Reply #33: I was going to leave it at that, until I saw the other response.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

As I clearly stated, poor decisions were made all around. The officer's poor decision does not exempt Dr. Gates' poor decision. Both were wrong.

Further, I actually agree with your comments about a free society and the need to safeguard against abuse of power. I share in your sentiment that police officers need to bear their responsibility well and need to rise above the kind of petty alpha-male conflict that occurred on the night in question. Consequently, this is also a reason that I am a proponent of the second amendment, albeit with significant controls in place, as I fear a society where only cops and criminals have weapons, as I fully trust neither.

But that's neither the point of controversy, nor the point of the article or the point of my post. What this article and my comments have to do with are the allegations of racial profiling and circumstances around Dr. Gates being arrested not for B&E, but for disorderly conduct (again, a poor decision, but probably not a racist one and probably not even an improper one, technically speaking). I look at this case and I see two men acting very stupidly, to borrow a word from our President. I don't see hate, I see idiocy and arrogance.

Further, this is an unbelievably mild example of abuse of power. Worse happens hundreds of times over every single day of the week. Is this example regrettable? Absolutely, but to place it so prominently completely belittles the experiences that millions of people are faced with each year and it undermines the cause, in my humble opinion. It's funny that I've seen the Duke Lacrosse case used as an example favorable to Gates in terms of institutionalized racism, because frankly, I see it as an analog to Gates of an abuse of police and law enforcement power (granted, the degrees of abuse involved a vastly different).

edited for typos