The caller who alerted Cambridge police to a possible break-in at the house of Henry Louis Gates Jr. earlier this month told a dispatcher that she had seen two suitcases on the porch and said she wasn’t sure if it was a break-in.
“I don’t know what’s happening. … I don’t know if they live there and they just had a hard time with their key, but I did notice they had to use their shoulders to try to barge in,” the caller said in a recording of the call released today by Cambridge officials.
In a recording of police radio transmissions also released today, the dispatcher asked officers to “respond to a possible B and E in progress,” saying the caller had reported two people had “barged their way into the home. They have suitcases.”
The recordings appeared to reflect a relatively routine call, with officers and even the 911 caller mostly calm. Cambridge city officials released the recordings in an effort to put behind them the heated national debate over racial profiling that began when news broke that Sergeant James M. Crowley, who is white, had arrested Gates for disorderly conduct at his own home.
The recordings were released after a noon news conference held by City Manager Robert Healy, Mayor E. Denise Simmons, and Police Commissioner Robert Haas.
Asked what the tapes show, Haas said, “I think the tapes speak for themselves and I would ask you to form your own opinion.”
One thing the tapes didn’t show: any obvious background sound that indicated Gates was shouting during the incident. An officer can be heard at one point describing the person in the house as “uncooperative” and a second person can be heard saying something unintelligible in the background as the officer transmits.
Crowley said in the report he filed after the incident that Gates became disruptive during their encounter. Gates has denied that he was disorderly.
The controversy over Gates’s July 16 arrest generated a media frenzy last week that was stoked when Gates demanded an apology from the officer and Crowley said he wouldn’t. The debate intensified when President Obama stepped into the fray, saying that police had “acted stupidly.” But Obama later expressed regret for his choice of words and invited the two men to the White House for a meeting, which is expected to happen this week.
City officials at the news conference also discussed the formation of a panel of experts that is aimed at examining if lessons can be learned from the incident.
“While this has been a trying time for Cambridge, we are confident that we can ultimately come out stronger and a more unified community,” said Mayor E. Denise Simmons.
The woman who made the 911 call said Sunday through a spokesman she never mentioned race during the call and was “personally devastated” by media accounts that suggested she placed the call because the men she saw on the porch of Gate’s home were black, the Globe reports today.
Crowley arrested Gates, a leading expert on African-American history, after police were called to a report of a break-in at the Ware Street home. Gates had just arrived home from the filming of a PBS documentary in China. His front door was stuck shut, and his taxi driver helped him pry it open.
