Cambridge Police: Stupid or Not? Let's Look at the Police Report

The biggest news story in the world today is the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Earlier this week, Cambridge police were called to Professor Gates' home when a passerby reported that two men were trying to break in. Turns out that one of the men was Gates, who lived there, and his front door was jammed. Everyone is weighing in on this issue, even our president. Was the arresting officer racist? President Obama said that the Cambridge police acted "stupidly."

For the purposes of this blog, the important question is, did the Cambridge police write stupidly in the police report about the incident?


There are a couple of missing commas and places where the punctuation should be inside the quotation marks, but overall, this report is pretty well written. The one glaring error is a your/you're confusion in one of Gates' quotes. I'm certain that the scholar meant to say, "You don't know who you're messing with!"

Still, this police report was better than I had been expecting, so, the jury's still out. I'm sure we'll hear plenty more about this story in the next few days. It even made the homepage of the London Times online, along with Amy Winehouse's latest antics.