Of course, Obama and the left are playing the race card on this one. I would be ok with that if it were really about race, but it isn’t, not in the least. The quote that best summarizes what this was really about is here:

“The actions of the Cambridge Police Department, and in particular, Sgt. Joseph Crowley, were 100 percent correct,” said Hugh Cameron, president of the Massachusetts Coalition of Police. “He was responding to a report of two men breaking into a home. The police cannot just drive by the house and say, ‘Looks like everything is OK.’

“Sgt. Crowley was carrying out his duty as a law enforcement officer protecting the property of Professor Gates, and he was accused of being a racist,” Cameron added. “The situation would have been over in five minutes if Professor Gates cooperated with the officer. Unfortunately, the situation we are in now is the environment police work in now.”

Jim Carnell, a union representative for the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, said cops are “furious at the way Crowley is being vilified.”

“The officer’s mindset when going in there is, ‘Why was he breaking down the door?’ Maybe there is a restraining order in place. Maybe Harvard University, who owns the house, changed the locks for some reason. The officer’s job is to make sure everything is on the up-and-up,” Carnell said.

“Mr. Gates should be grateful that the police responded and explained himself with some civil discourse,” Carnell added. “It would have ended there. Instead, his arrogant, combative behavior gave the cops cause to wonder that something else was going on.”

That’s precisely what I thought when I first read about the story. Why was he breaking into his own home? Was there something or someone there that he wasn’t supposed to be around, or was he evicted or something? It just didn’t add up. And it didn’t have anything to do with race.

Now, we’ve all locked ourselves out of our homes at one time or another. Without fail, some neighbor will call the police or, at the very least, come over to see what you’re doing and who you are. While some people hate having neighbors like that, I don’t mind at all. I’d RATHER have neighbors like that, to be honest, who are willing to call the police if they think something is going on, rather than just sitting back and saying “It’s none of my business.”

As for those who are saying that once Gates produced his i.d., the matter should have ended there, well, that’s true to a certain extent…it SHOULD have. But we’re not even certain that he did produce i.d. at all (I’ve seen articles that say he did, and some that say he didn’t). And even if he did, it didn’t answer the question of why he was breaking into his own home in the first place. Did he just say “I locked myself out of the house, officer” or did he say “It’s none of your damn business”? If it was the first, then that would have answered their questions (or most of them, at least). If it was the second one (and I’ve seen some pieces that say that’s basically the way he reacted), then that doesn’t help matters and, in fact, raises more questions that need to be answered.

Consider this*: say Gates was going through a bitter divorce. He’s been ordered not to have contact with his soon-to-be ex-wife. In a fit of rage or whatever, he decides to go to the house she’s living in (which he owns), break in, and then beat the crap out of her or whatever. The police respond (before he’s had a chance to do anything but break in), are told “it’s my house” and shown proof that it is his home. Leaving it at that, they then depart, leaving him to do what he came to do (beat is estranged wife). Do you think the left would be happy with that scenario? Of course not, they would be screaming bloody murder over it (and justifiably so).

Yet for all intents and purposes, the police would have done exactly what Gates and the left wanted them to do, albeit in a completely different situation. They would have responded to a possible breaking and entering, told that he was the owner, and then left without asking any further questions, leaving any potential victims to their fate. The fact that there was no victim or “other situation” is beside the point. The police had no way of knowing what was going on unless they investigated why he was breaking into his own home.

In addition to that, he was openly and overtly hostile to them asking him a few simple questions. Seems to me the only racism here was by Gates, who assumed that simply because he’s black, he’s being unfairly treated. The police would have done the exact same thing whether he was white, black, gay, or a combination of all three. In other words, he wasn’t arrested because his color was the issue, he was arrested because he chose to make his color the issue. If he would have simply told them that he locked himself out of his house, showed his i.d., and left it at that, that would have been the end of it. Instead, he decided to play the race card. And this was the result.

*I want to make it clear that I’m not suggesting Gates is getting divorced or anything like that, nor am I calling him a “wife beater” or the like. I’m simply pointing out that there could have been something else going and that the police had every right — indeed, it was their duty — to find out what the situation really was before leaving the premises.

And, for the record, I don’t think the officer in question is a racist. The facts prove he is not.

Update: In thinking about this further, I was reminded of Chris Rock’s famous comedy bit “How To Not Get Your A$$ Kicked By The Police”. Comedy and race-baiting issues aside, it does apply here, in that you won’t have a problem with the law unless you give them problems to begin with. In other words, unless you are indeed breaking the law and have something to hide, just use some common sense and you’ll be fine and the situation will be resolved to everybody’s satisfaction.

(Warning: strong language!):

Update #2: Newsbusters managed to save the police report before the Boston Globe scrubbed it from their site. If it’s true (and I have no doubt that it is, as the neighbor evidently backs up the story), then it is Gates who was the problem here, and not the police.

Update #3: This just keeps getting better and better:

The white police sergeant criticized by President Barack Obama for arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his Massachusetts home is a police academy expert on racial profiling.

Cambridge Sgt. James Crowley has taught a class on racial profiling for five years at the Lowell Police Academy after being hand-picked for the job by former police Commissioner Ronny Watson, who is black, said Academy Director Thomas Fleming.

“I have nothing but the highest respect for him as a police officer. He is very professional and he is a good role model for the young recruits in the police academy,” Fleming told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The course, called “Racial Profiling,” teaches about different cultures that officers could encounter in their community “and how you don’t want to single people out because of their ethnic background or the culture they come from,” Fleming said.

So much for that meme, eh?

But wait, it gets better. Gates still won’t back off and admit he went off the deep end, here:

Gates has said he was “outraged” by the arrest. He said the white officer walked into his home without his permission and only arrested him as the professor followed him to the porch, repeatedly demanding the sergeant’s name and badge number because he was unhappy over his treatment.

“This isn’t about me; this is about the vulnerability of black men in America,” Gates said.

He said the incident made him realize how vulnerable poor people and minorities are “to capricious forces like a rogue policeman, and this man clearly was a rogue policeman.”

Here’s a little tip, courtesy of my 40 years of living in the real world and dealing with people all the time: when someone says something like “this isn’t about the money”, it sure as hell is. Likewise, when they say “this isn’t about me”, I guarantee you it is (Obama must say that exact phrase twice a week, I think, and we know it’s all about him, always was and always will be). This entire episode is about Mr. Gates and his knee-jerk liberal reaction, and how fellow liberals will support him without question, up to and including the President of the United States.

And yet they have the nerve to call us conservatives “sheep”. Pfft.

Others commenting:

Patterico
Michelle Malkin
Stop The ACLU
Don Surber
Hot Air (here and here)
Gateway Pundit
Jammie Wearing Fool
The Other McCain