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I have no issue with the police showing up. If the neighbors didn't recognize Gates I have no problem with them calling the police to say it looked like someone was breaking in.
But the fact is that the triggering event for being arrested was calling a policeman a racist and saying he'd talk to his mama. In Massachusetts "disorderly conduct" is conduct likely to incite violence or significant social disruption. A man shouting on his porch yelling at you is nowhere near such a thing.
This is simply a police officer annoyed by someone and so decided to show Gates who was boss with an arrest he knew would be dropped and the expectation that the person being arrested wouldn't feel he could do anything about it and even if he tried nobody would care. He got really unlucky in who he decided to do this to.
I in no way suggest that race had anything to do with it. It may have, it may have not (and Obama didn't say the police acted stupidly because they acted in a racist manner, he quite explicitly said otherwise). He didn't have all the facts to know if race was a factor. We've plenty of facts (and none of them have changed) to know that the policeman was chose poorly in how to behave.
That is the stupidity on the part of the policeman. Throwing his weight around with an arrest he knows isn't supported by the facts simply to say "bow down or learn a lesson" and playing the odds that he'll get away with it (as they certainly do 99% of the time such arrests are made).
The idea that it is ok to be arrested for simply yelling at a member of the police (and from your own front porch) is kind of scary.
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