http://www.nypost.com/seven/08022009/news/regionalnews/ticket_to_deride_182595.htm Last updated: 3:56 am
August 2, 2009
Posted: 3:35 am
August 2, 2009
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. copped an attitude with law enforcement long before Massachusetts police arrested him for disorderly conduct last month.
After a Rhode Island state trooper slapped the respected black academic with a speeding violation 25 years ago, the officer pointedly scribbled and underlined a note on the ticket: "Attitude: Poor."
The now-retired trooper, Dan Morrison, told The Post last week he didn't remember the traffic stop or Gates, but would have made such a notation only if a driver acted "hostile."
"My practice was, if someone showed a hostile attitude -- and most people when stopped admit that yes, they were traveling too fast -- but if they argue with me, then I would note 'poor attitude' on the ticket," the former lieutenant said.
Morrison stopped Gates on Oct. 4, 1984, after clocking him going 71 mph in a 55 mph zone on I-95.
The trooper had the choice of giving Gates, then a professor at Yale, a ticket that could be mailed in, or a more inconvenient court appearance. He opted for the latter.
"My notes [on the ticket] were meant to be directed toward the traffic-court judge . . . If this motorist were to make a claim or ask for a plea of leniency -- ask for a break, basically -- the judge would then understand, 'Well, you gave . . . the trooper a hard time on the road. You were not accepting, you did not offer any explanation at that point, you were basically hostile,' " Morrison said.
Gates never appeared before a judge because the summons was lost in a backlog. It was eventually settled in 2002, when the state court started going after old tickets. Gates agreed to pay a $25 fine by mail.
Morrison said the traffic stop had nothing to do with racial profiling -- which Gates has alleged was behind his July 16 arrest in Cambridge, Mass.
"I don't feel that I am racially motivated or biased at all," Morrison said. "In this case, there was a speeding car coming up the road. I was polite as I could be."
Gates, an author and commentator on race relations, was arrested on July 16 after the Cambridge police responded to a 911 call of a possible break-in at the professor's home. Sgt. James Crowley says Gates became combative when he asked him for ID.
The arrest led to a national debate -- with President Obama weighing in by saying the officer acted "stupidly," then retracting the statement, and finally inviting Gates and Crowley over to the White House last week for a "beer summit."
Gates has long been critical of cops in his writings and statements.
"There's a moving violation that many African-Americans know as D.W.B.: Driving While Black," Gates wrote in an Oct. 23, 1995, New Yorker article examining O.J. Simpson's acquittal on murder charges.
"It's a commonplace that white folks trust the police and black folks don't. Whites recognize this in the abstract, but they're continually surprised at the depth of black wariness. They shouldn't be," he wrote.
"I have always been paranoid around the police," he told Newsweek in 1992. "I often find myself moving into upper-middle-class white neighborhoods, and the first thing I do when I move into a neighborhood is to check in with the police and introduce myself.
" 'Hi. I am Dr. Gates. I go away often and I was wondering if there are any security precautions I should take during vacations,' " Gates said.
"But of course that's not it. It's that sooner or later someone is going to see this Negro in a car and ask what he is doing there. I do it so they see this face . . . I think it's disgusting to feel that you have to do that. It's just a bizarre form of behavior that's required by the racist nature of this society, and the police."
Topic: Affirmative action skippy Gates had problem with R.I. State Police yrs ago (Read 564 times)