Officers behaved "stupidly" but may have been trained that way

You know when the President of the United States calls a police officer's decision "stupid" in a primetime press conference that your department has had a particularly bad day, one that's going to reverberate in the national conversation about racial politics for quite a long time.

Obama was talking about the remarkable arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in his Cambridge home for disorderly conduct after a neighbor called police thinking he was a burglar.

Having read several accounts of the incident, I think its root cause may or may not have been racial but was much more definitely the result of basic police training regarding how officers are taught to engage with the public. In this case, even after learning that Gates was in his own home and they'd been called out based on an error, officers still wanted to maintain a "command presence," in the policing lingo, and Professor Gates apparently was having none of it.

To be fair, Gates indulged his own frustrations and acted unwisely. The proper approach IMO would have been, after establishing he was in his own house, to repeat like a mantra, "Please get off my property, please get off my property ..." No need to argue or attempt to reason with police when his goal should be for them to leave.

Still, the "I'm in charge here" bluster by police heightened tension in a confrontational situation instead of defusing it and the end result was the President calling the cops "stupid" on national TV. To the extent it was "stupid," though, it's also worth remembering it's probably exactly how the officers were trained to behave, whether they're dealing with a black man caught breaking into his own home or some blogger who's babysitting while white.