By Maggie Mulvihill, Sarah Moffit and Carroll Cole
Nearly a year after Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested for disorderly conduct at his Cambridge home, a special panel of law enforcement experts and academics released a 60-page report today stating the arrest was avoidable.
“This incident could have been resolved quickly and peaceably,” said Chuck Wexler, Executive Director of the Police Executive Research Forum and a member of the 12-member Cambridge Review Committee.
President Barack Obama, a Gates’ friend, said last year the Cambridge Police “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates.
The criminal charge was dropped by the Middlesex District Attorney’s office within days of the incident.
The review committee was formed by Police Commissioner Robert C. Haas following the July 16, 2009 arrest of Gates, a prominent black professor. Gates claimed the white sergeant, James Crowley, who arrested him did so because he was black. At the time, Crowley was responding to a 911 call about two men possibly breaking into the house.
The committee’s report also backs up findings released earlier this month by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting demonstrating the Cambridge Police have had no pattern of racial bias with disorderly conduct arrests within the past five years.
Wexler said while race did factor into the Gates arrest, issues such as class and police authority also came into play during the encounter between Crowley and Gates.
Gates has declined requests to be interviewed by NECIR. His attorney, Harvard Law Professor Charles J. Ogletree, is currently promoting a book entitled: “The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America.” In the book, Ogletree compares the Gates arrest to the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, which led to race riots. He has acknowledged he never reviewed arrest data from Cambridge police nor did he interview Cambridge Police officials or Crowley before writing his book.