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Gates 911 caller never mentioned race
By adamg on Mon, 07/27/2009 - 7:40am
Cambridge Police only acknowledge that after the woman's been dragged through the mud for a week - and after the woman's lawyer has a chat with the Globe.
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Another lesson here
I saw a considerable number of commenters condemning this woman, as well as her being outed after the paper made a point to redact her name as a witness/RP.
Now it appears that she was even more "color-blind" than I think one would expect.
We keep getting reminded of the folly of jumping to conclusions.
BTW, I wouldn't blame CPD for not addressing that question sooner; it appears that they've been quite busy this last week.
Color Blind? Or just blind.
What else did she not see? A whole lot.
two gentlemen with suitcases
Whalen says "two gentlemen with suitcases" (paraphrased) in her 911 call. There's no mention of race or backpacks. Those identifying elements must have come later.
Notice the question the 911 call attendant asks. He wants Whalen to profile the suspects. Instead of asking her to describe the two gentlemen, he asks is they are black, white or Hispanic like those is the only three choices. Are 911 attendants not trained to ask an open ended question: Please describe all the characteristics of these two gentlemen you saw.
Dispatch acts likes it's Whalen problem and exhibits frustration with her that she doesn't have it all figured out. In the union press conference last Friday we also learned that Crowley was in a hurry to get back to the station. I wonder what effect other work pressures on Crowley factored into his decision to arrest Gates rather than leave the premises B&E investigation over.
This story is a red herring
Anyone who has actually READ the police report would have suggested that she made mention of his color on the 911 call. But I guess I shouldn't expect too much, half of the rest of the nation is still calling her "a neighbor". I'm sure it doesn't help that between the Globe and CPD, the full information in the police report keeps getting redacted, carved up, and spit out in lesser and lesser useful bits. The report reads:
According to Crowley, she told him they were black when he arrived on the scene. You know, after she must have watched the driver get in his limo and leave...but didn't seem to think that was worth mentioning. Whether this is racist, put Crowley in a particular mindset, or anything else is anyone's guess. But to put out that the 911 call was color-blind isn't really the point of the matter...just dead fish.
So
Whether or not this story is a red herring, would you agree that we keep being reminded of the folly of jumping to conclusions?
Follies
It would be interesting to see where the idea started.
Personally?
I'm constantly reminded of the absolutely horrendous investigative and fact-checking ability of our news media today.
As news breaks, I'm still going to comment. I think it's pretty clear that the entirety of blogdom would get a bit bogged down if every sentence were prepended with "Assuming we're dealing with the truth..." or "Given the facts as they stand now...".
If we could fuel the world on the "I told you so's" of the modern era, we'd never burn another drop of oil again. The bigger problem isn't acknowledging that we're jumping to conclusions, but to stop considering them final conclusions. A more rational, logical thought process would accept that the premises might change and thus affect the result. Unfortunately, for the majority of America, they have been trained to listen to the 24 hour news cycle (and I'm not even sure it lasts 24 hours any more these days) and stick to their first conclusion (the Bush "shoot from the hip" approach that he wore like a dime-store Sheriff's badge...and got him elected for being just like the people).
So, that's what I'd agree to. We need to expand people's capacity to adjust to situations as they change and not root in at the first sign of a thought pattern that fits what they wanted from the data.
she should be commended
So many people see odd things in the neighborhood and don't do anything out of indifference/lazyness/doubt/etc.
Gates and CPD should thank her for being cautious and making the call. I'd rather have the cops show up for a false alarm rather than have my place broken into b/c someone couldn't bother to call the PD.
Small, but important correction
Sorry, somewhere in my self-editing, I dropped the "not" from the first sentence. It should read:
"Anyone who has actually READ the police report would not have suggested that she made mention of his color on the 911 call."
Does she get to have a beer
Does she get to have a beer at the White House too?
Unredacted 911 and radio dispatch audio available
Cambridge is having a press conference right now and has announced that they will be making the 911 and radio dispatch audio available with nothing redacted except Whalen's cell phone number. I imagine it will be up on the web in an hour or two.
Listen now
Channel 25 posts the audio.
wow........
Thanks for the link. Just listened. I'm not sure what to make of the 911 call. But it is not what I expected to hear. Man!
I just read the AP transcript
It's an ordinary 911 call by a stereotypical Cambridge person who is careful not to jump to conclusions nor inadvertently lead someone else to.
I hope that the people who criticized and hassled this woman because they, ironically, jumped to conclusions-- now feel humbled, and are less likely to make that mistake in the future.
a stereotypical Cambridge person
What would that be exactly?
