Police officials stood by the report in interviews over the weekend, but on Monday, Ms. Whalen’s lawyer said she had never mentioned race to Sergeant Crowley.
“She didn’t speak to Sergeant Crowley at the scene except to say, ‘I’m the one who called,’ ” said the lawyer, Wendy J. Murphy. “And he said, ‘Wait right there,’ and walked into the house. She never used the word black and never said the word ‘backpacks’ to anyone.”
So she never identified the two intruders as "black" adds a fact that may change how I view whether Gates or Crowley was more in the "right" in this embarassing episode -- will a shared beer at the White House make things all better? The article on the different worlds the different worlds lived in by Yalie and Harvard Prof. Skip Gates and Cambridge Police Officer Jim Crowley is interesting in how these two would seem to be unlikely participants in this "teachable moment."
I tend to be wary of law enforcement on the mainland when I'm traveling.
I also got called back to Airport security during the Legislative Session when flying from Maui to Oahu -- someone (I assumed a haole) identified me as the person who had taken a live bullet round out of my pocket and put it in one of the containers at the security line. The head security person skeptically questioned me about whether I had ever seen the bullet before -- muttering that he would be checking the video and see about that when I indicated I had not seen it before. I suppose I could have pulled a Skip Gates but I wanted to make my flight to Oahu and didn't want to cause a scene (the two Airport police officers watching nearby included the husband of a fellow Good Shepherd parishioner and a DOCARE officer I'd spoken to a few weeks before). So I just assumed that the head security person would have treated any traveler the same way and it wasn't because I wasn't profiled as a goatee'd bald, and brown skinned.
But I do admit being skeptical of TSA now.
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