Was there a better way to conduct Gates-Crowley debate?

Illegal to hate the police?

Washington attorney Pepin Tuma, after telling friends that police too often overreact when not given what they deem to be proper deference, spotted six police cars at a traffic stop last Saturday. He decided to test his theory by chanting, in a sing-song voice, “I hate the police. I hate the police.”

A police officer who overheard him confronted Mr. Tuma and arrested him for disorderly conduct, the same charge that Gates faced before his charges were dropped.

“People talk about the Gates thing in terms of race, but it's an ongoing problem of police using disorderly conduct to shut people up," Tuma told the Huffington Post. He has filed a complaint with the D.C. Office of Police Complaints.

‘Uncle Tom’?

Leon Lashley, the veteran black Cambridge sergeant who was at the scene when Gates was arrested and who subsequently supported Sergeant Crowley’s account, on Thursday wrote in an e-mail to Crowley (for delivery to the president) that he has been called an “Uncle Tom” by many in the African-American community for his refusal to admit that Gates was racially profiled.

Gates’s refusal to back down from his view that he had been racially profiled, wrote Sergeant Lashley, may have done “irreparable harm” to relations between police and the black community.

At his press conference Thursday night after the Rose Garden meeting, Crowley said, “I knew Sergeant Lashley would be putting himself in a position to be ridiculed for his support [of me].”

Gun stripped for 'jungle monkey' remark

Boston police officer Justin Barrett has said a Boston Globe column defending Gates sparked him to wade into the debate, verbosity blazing. Officer Barrett had his gun stripped and possibly his badge for calling Gates in a mass e-mail “a banana-eating jungle monkey” for standing up to a police officer trying to do his job.

“I am not a racist but I am prejudiced towards people who are stupid and pretend to stand up and preach for something they say is freedom but it is merely attention because you do not get enough of it in your little fear-dwelling circle of on-the-bandwagon followers,” Barrett wrote in the e-mail.

He told CNN he had never used such language before and said he did not know what moved him to use it in his e-mail.

‘O-dumb-a’?

Twenty-four-year-old Lee Landor, too, is out of a job after sharing her thoughts on the Gates imbroglio.

The deputy press secretary for the Manhattan Borough president resigned after a newspaper published photos of her Facebook entries, written at work, about the Gates incident.

In the entry, she called Obama “O-dumb-a” for siding with Gates against the police, despite acknowledging he didn’t have all the facts. She also defended racial profiling, pointing to the fact that black men make up the majority of the US prison population. In fact, she says, in her opinion, it was Gates who racially profiled Crowley by virtue of the officer being white.

“Regardless of how I said it, my point was there’s a double standard when it comes to talking about race,” she said in a phone interview with the Monitor. “Some people can talk about it, and some people can’t.”

Ms. Landor would not define by race who can, saying it depends on the context: “If you're so conscious of your race and you behave based on that, who's the one who's perpetuating a problem? You!”

Carla Murphy contributed reporting from New York.

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