for no reason and that the officers were there because of racial profiling. The PD maintains that they had to investigate a crime and that Gates did not allow an officer into the house to investigate. Further the PD says that Gates  did not provide a state issued ID, only a Harvard University ID. While the officer was trying to obtain ID, Gates allegedly began asking for the officer’s badge and name. After the officer entered the house and obtained proper ID he threatened the officer, “You don’t know who your messing with.” Gates followed the officer outside and continued to berate him. At that point the officer arrested Gates for a public disorder crime (read the Gates Arrest Report).

Is this racial profiling as nearly everyone claims it to be? Racial profiling means that an officer stops, detains, or arrests a person solely on the basis of their race. Or is this a case of racial discrimination? That is, was Gates singled out for disparate treatment by the Cambridge Police, or more specifically Sgt. Crowely? Would  a white professor have been treated the same way?

Based on my professional experience I cannot say that I find the police report satisfactory. In CA, anyway, there would be little or no precedent to make an arrest. I would also hope that an arrest report dealing with “sensitive” person would have more detail. That the District Attorney’s Office dismissed the charges does not help. It does not mean that Sgt. did not have probable cause for an arrest, but it does imply that the case could not have been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. It also looks really bad from a public relations point of view.

But is this profiling or discrimination? I don’t think that can be adjudicated from the report or Professor Gate’s version of the events. From a working deputies point of view I can agree with many aspects of how Sgt. Crowely handled the situation. He has the right to detain a person for a reasonable amount of time to investigate a possible crime in progress. A person coming to the door and saying they are a resident is not sufficient to satisfy in most officers minds that no crime is occurring. Asking  for Government issued ID that proves someone is a resident is a common investigative technique. Someone refusing to give ID while legally detained is a real problem. It is generally problem to start arguing with an officer and deman

For example, last night (7/21/09) I responded to a noise complaint of a party with underage drinking.  I walk around the house, establish that there is unreasonably loud noise and I can smell the odor of alcohol coming from the residence. I look through the window and see people who look to be under 21. I knock on the door and a person under 21 answers the door. I ask to come inside after explaining why I am there. I am denied. I request identification from which ever minor lives at the house. The woman who answered the door first tells me “get out of my house” and then refuses to give me identification.

What to do? I explain again that I have to conduct an investigation and determine whether or not minor’s are being furnished with alcohol. I also need to make sure the noise is lowered. I explain that I have a right and an obligation to be in the house. The 19 year old proclaims, “My dad is a lawyer and you should leave.”  I also explain the consequences for impeding the investigation and finally gain the compliance of the white rich 19 year old daughter of a lawyer.

The point is this, I did whatever I could to de-escalate the situation and not make an arrest. My job was to stop the noise and ensure not alcohol was being furnished to minors. If I can get out without an arrest, I have done my job. Could it have escalated to an arrest, absolutely. But I give this example so that others will see some of the reasoning behind why the Gates incident could escalate to an arrest without original crime being founded. But this still doesn’t answer the question of whether Gates was discriminated against. I also don’t think that the claim that Gate’s arrest is prima facie evidence for “profiling.” That is not a logical argument (P.1 Gates is a black man. P.2 Gates is a well respected black man. P.3 Gates was arrested. P.4 Sometimes black men are arrested because of their skin color. C.1 Therefore Gates was arrested as a result of racial profiling.)

Are there other explanations for what happened other than racial profiling? Yes. Based on what we know, the officer did not profile. He had a witness who had facts about a specific suspect. The officer did his job and investigated. However, does that mean that the witness, a white woman, was not influenced by race? Social psycholoical research shows that people are influenced by unconscious biases regarding race. Likely the white witness was hyper-vigilant in her assesment of Gate’s trying to get into the house because of deeply embedded stereotypes about black men being criminals. This is very likely the case, but that is not the same a profiling by police.

It is also equally possible that Gates, tired from  a trip back from China, was exhausted and irratable and escalated the situation. He may have also been frustrated, as a black man who has dealt with a legacy of racism, that a white police officer was trying to enter HIS home. It is also possible that the Officer escalated the situation by not receiving the deference he expects from a upper middle class black man. You ask me and this can equally well be explained as being about masculinity. Could this not have been any more about two men in a pissing contest than it was a story of racial profiling? Gates committed the crime of “contempt of cop” and was arrested. The role of deference in relations between men, especially in police-citizen encounters, has been very well described by sociologists and criminologists. When either party feels disrespected, tensions rise and arrests are more likely.

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