President Obama said during a news conference this evening that a police officer in Cambridge, Mass., had “acted stupidly” last week when he arrested a prominent Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his own home after Mr. Gates angrily accused him of racism.
The confrontation at first led the local authorities to file disorderly-conduct charges against Mr. Gates, a well-known black-studies scholar, but on Tuesday the charges were dropped. In the incident, the officer was called to Mr. Gates’s house by a report of a burglary in progress. But what a neighbor had seen as a break-in was actually Mr. Gates and a taxi driver trying to open his front door, which was jammed shut.
After the police officer questioned his identity, Mr. Gates grew angry, declaring that the officer had only assumed he was a burglar “because I’m a black man in America.” The dispute grew more heated, and Mr. Gates was arrested. Sharply differing views of the incident, and who was right or wrong, have since crowded the comment pages of Web sites and sparked a national debate. Mr. Gates has demanded that the police officer apologize, and the officer has refused to do so.
Mr. Obama had called the news conference to urge the passage of proposals to overhaul the health-care system, but he showed no reluctance to answer a question, the last of the evening, about how the police had treated Mr. Gates, who is a personal friend of the president.
“I don’t know—not having been there and not seeing all the facts—what role race played in that,” Mr. Obama said, “but I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and No. 3, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately—that’s just a fact.”
Mr. Obama noted the “incredible progress that has been made” in race relations in the United States and cited himself as “testimony to the progress.” But that doesn’t mean the issue is resolved. “Even when there are honest misunderstandings,” he said, “the fact that blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently and oftentime for no cause casts suspicion even when there is good cause. And that’s why I think the more that we’re working with local law enforcement to improve policing techniques so that we’re eliminating potential bias, the safer everybody is going to be.”