Uh, not quite
Neither the Globe nor the Herald quite seems able to tease out what is interesting about this. The police report does not say she mentioned the two men's race in her 911 call. But Crowley says she definitely mentioned it when he spoke with her at the scene — and he tells the Herald he's sticking by that. See my analysis.
This lady is trying to be
This lady is trying to be helpful and the dispatcher seems annoyed because with her.
The dispatcher didn't ask her to describe the two gentlemen (as an open question) he asked her to profile them.
I found two things striking
One, as you say, the repeated push by the dispatcher to characterize the individuals observed as either Black, White, or Hispanic (is there a form they have to fill out with those three options?). The most she will say is one is maybe Hispanic (I guess that's the Moroccan taxi driver?), and she didn't really see the other one. Strange how that got transformed into "two black men..."
Two, how she tries to make it clear that she's not at all sure why the men pushed the door, and it may be that they live in the house.
It looks like a lot got lost in translation.
What got lost in translation?
What got lost in translation?
The part
Where Whalen described them as "two gentlemen with suitcases" was somehow translated to "two black men with backpacks."
Yeah. Thought the same thing.
Yes, the dispatcher sounded like a jerk to me. I was surprised. The woman was just trying to be helpful. The dispatcher kept pumping her for information that she did not have. Glad she stood her ground, though.
He asked her
he asked her if the dudes were white, black, or hispanic. Apparently that is profiling?
If so, we as a society need to come up with alternative ways of describing how someone looks.
Any suggestions?
Suggestion
"Can you describe them?"
I agree.
Let the person say what they saw, instead of offering categories.
I believe he was prompting
I believe he was prompting her, to move it along. This is 911, after all, and he was getting ready to dispatch something like "Possible B&E in progress, 17 Ware St., RP states 2 black [or white, or Hispanic] males entered the house. RP is waiting on sidewalk."
Some of the easiest descriptions are "black male," "white male," "group of teenagers." After that, people might have noticed things like age (if not group of teens), height, weight, clothing (e.g., "dark-colored hoodie"), etc. You may have seen police logs that have lots of "BM" as the only description.
If by prompting
If by prompting you mean asking what racial profile the person fits then yeah, absolutely.
In this case, I believe it's
In this case, I believe it's descriptive; I wouldn't call it "profiling."
For example, I don't think a decision tree was going to branch like this: "Black?! We're deploying SWAT. Are you in a safe location now?" OR "White? Oh, that's a relief. Listen, don't worry about it, ma'am. Just call 911 again if you see a *black* man, OK?"
I think they just wanted to get as much description as was practical, to relay to the responding officers.
It most assuredly is not
It most assuredly is not racial profiling collected to be used for racist purposes but it is, by definition, racial profiling.
There are multiple definitions of "profiling"
Some of them are loaded. You're going to have to say which definition you mean, and we'll see whether it's a loaded one, and go from there.
"Discrimination" is another such word.
But we still have this skin color issue.
If I say, "Describe them."
And you say, "Their skin was black (white, whatever)", I'm not sure if we are coming up with a better outcome.
It's better because you are
It's better because you are not leading the witness with the power of suggestion and so better results.
That backpack reference from Crowley's police report sticks out like a sore thumb as does Crowley's description of the conversation he had with Whalen in front of Gates house.
If that conversation truly did not take place then everything in Crowley's report becomes suspect.
Weird that CPD pulled that part of the report from the PDF they published... vanished like a fart in wind. Good thing a quick thinking blogger on UHUB (not me) had a copy in his cache. Some of it is here.
not offensive
It's not offensive for the 911 dispatcher to ask for a description of a person's skin color.
Spoke with her at the scene?
According to her, Crowley never spoke with her at the scene.
So did Crowley just make up this "two black men with backpacks" comment? What else did he make up?
What gives?
If it's true that Whalen's only interaction with police is the 911 call and not at the scene (which is what her lawyer claims without equivocation) then we need a better explanation of a few things from Crowley's report:
[1] Who Crowley must have just walked passed and ignored in spite of the fact he was told by the dispatcher the caller would be there. "I was told the caller was already outside'
Now. Gates comment of a "rogue" cop goes from ridiculous assertion to plausible, IMO.
rogue professor?
Perhaps Gates is a rogue professor? Yelling racist comments at the woman who called 911 is not exactly dignified or professional for the stature to which Dr. Gates has earned as a Harvard professor. Gates is trying to spin this as a 'teaching moment,' however instead of leading the way, he is hindering the effort with false accusations of racism which he has yet to retract.
