Let's have a beer, Obama tells race-case pair

US president Barack Obama has tried to calm the racial uproar he helped stoke by saying police “acted stupidly” in arresting his friend, black academic Henry Louis Gates.

Mr Obama said yesterday the white arresting officer was a good man and invited both him and Prof Gates to the White House for a beer.

The president admitted his earlier words had been ill-chosen, but stopped short of a public apology.

He personally telephoned both Prof Gates and Sgt James Crowley, hoping to end the furore over the arrest last Thursday and what he had said about it.

Trying to lighten the situation, he even commiserated with Sgt Crowley about reporters on his lawn.

Hours earlier, a multi-racial group of police officers had stood with Sgt Crowley in Massachusetts and said Mr Obama should apologise.

“This has been ratcheting up, and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up,” Mr Obama said of the racial controversy.

“I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department and Sgt Crowley specifically. And I could have calibrated those words differently.”

But the president still insisted police had overreacted by arresting the Harvard professor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for disorderly conduct after coming to his home to investigate a possible break-in.

He added, though, that he thought Prof Gates, too, had overreacted to the police who questioned him. The charge was later dropped.

“My sense is, you’ve got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in a way that it should have been resolved,” he said.

Mr Obama stirred up a hornet’s nest when he said at a prime-time news conference this week that Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” by arresting Prof Gates, a friend of the president’s.

The president said yesterday he hoped the matter would end up being a “teachable moment” for the nation.

“The fact that this has garnered so much attention, I think, is testimony to the fact that these are issues that are still very sensitive here in America,” he said.

And Mr Obama wryly took note of the distraction from his legislative efforts.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but nobody’s been paying much attention to health care,” the president said.

Amid fierce criticism from police groups, Mr Obama said he had called Sgt Crowley to clear the air and said the conversation confirmed his belief that he was an “outstanding police officer and a good man”.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs refused to say whether Mr Obama had apologised to Sgt Crowley.

Last night three Massachusetts police organisations issued a statement thanking the president for his “willingness to reconsider his remarks” and said Sgt Crowley was “profoundly grateful” that Mr Obama was trying to resolve the situation.

Mr Obama tried to lighten his tone in his public remarks about his phone conversation with Sgt Crowley, saying the police officer “wanted to find out if there was a way of getting the press off his lawn”.

“I informed him that I can’t get the press off my lawn,” Mr Obama joked.

In his conversation with Prof Gates, aides said, they had spoken about the president’s statement to the press and his conversation with Sgt Crowley.

The outcry began on Monday when word broke that Prof Gates, 58, had been arrested five days earlier at the two-storey home he rents from Harvard.

Civil rights activists said the arrest was an act of racial profiling.

Cambridge police dropped the disorderly conduct charge on Tuesday without apology, but called the case “regrettable”.

Meanwhile, the police union and fellow officers, black and white, rallied around Sgt Crowley, 42, a decorated officer who in 1993 tried to give lifesaving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Reggie Lewis, a black Boston Celtics player who collapsed at a practice. Lewis could not be revived.

It later emerged that Sgt Crowley had been selected to be a police academy instructor on how to avoid racial profiling.