>*according to the police report*
The report conflicts with the 911 call. And the commissioner's explanation here doesn't make sense when you compare the quote from the report itself and the commissioner's admission that the caller did not mention race. If every police report got the scrutiny this one is getting odds are very good many more such conflicts would come to light:
Gates caller says she didn't cite race
Woman laments media accounts
By John R. Ellement and Matt Collette, Globe Staff | Globe Correspondent | July 27, 2009
The woman whose report of a possible house break-in led to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said she never mentioned race during her 911 call and is "personally devastated'' by media accounts that suggest she placed the call because the men she observed on the porch were black, according to a lawyer acting as her spokeswoman.
The woman, identified in a police report on file in Cambridge District Court as 40-year-old Lucia Whalen, saw the backs of both men and did not know their race when she called 911, said Wendy J. Murphy, a Boston lawyer from New England School of Law. Whalen phoned police, Murphy said, because she was aware of recent break-ins in the area.
In an interview last night, Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert C. Haas said it was accurate that Whalen did not mention race in her 911 call. He acknowledged that a police report of the incident did include a race reference. The report says Whalen observed "what appeared to be two black males with backpacks on the front porch'' of a Ware Street home on July 16.
That reference is there, said Haas, because the police report is a summary. Its descriptions - like the race of the two men - were collected during the inquiry, not necessarily from the initial 911 call, he said.
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