Dr. Henry Louis Gates Arrested

[DrPhil]

Originally Posted by AGDee

This whole debate kind of reminds me of what I was trying to tell my ex-husband once when he was griping about traffic tickets. When he gets pulled over, he gets really grouchy sounding, curt, gruff and everything he says has sort of an argumentative tone. When I get pulled over, I get timid, near tears, passive. Guess who gets more actual tickets?

HAHA. He does.

Part of that is also a gender effect.

[AGDee]

Yep, but I'm betting if he was really passive and apologetic instead of annoyed and agitated, he'd get different results at least some of the time.

I will not deny that there may have been some bias involved. Some cops are also more gruff than others. But, part of me thinks about the situations they walk into every day and I think they kind of have to walk into it with a confident, even aggressive attitude much of the time.

I just don't see this as cut and dry as some here apparently do. There is some responsibility on all their parts. Charges were dropped so the police realized their overreaction. It would be nice to see some personal responsibility modeled on Gates' part too. They should all apologize for the situation getting out of hand and move on.

ETA: My ex also then gripes about how awful the cops are for giving him tickets. I ask "were you really speeding?" and he'd say "well yeah" and I say "ok then, you earned that ticket fair and square" LOL. "I hate Taylor (local city here) cops, they always give me speeding tickets" . So, "Don't speed in Taylor"