> And is Harvard prof. Gates really the issue? Not for me. His case is just
> the conversation piece for the broader issue of police abuse of their
> authority.
I'm with you on everything except the words.
Cops in the US these days certainly don't act like our idea of civil servants.
Presumably one of the things you see a lot of, if you're a cop, is bad temper and frazzled behavior. For most of us on this list, the appropriate civil-servant response to such harmless bad temper and steam-blowing would be an irenic one: you cool the situation down. I bet that's what you have in mind when you refer to "professional behavior" -- right?
And yes, that really is what we ought to be able to expect from our civil servants, cops most certainly included.
But we live in a society where cops have a very different mission. So Sgt Pupp of the Cambridge PD didn't "abuse" his authority at all. He did what the cops in our society are tasked to do: enforce servility and abjection.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org