Gates Report Irks Council

At a special meeting held yesterday, the Cambridge City Council expressed concerns about the Cambridge Review Committee’s report on the controversial arrest of Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates in July 2009.

The councillors criticized the methodology employed by the 12-person committee of academics and law enforcement personnel and questioned the effectiveness and relevance of the report, which concluded that miscommunication between the parties resulted in Gates’ arrest. The report, released this June, also emphasized the importance of communication between police and community members.

The encounter between Gates and arresting officer Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department sparked a national dialogue over the possible role of racial profiling in the arrest. Some councillors said they were disappointed the report did not investigate the role of race in the arrest.

“I think racism is a sensitive issue but it’s not something we should run away from,” Councillor Leland Cheung said.

Councillor Kenneth E. Reeves said he wanted the committee to recognize that racial profiling employed by police officers was “real.”

“The question that this report does not want to answer... [is] can you get arrested in your house for talking loud?” Reeves said.

“We can’t seem to get an answer.”

Most councillors raised objections about the process by which the report was compiled. According to Reeves, the committee did not consult the council or the public.

Reeves said that the committee meetings, while open to the public, were held during workday hours in hard-to-find places. He also said that the group did not respond to his requests to talk about the report.

Vice Mayor Henrietta J. Davis said that despite its shortcomings, she thought the report acknowledged “a lot of tough lessons,” and that those lessons were being incorporated at the police  department.

“I learned a lot from the report,” Davis said.

Councillors said they were concerned that the report did not present steps to prevent an incident like Gates’ arrest from happening again. They said that while the report presented what Cheung called a “Kumbaya” moment of reconciliation between the police department and the community, it did not recommend substantive steps for improvement.

“What are we going to do next?” Cheung asked. “How do we reconcile differences in [the] account from Crowley and Gates, and how is that going to inform [our] way of policing going forward?”

—Staff Sirui Li can be reached at sli@college.harvard.edu.