The Czabe has one. And it’s a doozy.

Also, not totally implausible.

It’s bad enough that I have to side with Gates, but now I’m siding with Obama, too. Ugh.

I’m a little troubled by how quick some people (particularly on the right) are to make Gates’ behavior the crux of the issue. Even without videotape, I think it’s reasonable to surmise that Gates acted badly (though not illegally). From there, the general consensus on the right seems to be of a piece with this bit of folk wisdom from Tom Maguire:

Back in 1986 I was in Beverly Hills for a friend’s wedding. While out jogging at about 9 in the morning I was hassled by a cop for jaywalking and threatened with a trip downtown since I didn’t have any ID. A trip “downtown” in shorts and a t-shirt really didn’t appeal to me or fit into the wedding schedule, so rather than summon forth the memory of centuries of British oppression of the Irish I employed the power of positive groveling. Don’t cop an attitude with the cops – is that rule too complicated?

The general assumption being that if you’re rude to a police officer, they then have carte blanche to abuse the law. This seems like an awfully dangerous idea to accept.

Let’s leave aside the First Amendment implications for a minute. (Even though they’re pretty substantial, haven’t a lot of American soldiers died so that you can cop any sort of attitude you want towards the police, so long as you don’t break the law?) The problem with Maguire’s dictum is that it demotes police officers to the level of private citizens, giving them no greater expectation or accountability.

That simply can’t be. Police officers are entrusted with the state-sanctioned use of force. We give them the power to arrest and kill. When police employ any of their powers, they do so not on their own behalf, but on behalf of the whole of society. (Remember that criminal offenses are, properly understood, offenses against society itself. That’s why, in a murder trial, it’s the state against the defendant, not the victim against the defendant.)

Because police are acting not as private citizens but as agents of the state, they should be expected to enforce the law fairly and dispassionately at all times. Not just during business hours. Not just when they had a good night’s sleep. Not just when the citizen in question is especially winsome or accommodating. If an offender breaks the law, groveling and sniveling before an officer should not affect the officer’s judgment. By the same token, someone who does not break the law should not be able to change an officer’s judgment by being rude and inconsiderate. The law is the law is the law. (And besides, as I said yesterday, the police don’t do this stuff out of the kindness of their heart. Cops are paid precisely to endure such abuse in the course of their duties. That’s why they’re compensated and don’t work as volunteers.)

All of that said, the consensus view seems to be that, political theory aside, in the real world one must expect police officers to be incapable making such fair-minded, dispassionate distinctions. Steve Sailer writes,

[Yo]u don’t make serious unfounded accusations at a cop if you don’t want something bad to happen to you. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is.

But is that really true? Are no police officers capable of tolerating a rude civilian, making an even-handed judgment about the law, and concluding an encounter without letting their egos take control the situation (leading to poor applications of the law)? I very much doubt that. And if even one police officer would have been capable of handling the Gates situation better, then we must expect all officers to live up to that standard. The “that’s just the way the world works” shrug we’re seeing is the worst sort of defining deviancy down. That way lies the police state.

Update: More great moments in policing here.

In the comments, Anonymous Super Trooper, who in the past has claimed to be a cop, begins his argument by asserting, “Gates did break the law.” Once again, Anonymous Super Trooper does more to injure his cause than to assist it. Gates did not break the law. Gates is not even alleged to have broken the law. The police arrested him, charged him, and then dropped the charges. With neither a judgment nor a charge against him, there are no grounds to assert that Gates’ behavior transgressed the boundaries of the law.

The fact that Anonymous Super Trooper can’t make even this basic distinction–and that he feels no compunctions about rendering illiterate legal conclusions–should serve as a broader caution for those who would give cover to the police to handle social (rather than legal) transgressions as they see fit.

Final Update: The great Mark Steyn takes a line similar to most other conservatives:

I certainly sympathize with the general proposition that not all encounters with the constabulary go as agreeably as one might wish. Last year I had a minor interaction with a Vermont state trooper and, 60 seconds into the conversation, he called me a “liar.” I considered my options:

Option a): I could get hot under the collar, yell at him, get tasered into submission, and possibly shot while “resisting arrest”;

Option b): I could politely tell the trooper I object to his characterization, and then write a letter to the commander of his barracks the following morning suggesting that such language is not appropriate to routine encounters with members of the public and betrays a profoundly defective understanding of the relationship between law-enforcement officials and the citizenry in civilized societies.

I chose the latter . . .

What strikes me here is how analogous this response is to how the left viewed the Danish Mohammed-cartoon crisis. Sure, they said, free speech is nice in theory. But it’s rude to purposefully provoke another religion. And when Muslims the world over riot and kill people well–what do you expect? That’s just what they do. Better to keep your voice down, make nice, and never offend them.

