Second is the effect of public perception of racial profiling and intimidation by police. At least a large share of people will look at this incident and say, “THIS is racial profiling? A guy gets seen breaking into a house, the police come to ask questions, and he starts yelling at the police? Seems fair that the police would react to being yelled at when they’re just trying to ascertain the facts of the situation, which on their face clearly warrant investigation. If this is what passes for police brutality, then there must not be a real problem.” That is, the publicization of THIS incident, which is in the opinion of many people, including me, is not egregious behavior on the part of the police, obscures all the instances of true police misconduct that occur on an everyday basis.

And hat’s off to you for risking life and limb for such an important cause. I imagine that activism on the part of white volunteers such as yourself was important for similar reasons to Gates’ own. I know there were those among you who experienced the most severe consequences, but I would guess there were also times when the presence of white college students deterred actions that, sad to say, might not have been so controversial were they to have been inflicted only upon blacks?

That said, in the absence of legal consequences and public criticism, they have considerable incentive to maximize their intimidation factor. There is considerable empirical evidence to suggest that this is in fact what will happen when rights are not vigorously upheld.

What I mean to say here is that formal legal rights are far from being absolute protections. They are themselves only one tool in a back-and-forth between police and policed, one whose realization is far from automatic. There is every reason to expect that police offers will continue to push the envelope, and thus it is imperative that those few who are in a position to push back do so. Despite the alarmist cries of the far right, we are far from the point where legitimate police tactics are deterred for fear of public outrage or legal consequences.

I was one of the white college volunteers who went to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 as part of the “Mississippi Summer,” a broad range civil rights effort in that deepest of the deep south states. At the very start of that summer, three workers — James Chaney, a local Mississippi black, Mickey Schwerner, a Northern white volunteer who’d been in the state awhile, and Andy Goodman, one of the fresh volunteers from NYC, disappeared in Neshoba County. Some time later, the Neshoba County sheriff, his deputy, and some others were arrested for the abduction and murder of the three. During the training camp for volunteers I remember overhearing three black guys, Mississippi movement veterans, talking among themselves about the volunteers they were training. “They ask me, ‘When you’re in the middle of a crowd of angry crackers, how can you remain nonviolent?’ Shit, man, what else can you be?”