Authorities in Cambridge, Mass., announced today that prosecutors there would not pursue disorderly-conduct charges brought against the prominent black-studies scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. last week after he exchanged words with police officers investigating a falsely reported burglary at his home.
The Cambridge police were called to Mr. Gates’s home last week after he and a taxi driver, whose help he had enlisted, were seen trying to force open the jammed front door of his house. A Boston Globe article quotes a police report on the incident as saying Mr. Gates became upset with the police at the scene, asking if they had assumed a burglary was in progress “because I’m a black man in America.”
When a police officer repeatedly asked Mr. Gates to step outside to talk, he shouted, “I’ll speak with your mama outside,” the police report said. The report said Mr. Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct for “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior.”
In a joint statement, the City of Cambridge and the Cambridge Police Department said the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office had agreed to their recommendation not to prosecute Mr. Gates over the incident. The statement said the Cambridge authorities and Mr. Gates had agreed that the incident “was regrettable and unfortunate” and that dropping charges “is a just resolution to an unfortunate set of circumstances.”
The Globe report says a lawyer for Mr. Gates declined to say whether he thought racial bias had played a role in the arrest of Mr. Gates, who is director of Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research.