Substitute “cops” for “Muslims” and you have the conservative position on police misconduct.

In both cases, the sentiment is wrong-headed and pernicious.

Final Final Update: Radley Balko makes the case against Officer Crowley much better than I did, so we’ll let him have the final word. I’m going to excerpt heavily, but you should read it all:

By any account of what happened—Gates’, Crowleys’, or some version in between—Gates should never have been arrested. “Contempt of cop,” as it’s sometimes called, isn’t a crime. Or at least it shouldn’t be. It may be impolite, but mouthing off to police is protected speech, all the more so if your anger and insults are related to a perceived violation of your rights. The “disorderly conduct” charge for which Gates was arrested was intended to prevent riots, not to prevent cops from enduring insults. Crowley is owed an apology for being portrayed as a racist, but he ought to be disciplined for making a wrongful arrest.

He won’t be, of course. And that’s ultimately the scandal that will endure long after the political furor dies down. The power to forcibly detain a citizen is an extraordinary one. It’s taken far too lightly, and is too often abuse

d. And that abuse certainly occurs against black people, but not only against black people. American cops seem to have increasingly little tolerance for people who talk back, even merely to inquire about their rights. . . .

If there’s a teachable moment to extract from Gates’ arrest, it’s that arrest powers should be limited to actual crimes. Instead, the emerging lesson seems to be that you should capitulate to police, all the time, right or wrong. That’s unfortunate, because there are plenty of instances where you shouldn’t.

The most obvious case where deference to authority can be counter-productive—both in practice and in principle—is when police attempt an unlawful search or seizure of your person and property. But there are plenty of other instances as well, particularly with the spread of information technology.

Photographing or videotaping police ought to be a protected form of expression under any reasonable interpretation of the Constitution. Yet at the website Photography Is Not a Crime, photographer Carlos Miller has tracked dozens of cases in which police have unlawfully demanded someone cease photographing on-duty cops. Typically, police demand photographers hand over their cameras, and those who refuse are often arrested. In some of the cases, the preserved video or photographs have vindicated a defendant, or revealed police misconduct. Miller started the site after he himself was wrongly arrested for photographing police officers in Miami. . . .

Just days before Gates was arrested, Philadelphia newspapers reported on a local cop who was captured by a convenience store’s security video brutally assaulting a woman who had been in a car accident with his son. He then arrested her and charged her with assaulting him. The officer then demanded the store clerk turn over surveillance video of his attack. The clerk says other officers made subsequent demands to turn over or destroy the video. To his credit, the clerk refused. The video vindicated the woman. The officer has since been suspended. . . .

This [conservative] deference to police at the expense of the policed is misplaced. Put a government worker behind a desk and give him the power to regulate, and conservatives will wax at length about public choice theory, bureaucratic pettiness, and the trappings of power. And rightly so. But put a government worker behind a badge, strap a gun to his waist, and give him the power to detain, use force, and kill, and those lessons somehow no longer apply. . . .

Verbally disrespecting a cop may well be rude, but in a free society we can’t allow it to become a crime, any more than we can criminalize criticism of the president, a senator, or the city council. There’s no excuse for the harassment or arrest of those who merely inquire about their rights, who ask for an explanation of what laws they’re breaking, or who photograph or otherwise document police officers on the job.

What we owe law enforcement is vigilant oversight and accountability, not mindless deference and capitulation.

Case closed.

I’m only two weeks late to seeing it, which is kind of remarkable in its own right. All in all, quite enjoyable. It was my favorite of the Potter movies until the last 10 minutes, in which it went a little off the rails. Some thoughts (if you haven’t seen it, there will be SPOILERS):

* Daniel Radcliffe is better when they let him be funny. He still can’t do serious. Emma Watson seems to be getting worse with each film. Rupert Grint should actually have a career as an actor if he wants it.

* I’m not sure if it was intenionally done with make-up, but Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon looked suddenly very, very old.

* Jim Broadbent’s Slughorn was truly wonderful. It’s a very different interpretation from the book–much more sad than blustery. It worked for me.

* For the first time ever, quidditch looked both real and interesting. Compare the quidditch scene in HBP with Sorcerer’s Stone on blu-ray. What a difference eight years makes.

* Overall, the f/x was pretty great, which it should be when money is no object. But there were a couple moments when the green screen was so glaringly obvious that it was a little jarring. Such as the final scene with the kids in the Hogwarts tower looking down at what might as well be painted back-drops.

The other moment which was distracting in its poor execution was the set design for the hidden horcrux. The crystal island looked straight out of Return of Superman. After being in a world that felt, for the most part, lived in and real, all of a sudden we’re on a soundstage with what is obviously a movie set. I wouldn’t complain except that for this franchise, the money really does grow on trees. Every single set should be perfect.

