“If anyone has been offended, I’m sorry for that.”
—LA Chief of Police Darryl F. Gates
(in response to being criticized for suggesting that more blacks than whites die from police chokeholds because their carotid arteries “do not open as fast as normal people.” LA Times, May 11, 1982.)
Just as accountants and pharmacists tend to be alike, the argument can be made that the police are pretty much the same everywhere, whether in Portland, Maine, Portland, Oregon, or Los Angeles.
One thing the Henry Louis Gates dust-up with the Cambridge police department did was r....