Obama stands by race row remark

BARACK OBAMA defended his criticism of police officers in the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr as law enforcement groups and Republicans called the president’s remarks out of place.

Obama stuck by his comment on Wednesday that Cambridge, Massachusetts, police “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates.

The black scholar, 58, was charged with disorderly conduct after a July 16 confrontation with a whitepolice officer on his front porch. The charges werelater dropped.

“I am surprised by the controversy surrounding my statement,” Obama said in an interview for ABC’s Nightline programme. “It was a pretty straightforward commentary that you probably don’t need to handcuff a guy, a middle-aged man who uses a cane, who’s in his own home.”

The reaction threatened to overtake his main message of the week on overhauling the US healthcare system. Obama has only rarely waded into the topic of race relations, and his remarks in response to a question at a nationally televised news conference reignited a debate over law enforcement and racial profiling.

The national president of the Nashville, Tennessee- based Fraternal Order of Police, Chuck Canterbury, said yesterday that he was “very concerned” by Obama’s statement.

“Police officers, like all Americans, rely on President Obama’s leadership to guide us through an extraordinarily difficult period of change in a variety of areas,” Canterbury said. “To be successful in this effort, he will need the help and support of all of us.”

Police officials in Cambridge were more direct. Commissioner Robert C Haas, who heads the force in Cambridge, where Harvard is located, saidhe was “deeply pained”by Obama’s comments.

The officer involved, Sergeant James Crowley, “acted in a way that was consistent with his training in the department and with national standards of law-enforcement protocol,” Haas said at a news conference at police headquarters.

Haas said he will appoint an outside panel to examine how the incident was handled.

Crowley told Boston radio station WBZ-AM that Obama was “way off base, wading into a local issue without knowing all the facts”, the radio station reported on its website.

Crowley also told the station he supports the president “110%”.

In the ABC interview, Obama said he has “extraordinary respect” for law-enforcement officers and that he understood Crowley is an “outstanding policeofficer”.

In this case “everybody should have just settled down and cooler heads should have prevailed”, Obama said.

It “doesn’t make sense to arrest a guy in his own home if he’s not causing a serious disturbance.”

Political reaction largely fell along party lines.

“He sounded more like a community organiser than the President of the United States,” Richard Viguerie, a Republican fundraiser and activist, said.

“This is not Mississippi in the 1950s. This is Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, said it would begin running an ad on the web posing the question, “Was it presidential?”

Democratic representative Barbara Lee, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, called Obama’s remarks “right on target”.

The arrest is “an example of the unfinished business of America and inequalities and the racism that continues to exist”, Lee said.