* One of the complaints leveled against the movie is that it adheres too slavishly to the book. That criticism strikes me as off the mark. There’s lots of deviation from the book done specifically for the purposes of story-telling. Some of it, like Harry hanging around in the Underground in the beginning, works very well. Having the Weasley Burrow burned to the ground is also a nice bit of shorthand to show us the loss that peripheral characters are sustaining without going character by character.

* My big complaint is actually about a piece of adaptation that I thought didn’t quite work: the final battle at Hogwarts.

Once Harry and Dumbledore return to Hogwarts, Malfoy has let Voldemort’s crew of Death Eaters into the castle. But all they do is sneak upstairs to confront Dumbledore. There is no pitched battle for Hogwarts. After Snape kills Albus, they high-tail it off the grounds.

This didn’t work for me for a few reasons:

(1) We don’t get to see the students and staff of Hogwarts suddenly thrown into combat. Everything has changed by the end of HBP not only because Dumbledore is dead, but because the professors and the students have suddenly become soldiers. By keeping them out of the battle, at the end of the movie, they’re still just on-lookers, essentially the same position they’ve been in at the end of all the other movies.

(2) Malfoy’s big vanishing cabinet plan doesn’t make much sense without a larger assault on Hogwarts. Why bother importing Belatrix, Greyback, et al for the sole purpose of letting Draco kill Dumbledore? The only reason to have them there is for it to be an all-out invasion.

(3) I understand that cleaving a little more closely to the book would have incurred significant costs of both time and money. But couldn’t that have been conserved by eliding the intro where we see London under assault from the Death Eaters? Shifting the set piece to the end seems a net plus in terms of story.

* My only other real quibble is with the portrayal of Snape. In the book, his role is quite ambiguous by the end. In the movie, not so much. I think it’s reasonably (though not totally) clear that he’s ultimately on Dumbledore’s side. I missed that extra layer of complexity where no one knew if he was a triple- or quadruple-agent. Also, his final encounter with Harry–the last time they’ll see one another until Snape dies, I think–felt a little rushed for such an important moment. In the movie’s own terms it didn’t even make much sense for Snape to cop to being the Half-Blood Prince. Why not just leave that a mystery?

The dunk tape is out.

And it makes LeBron look even worse because there’s no reason he should have been so sensitive about it. He’s not the one guarding Jordan Crawford. Crawford blows by his man and LeBron steps over to help from the baseline where he had been guarding the post man. He’s a little late, but, in fairness to him, he needed to stay home an extra millisecond because otherwise Crawford drops a short pass to the post for a sure dunk.

LeBron made the right play from the help side. Crawford made a really good move and finished well. What’s embarrassing for Bron-Bron isn’t that he was dunked on.

For the first time ever.

Taranto’s piece is even-handed and fair, but I’d add one (important) thought to this:

This is not to say that the police are always right, and it seems to us that arresting Gates was an unwise use of the officer’s authority. Having ascertained that the burglary report was false, the cop had no reason to remain on the scene. This appears to have been a misunderstanding between two stubborn men, both of whom would be better off had one of them exercised some maturity and forbearance.

The difference is that in encounters between the police and the public, it is the police officer who is being paid to exercise maturity. If a citizen acts less maturely in such an encounter, he is simply behaving poorly. If a police officer acts less maturely, he is doing his job badly. That’s a substantial difference.

Don’t get me wrong–I’m very much rooting for Tom Watson at the British Open. He is, however, currently tied with Steve Marino. The UVA golfer has yet to win a major tournament and the weekend is still ahead of us. (His best finish was earlier this year at the Crowne Plaza Invitational at Colonial where he placed second.) But at least for the moment, Marino is in the spotlight. And it brought to mind a piece in the Washington Post Magazine, in which staff writer Eli Saslow invites Marino to play a round at one of the District’s public courses. Being accustomed to the carpeted greens of Turnberry and Augusta, Marino finds it a bit of a challenge at the rough-and-tumble Hains Point.

Willis Group Holding, a London-based insurance firm, has purchased the naming rights of Sears Tower, rechristening it Willis Tower. Not that anyone will call it that.

Sears Tower will always be Sears Tower, even if you haven’t been to a Sears since 1983. Just like the PNC Bank Arts Center will forever be the Garden State Arts Center, where I once saw Hall & Oates. Did I just admit that? (Next stop, Brigantine Castle!)

Remember when Richard Gasquet was suspended from the tour for cocaine use? No? Well play along anyway.

An ITF panel has now found that level of cocaine Gasquet was found to have in his system was no more than a grain of salt” and that he had ingested it by making out with some chick at a club and that “the amount of cocaine in the player’s body was so small that if he had been tested only a few hours later, his test result would be likely to have been negative.”

As if he hasn’t had enough bad breaks already.