POLICE OFFICERS AREN'T LIKE COLLEGE PROFESSORS

President Obama has been trying to wiggle out of the mess he made for himself in the Professor Gates arrest case. Now he says that both Sgt. Crowley and his friend Gates may have overreacted. WHAT A CROCK! Crowley didn’t overreact, it was his buddy Gates who went ballistic. Crowley was subjected to a lot of verbal abuse before he finally arrested the loud-mouthed professor.

Professor Gates and his supporters, including black professors Michael Eric Dyson and Lawrence Bobo, are milking the race card for all it’s worth. They must have earned their doctoral degrees at the Al Sharpton-Jesse Jackson College of Victimology.

Sharpton and Jackson were quick to pounce on the Gates case. Sharpton proclaimed, "This arrest is indicative of at best police abuse of power or at worst the highest example of racial profiling I have seen. I have heard of driving while black and even shopping while black but now even going to your own home while black is a new low." And Jackson said, "The charges have been dropped, but the stain remains. ... Humiliation remains. These incidents are so much of a national pattern on race."

The police did not humiliate Professor Gates - he humiliated himself. This was not a case of racial profiling, nor was it an example of how the police mistreat blacks in America. This was nothing more than a case wherein Gates took offense to the police investigation of a reported "Burglary in Progress" even though the cops were there to protect his property and possibly his life.

And contrary to what all the critics were saying, including Obama, the professor was not arrested inside his home - he was arrested for disorderly conduct only after he followed Sgt. Crowley out the front door and continued to rant and rave his racial crap before a crowd of onlookers and cops. .

"Don't Cop an Attitude" is a column by Rich Tucker that appeared in today’s Townhall.com. I have chosen to reproduce only a small part of Tucker’s column, excerpts that illustrate the milking of the race card in the Gates case and the absurdity of it all. Tucker wrote:

[Professor Gates’] friends plan to flog the supposed police racism for all it’s worth, too. "Ain’t nothing post-racial about the United States of America," wrote fellow Harvard prof Lawrence Bobo in the Post on July 22.

Bobo goes on to draw exactly the wrong lesson, lauding Gates for refusing to go along with the police. "I think my friend could have been physically injured by this police officer (if not worse) had he, in fact, stepped out of his home before showing his ID."

It’s difficult to believe that a Harvard professor would suggest that an American police officer would order a man into the front yard so he could beat or shoot the man. But that’s the gist of Bobo’s argument. Look: If the officer wanted to beat Gates up, he’d keep him in the house. The front yard, surrounded by witnesses and other officers, is the safest place to be if Gates is worried about being beaten.

There’s a reason the officer wanted Gates to come out of the house, and it’s not so he could pistol whip him (if not worse). It’s so the police could check the house and make sure there wasn’t anyone else -- an intruder -- there.

Police officers aren’t like college professors. They don’t have the luxury of being wrong. If the officer had simply left, and there was an intruder in Gates’s home who later attacked the professor ...... he wouldn’t have done his job.

EDITOR’S NOTE: With experience as both a cop and a professor, I can speak with some authority when I say, thank God police officers aren’t like college professors!