Sgt. Crowley's Unhappy Learning Experience

Sergeant Crowley Does His Job and Is Vilified for It!

A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.
Police.
Ah!
Sergeant & Police.
When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done,
A policeman’s lot is not a happy one, happy one.

Pirates of Penzance


Gilbert and Sullivan could have told Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge, MA, Police Department that his “lot is not a happy one,” but Crowley probably already knew that. He certainly knew it after properly investigating a suspected burglary on the afternoon of July 16th.

Acting on a report of a witness who saw ”two black males with backpacks” apparently breaking and entering a private home on Ware Street, Crowley did his assigned duty and sought to question one of the men. It ended up with his arresting the suspect for disorderly conduct.

The rest, as they say, is history, one more incident involving a black man, a white cop, and charges of racism against the cop for simply doing what he gets paid to do. This particular incident has taken on the trappings of a major brouhaha since the suspect turned out to be “renowned black scholar,” Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

Adding to the farce, black comedian Bill Cosby felt it incumbent to throw in his two cents, at first expressing his shock that the black president of the United States saw fit to jump into the fray during a health care news conference. (Cosby later retracted his shock.)

One must assume the matter somehow qualified as a health care issue.

The president admitted he didn’t know all the facts yet nevertheless saw fit to condemn the Cambridge P.D. and, by inference, Sgt. Crowley, for acting “stupidly” in performing their duty.

He then launched into a mini-diatribe on race relations, saying, “There’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact:” http://bit.ly/PFluz. (That link includes a video featuring Crowley.)

After it all hit the fan, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs semi-retracted Obama’s “stupidly” comment by saying, “Let me be clear, he was not calling the officer stupid.”

Of course not! It’s just the Cambridge P.D. he was calling stupid. That, too, is a fact.

Now, far be it from me to impugn the chief executive’s motives in calling anyone stupid. Nor would I dare question his manufacturing charges of racial profiling from a minor incident about which he knew next to nothing; he has a penchant for such things.

It struck me, though, that with all the problems on the nation’s plate right now, Obama still felt the need to stupidly and baselessly lambaste some cops.

The fact the matter involved a black may have played a part.

Anyway, the outraged Prof. Gates, who had noisily and verbally abused Sgt. Crowley and who . . .

(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com)