gates-gate: the tale of the actual tapes [update]
By American Girl in Italy on July 27, 2009 at 1:41 PM in Sara in Italy
The 911 call and radio dispatch tapes were released. The 911 call reveals that the *racist neighbor* that everyone attacked is anything but. (In fact, I do believe it is the 911 operator that asks if they are white, black, or Hispanic..?)
This also supports Crowley’s statements that he wanted to be sure Gates was one of the men seen *breaking in* and that there weren’t two men hiding in the home somewhere. Which is why he asked Gates if anyone was in the house with him.
UPDATE:
There is a longer video from msnbc. In the original video I ad posted, you hear Crowley making two statements, quite calmly. You can, at one point hear Gates yell something in the background. Crowley says, “he’s not being very cooperative” at one point. And “The gentlemen says he resides here.” In this longer video you can hear Gates yell a few more times, in the background.
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Apparently his laryngitis wasn’t that bad… I wonder if Gates didn’t lose his voice until the following day, after all that yellin’!
I think everything so far supports Sgt. Crowley, and the other officers.
I am quite happy that the woman who called 911 has been MORE than vindicated.
SO, when are the apologies going to start rolling in?
“As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate.“
~Henry Louis Gates Jr.
UPDATE: Apparently, the woman who made the 911 call has had to hire an attorney to be her spokesperson. So much for the rewards of being a good citizen. CNN reports on the attorney’s important clarifications in “911 caller in Gates’ arrest says she never referred to race“:
(CNN) — The woman who made the 911 call that led to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. never referred to race when she contacted authorities for what she thought was a potential break-in, her attorney told CNN on Monday.
Attorney Wendy Murphy also categorically rejected part of the police report that said her client, Lucia Whalen, talked with Sgt. James Crowley, the arresting officer, at the scene.
“Let me be clear: She never had a conversation with Sgt. Crowley at the scene,” Murphy said. “And she never said to any police officer or to anybody ‘two black men.’ She never used the word ‘black.’ Period.”
[...] “Her only goal is to make it clear she never described them as black. She never saw their race. … All she reported was behavior, not skin color.”
[...]
Murphy also disputed accounts of her client as a white woman in the traditional sense. “The fact is she’s olive-skinned and of Portuguese descent. You wouldn’t look at her and say necessarily, ‘Oh, there’s a white woman.’ You might think she was Hispanic,” Murphy said.
