In advance, I ask your pardon for a rant I am unable or unwilling to suppress. Today’s White House Beer Summit On Race Relations And Police Practices has enraged me. Police Sergeant Crowley of the Cambridge PD didn’t deserve an invitation for beer at the White House, he needed an appointment for a deposition in a federal civil rights case in which he and his superiors were the named defendants. But according to the Trad MediaTM, all of Crowly’s vengefulness, his making an illegal arrest, his making a stupid, unjustifiable illegal arrest, his serving up a racist/classist illegal arrest of a person in his own home is now behind us. We’re past all of the ugliness of his conduct. It has now been chilled (unless you have to live with brutality and oppression on a daily basis) with some beer. And pretzels. This I hasten to point out might solve Police Sgt. Crowley’s immediate problem, including departmental discipline and federal civil rights action for damages, but it doesn’t solve my problem. Or the country’s. And I don’t think it solves Prof. Gates’s problem. It certainly doesn’t solve the US’s police problem. Not one bit.
