Washington, July 25: US president Barack Obama has been entangled in a racially charged case following the controversial arrest of a Harvard scholar by police.
The story began when the African-American professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., was arrested at his own home by Cambridge police on charges of disorderly conduct.
Officers were called to the professor’s house on Tuesday after a woman reported seeing two black males — Gates and his driver — trying to force entry into Gates house, as the door was jammed.
Although the exact facts of the incident are disputed, Prof Gates was asked to step outside his house and was arrested after he allegedly shouted at an officer named Sgt James Crowley and accused him of racism.
Later, during a televised news conference on Wednesday, President Obama said the Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they where in their own home.
Police Union officials in Cambridge Massachusetts reacted to the president’s comments soon after, demanding an apology.
“We are hopeful that upon reflection they will realize that their statements were misguided and will take an appropriate action in the form of an apology,” Steve Killian, Cambridge Police Officers Association told reporters on Friday.
Only hours later, Obama made a surprise appearance at the White House briefing room and told reporters that he “could have calibrated those words differently”.
“Because this has been ratcheting up and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up, I wanted to make clear in my choice of words I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department,” Obama said.
The president, however, did not formally apologize to the police but rather maintained his initial idea that Gates’s arrest was “an overreaction”, putting it in the context of “the long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately”.
Critics have seized on his comments, saying Obama should not be getting involved in individual cases, especially if he was not in full possession of the facts.
—-Agencies