I'll bet they recommend dropping charges - Gates would be within his rights to slap them with a massive lawsuit. I remember Henry Louis Gates ("Skip" to his friends, "the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University" to the rest of us) from my graduate school days, though I never had the chance to take one of his classes. He is about the most non-threatening person you could imagine.

Now I don't doubt that he was angry - most of us would be. He was also tired, having just returned from China, only to find his door jammed, and to have the neighbors call the cops when managed to get his own front door open. But as SRS says, he showed his ID. Now matter how angry he seemed, that should have been the end of it. It's understandable that the police officer would want to see that much, but after that, Gates could have shouted at him six ways from Tuesday and the officer should have apologized and left. He was in his own home, and it was up the officer, not Gates, to deal with it and leave.

I suspect that the officer was inexperienced, and that Gates, being tired and already in a rotten mood, was less than diplomatic. But arresting the man? On his own front porch? For nothing more than being upset at being accused unfairly? Good grief!

Can you just imagine the call to his lawyer? "Chuck - you're not going to believe this...."

Dan