Yelling racist comments at
Yelling racist comments at the woman who called 911 is not exactly dignified or professional for the stature to which Dr. Gates has earned as a Harvard professor.
What did Gates say to the Whalen? I don't remember reading anything that talked about a conversation between Gates and Whalen. Paste the link so we can read it.
Whalen was just a go-between
Here's the telling part to me:
It would appear from the 911 transcript on the Fox25 website that Whalen's role in this was to make the call for someone else (an elderly neighbor). Of course, now you have to wonder if the elderly neighbor didn't recognize Gates for some reason and freaked out about the color of their skin. Whalen seems to shrug off the idea that this was a break-in almost the entire time and is resigned to feed the dispatcher whatever information that dispatch asked for ("Is he hispanic?" "Um, beats me...uh, maybe?").
I have been on the phone to 911/dispatch before and told them flat out "I don't know" or only been able to describe their height or clothes when asked to identify the person I was calling about. I have never had a problem with them prompting me for answers the way this call reads out. Seems like that might have been half of the problem.
Why didn't Crowley's report also include anything from the original woman who stopped Whalen and asked her to call the police? Why didn't dispatch ask for that woman's information too since she was the initial witness? It seems like the entire affair was performed pretty stupidly.
my take
Why didn't Crowley's report also include anything from the original woman who stopped Whalen and asked her to call the police? Why didn't dispatch ask for that woman's information too since she was the initial witness? It seems like the entire affair was performed pretty stupidly.
It really doesn't matter who called or why they called. Crowley got the call as a "possible break in progress". At that point, its up to the officers on scene to get the witness information and caller information if there actually was a serious crime.
The crime was not that serious, so Crowley doesn't need to write a 3 page report like he might if there were an actual break.
Could he at least try the truth?
Do you think his version stacks up against what you can hear from the radio broadcasts and 911 call at all in the beginning?
Part of the problem with "contempt of cop" is that it's never "that serious" (your words) of a crime and so it's he-said/cop-said and whatever the cop says goes if you try to fight the injustice. That should never be the case.
Im just saying
The initial race or baggage description isn't really important here. He would have no reason to make that stuff up, and its not important enough to go back and check the tapes for the original call taker either. Thats what you would do for a report like this. Those facts don't matter. You don't need to waste police time or report writing hours checking facts like that. And it doesn't seem like there would be a reason to lie about something like that if he were to lie.
Plus there were multiple other cops and witnesses that were there that I assume were in another part of the report or could at least be contacted or come forward.
The Other Tape
The female dispatcher who calls Crowley does not do a good job of relaying the information received from Whalen. She says "possible burglary, race unknown, possibly hispanic". She never explains who Whalen is or that Whalen was merely repeating what an old lady said and maybe thought it was the SP's house.
Clearly Crowley drove over there thinking there was a burglary taking place.
And there is no way he would assume the suspect was black, besides from his knowledge of racial statistics of previous cases.
Clearly Crowley drove over
Clearly Crowley drove over there thinking there was a possible burglary taking place.
And...
There might be more tapes. I don't hear any other units call off or respond and say that they have arrived. I highly doubt Crowley was the only one that got on the air and spoke with dispatch.
Maybe I didnt hear the right clips, or maybe the other tapes dont mean anything.
1R and 18
I'm not listening to the tape this second, but if I recall, "1R(?)" and "18" both call in and "Wagon" acknowledges that it has to go there towards the end.
I know that when Crowley is walking out of the house and arresting Gates, he magically disappears when dispatch tries to reach him and one of the other units tells dispatch to hold on (assumedly during the arrest).
handy reference
Whalen's attorney says Whalen doesn't speak with Crowley at the scene bur take a look at Gates incident report (below). Either Crowley spoke with someone else [white female] and/or he made some shit up about backpacks and/or he misremembered backpacks when he was told suitcases and/or he lied. I am trying to keep n open mind but there are clearly conflicting accounts that must be explained.
If you look on the Globe's website, you will not all of the incident report (below). It changed. Why?
One thing that Gates said sticks in my mind, "rogue" cop. Either Gates is unfairly accusing Crowley or he his has reasons.
Gates
Where is the older woman who asked Ms. Whalen to call the police? She is at fault here. She knew her neighbor Professor Gates, Ms. Whalen, I understand did not live in the block, she was a visitor in the area. If you go in this direction you will understand race relations is America and that I can help you with.