Tag Results for Lucia Whalen

The release of the 9-1-1 tapes from the Henry Louis Gates arrest absolved caller Lucia Whalen as a racist and changed the story line. But the tapes revealed more about the media's reporting of the Gates arrest story.

Even many of us who think the Cambridge Police overreacted by arresting Henry Louis Gates in his own home have assumed — for the sake of argument if nothing else — that Sgt. James Crowley's report was accurate.

I've contended from the beginning that Crowley's mistake was in failing to recognize why Gates would think he'd been racially profiled. Noted civil-rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate and Slate columnist Christopher Hitchens have both written that the issue wasn't race, but Gates' constitutional right to throw a nutty in his own home. I agree.

But with Crowley, Gates and President Obama settling in for an awkward beer later today, let's not forget that there is an enormous discrepancy between Crowley's report and the statements of Lucia Whalen, the woman who called 911 and then waited at the scene until police had arrived.

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