Obama, Gates & Cambridge Police
Item: Is This the Instance of Police Misconduct to Obsess About?/Conor Friedersdorb, The Daily Dish, Atlantic Monthly
More Info: Interesting as it is to speculate about Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge Police Department, the attention the case is generating reflects an unfortunate feature of American public discourse: you've got someone like Radley Balko who spends the bulk of his career documenting the most grave instances of police misconduct imaginable -- including cases that involve the incarceration of innocent people for years on end -- and most of even the egregious cases he writes about never break into mainstream conversation, whereas a minor altercation involving a Harvard professor who isn't even being charged with a crime spawns wall-to-wall media coverage.
Question: Should President Barack Obama have gotten involved in this situation?
