Gatesgate: Caller Disputes the Police Report

The Cabbed Caller, who reported Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to the police, now disputes the police report about what she told them in her 9-1-1 call. Instead, the caller — who has now been repeatedly identified as Lucia Whalen — contends that she did not know the race of the two people attempting to enter the house. According to the Boston Globe:

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.

Well, I guess I was wrong. On Friday, I questioned whether or not the woman acted appropriately in sicking the Cambridge police on Professor Gates while he was attempting to enter his house. Previously, I questioned whether Gates’s blackness prevented this woman from assessing the situation rationally.
Assuming the woman is telling the truth, then you can’t really fault her. You can fault the Cambridge police, for injecting race into a call where race wasn’t even mentioned.
More from Whalen’s side of the story, plus the 9-1-1 tape, after the jump.


If she didn’t know the race of the two men entering the house, then you can’t say that race played a role in her decision to call the police or not. And Whalen, through her attorney, claims that she didn’t know the race of the two people she observed:

“People are making their own judgments about the case and assuming that she called police because they were black,” [Whalen’s lawyer Wendy] Murphy said yesterday in a telephone interview. “That sentiment is permeating the stories, and it ties directly to her involvement, even though the truth is she didn’t report seeing black men and she didn’t know the men’s race when she called 911.”

The police have now released the full 9-1-1 call. You can access it on Gawker. There, you can hear Ms. Whalen repeatedly tell the police that she didn’t know precisely what was going on and that men were carrying luggage (not “backpacks,” which was the word the police put in her mouth in the police report). She repeatedly suggests that the men may in fact live in the house and were simply having trouble with the key. In essence, the police report materially misrepresented the woman’s statements to the 9-1-1 dispatcher.
Armed with this new information, I no longer think the woman acted inappropriately. It looks like I am guilty of a version of what I incorrectly accused the lady doing: I relied on the police to act with basic competence and believed that the police report would accurately reflect the woman’s 9-1-1 call. That was dumb of me.
Taking the police’s word about anything the 9-1-1 call wasn’t very lawyerly. That is precisely what I learned from my first year of law school, and I’m sorry I momentarily forgot that lesson.
Gates caller says she didn’t cite race [Boston Globe]
The 911 Call That Got Henry Louis Gates Busted [Gawker]
Earlier: Gatesgate: A Legal Hypothetical

Sponsored