Review Shows No Racial Bias In Cambridge Arrests

Let’s review the story again: It’s July 2009. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. comes home from a trip to China. The door to his house is stuck, so he and his driver — who is also black — try to force it open. A woman walking by is alarmed and convinces someone with a cell phone to call 911. James Crowley — a white sergeant from the Cambridge Police Department — comes to investigate.

Gates tells Crowley that he lives in the house and Crowley asks him for identification to prove it. Meantime, Gates asks Crowley for his name and badge number.

“Why are you not responding to me?” Gates recalled asking Crowley. “Are you not responding to me because you’re a white police officer and I’m a black man?”

In this photo taken by a neighbor on July 16, 2009, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is arrested at his Cambridge home. (AP)

In the police report, Crowley says he did respond, but Gates continued to ask for his name. And Gates allegedly called Crowley a racist. The sergeant arrested the 58-year-old professor for disorderly conduct.

Disorderly conduct is a highly subjective and discretionary type of arrest. Experts say it can be a good indicator of racial bias in a police department.

But a new review of such arrests, conducted by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, finds no evidence of racial bias in the Cambridge Police Department.

David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on racial profiling, vetted the study’s findings.

“What we see here is that at least as far as the use of the disorderly conduct statute, race does not seem to play a role in who gets arrested and who doesn’t,” Prof. Harris said.

The study analyzed disorderly conduct arrests in the department going back five years. It found that 57 percent of the people arrested were white and 34 percent were black. The racial breakdown of arrests almost exactly mirrored the racial composition of the population that Cambridge police investigated for disorderly conduct.

In many ways, the study shows that Gates’ arrest was an aberration. Most people arrested for disorderly conduct in Cambridge are much younger and are arrested in busy public squares — not on their front porch.

Gates did have one thing in common with many arrested for disorderly conduct: He talked back to police. More than 60 percent of those arrested for disorderly conduct involved some sort of inflammatory speech.

Some citizen advocates argue that mouthing off to police isn’t enough to warrant putting someone in jail, and that it violates freedom of speech. But police argue that there’s always behavior that goes along with talking back that could trigger wider social disorder.

After the Gates arrest, Cambridge Police Department did its own study of disorderly conduct arrests and concluded that there’s no pattern of racial profiling in the department.

“All too often, police administrators have said that that doesn’t exist within our police department,” said Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas. “Now we can demonstrate in very clear terms and through our actions, which I think speak much louder than our words, that that type of activity is not taking place within the city.”

Haas wouldn’t answer direct questions about the Gates arrest and Crowley’s conduct, but Crowley did issue a statement.

“I have always known that the accusations of racism leveled against me were false,” he wrote. “I have never and will never use race to affect how I do my job.”

But for others who have examined this case, the study doesn’t explain everything.

For University of Nebraska Professor Sam Walker, these findings don’t eliminate the possibility that conscious or unconscious racial bias influenced Gates’ arrest.

“The major finding points us in the direction of focusing on this one particular officer,” Prof. Walker said, referring to Crowley.

For example, the study doesn’t examine the arrest history of Sgt. Crowley. He only made one disorderly conduct arrest during the five-year period — Gates.

Prof. Walker thinks it’s curious that the only time Crowley arrested anyone on this charge, it was a black man on his front porch.

But Prof. Harris doesn’t make much of Crowley’s single disorderly arrest. He says we don’t know enough about Crowley’s work history and assignments. Still, he says the study can’t settle the debate about what happened during Gates’ arrest.

“These numbers, this data can’t tell us anything about the individual facts of that day, about what happened, about what was in the mind of the two men that were there,” he said. “Race could very well still have played a role in that sense.”

Perhaps no study could answer those questions. But, based on this study, there is good evidence that dispels the idea that Cambridge police disproportionately arrest blacks for disorderly conduct.

More:

• Listen: Constructive Dialogue Has Followed Gates Arrest, Says Prof. Ogletree