Matthew Daly

Two stories about Michelle Obama in the news today. Two!

As rivka points out, the AP ran a story about the dress the First Lady wore at the state dinner that the reporter described as "flesh-colored", and runs a picture next to it that makes it very very clear that it is not the color of flesh at all. Sheesh, it's been almost fifty years since Crayola picked up the clue phone on this one, so what the hell is going on at the AP editor's desk? Frankly, it seems to me that even a healthy white person oughtn't have flesh of that particular shade.

And I refuse to look, but according to the news, if you did a Google image search of Michelle Obama this morning, the top result would have been a crudely altered picture that portrays her as a monkey. Again, you can't make me look. Google initially resisted calls to fix this problem, saying 'We have, in general, a bias toward free speech', and the only reason the problem was remedied from what I can gather is that the original blog took down the image (which isn't too surprising if, in fact, it was viewed and linked by enough people in the world to get it to the top of Google's scoring algorithm).

I like free speech too, but that isn't what this is about. If someone does an image search for Michelle Obama, and Google's top scored image is not a picture of Michelle Obama, then there is something wrong with Google's scoring algorithm, and pretending that you are not responsible for the relevance of your search results is highly disingenuous. By all means, keep a link to the picture and tag it so that it does very well if someone searches for "Michelle Obama racist monkey infantile". But you've managed the web search so that the entire top page of Obama's search is filled with non-pranks, and the rest of your searches need to catch up.

I keep on thinking "Oh, I'm late to this story, so I'll keep my thoughts to myself." But, damn, the story has legs, so in I'll jump.

The one thing that I have no interest in is whether James Crowley is a racist. I don't know the answer to those questions (nearly nobody does), and moreover I don't care. Like Jay Smooth says, it's the Bermuda Triangle of conversations. If he is a racist, then he should have the professionalism to leave it at home when he is an on-duty police officer. And even if he would have arrested a white law-abiding person of interest in a felony investigation who was uncooperative and belligerent, then he shouldn't. Let's hold him accountable for his specific actions instead of laying out a rhetorical snare so broad that he and the Cambridge Police Department can slip out of it.

I am sorely disappointed by Crowley. I don't have all the facts either, but assuming that the most charitable version of the story is the incident report that Crowley filed (the quotations that follows are directly from that report), it portrays an abuse of power in at least two different areas. The first is a failure to identify yourself when asked. By Crowley's own admission, he "began" to supply the information several times and then switched to a refusal to answer because "I had provided it at his request two separate times." In other words, he knew that he had not provided the information. So you pull out a piece of paper and a pen and write down your name and badge number and the incident report number and hand it to him; you've provided the information even though he's still yelling at you. The second is what clearly seems to be a deliberate escalation to get him arrested instead of defusing the situation. Advising someone "to calm down", um, never works, the repeated tactics to move the conversation outside is evidently necessary because someone isn't engaged in disorderly conduct if they're in their house, and FFS you can defuse the situation by getting in your car and driving away along with the rest of the law enforcement community that is backing you up. The police are the majority of the disorder in the neighborhood, and the fact that you couldn't defuse the situation short of arresting and handcuffing a middle-aged man who needs a cane to walk speaks very poorly of you and the department that trained you.

But I don't get Gates either. I'm not going to tell the African American community or anyone else that the police are your pals, because they're not. They're not my pals either. Neither are they our masters. What they are is a necessary tool to allow us to live in a free society without it devolving into anarchism or barbarism. When a neighbor suspects that your house is being burgled and they send the police to investigate, that is a good thing. Not good like a trip to Disneyland, but good like a trip to the dentist. There is some discomfort, and maybe there are some demeaning instructions if you care to think of it that way, but it's someone who is on your team. And when I say "on your team", I mean both that he wants to keep people from breaking into your house (again), and he wants to get off your property as soon as possible. And the more efficiently you show him your ID and chuckle about how you were breaking into your own house, the sooner you get on with your day and he gets back to the doughnut shop. If you're feeling particularly sociable, you can thank him for arriving so quickly and wish him luck in catching a real criminal next time, or even introduce yourself to your neighbor who is standing outside. If dealing with a police officer doesn't leave you in a sociable mood, then don't. But the fact that this took more than three minutes (plus whatever he had to pay Charles Ogletree) is entirely on Gates' shoulders. There is a huge plate of problems between law enforcement and minority communities, but unloading on the beat cop standing in front of you right now doesn't seem like an auspicious way of creating a better world.

The whole thing seems like two guys having rough days who decide to play an alpha male heirarchy contest. The African-American man plays the "do you know who I am?" card, the preening cop calls the bluff and loses. Then in the next round, the President weighs in but is batted down by the police unions. The only really good idea I've heard is that Obama has invited Gates and Crowley to the White House for a beer. Maybe he should declare August to be National Calm Down And Share A Cold One With Someone Who Pisses You Off Month.