Victim blamers are often also telling a story about how they personally will never be raped, or in this case, arrested unfairly for doing something totally legal. To blame Gates for being stupid is to say, ”I would never get arrested for breaking into my house, because I have the sort of self-preservation instincts that this man is clearly missing.” People enjoy the illusion of having more mastery of the world than they do, because it makes them feel safe, but it also contributes to an atmosphere where victim-blaming can flourish, particularly in situations that are loaded with racial or gender politics.
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Reading both accounts, I get the distinct impression that things started to spiral out of control when the cop in question was asked for his badge number and supervisor by Gates. At this point, the cop decided to lure Gates outside to create an excuse to arrest him.
Asking for a badge and a name is your right as a citizen, but it’s also a reminder to the cops that they work for you, and I have zero doubt that this can infuriate a whole lot of cops. It’s a reminder that the gun only makes you a servant, not an actual authority, and that the citizens who hired you are the authority, at least in theory. But as Digby says, when you engage in the “mouthing off to the cops is stupid” discourse, you’re basically putting the cops in the same category as a group of thugs. When you run into a group of armed thugs, yeah, they’re the authority because they didn’t take an oath to serve and protect. Cops did, and in theory, they’re not authorities, but merely enforcers of the law, and when there’s not a law being broken, then they really are 100% out of line hiding behind the authority of the badge and the gun.
Digby links the growing acceptance of out-of-control police brutality, particularly the widespread use of Tasers (which Pam has done a lot of blogging about here), with the acceptance of other incursions on our liberal democracy, like the spying on U.S. citizens and flouting of the basic human rights laws of people that have been picked up as “enemy combatants”.* She also engages arguments from a cop who blogged at Crooked Timber about why cops should have the right to use violence and force to keep people from being mouthy, neatly tearing the arguments apart while being cognizant of the fact that it isn’t easy to be a cop.
It’s interesting to me that Americans have a long history of using unchecked police authority as a shorthand for totalitarianism that makes us feel superior to other countries. If you’re writing a book or a screenplay that takes place in a country whose unjust dictatorial government is up for criticism---which is a worthy goal, don’t get me wrong---then it’s mandatory that you have scenes where your freedom-loving heroes come across some police forces that are drunk on power, who decide to fuck with you just because they can. They could be the S.S. or the Stasi or the KGB or the Iranian police running around accusing women of walking with too much of a swing to their step. If it’s someone else’s culture, we have no problem seeing the problems with making people adopt a submissive, humiliated pose merely because they’re speaking to the police, or that cops are given loosely defined laws and plenty of discretion, so they can just go on power trips and abuse people who they perceive as deserving of their oppression. When it’s someone else’s country, the excessive use of violence, leering behavior towards women, and abusing racial or ethnic minorities seems so obviously wrong. I doubt many people who are calling Gates “stupid” did anything but cheer, for instance, when reading the section of “Persepolis” where Marjane puts herself in danger by telling a cop to quit staring at her ass. When it’s not our cops, it’s a lot easier to see that demanding perfect submission to police authority is fucked the fuck up.
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