Lucia Whalen, the woman whose 911 call led to the encounter between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Police Sergeant James Crowley, will hold a news conference to tell her story. She’ll meet with the media at a park near Cambridge’s Fresh Pond Mall.
The white police officer’s July 16 arrest of the noted black academic in his own home sparked a heated debate over police relations with minorities, raising questions of whether officers practice racial profiling.
President Obama stepped into the fray last week, saying Cambridge police “acted stupidly.” He later expressed regret for his words and invited Gates and Crowley to the White House to meet with him and have a beer, hoping to turn the case into a “teachable moment.” That meeting is slated for 6 p.m. Thursday.
In a recording of the 911 call released Monday by Cambridge officials, Whalen, 40, can be heard telling a dispatcher that she had seen two suitcases on the porch and 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,” Whalen said
Whalen said Sunday through a spokeswoman 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.
Whalen did speculate that one of the men in the house was Hispanic. And recordings of radio transmissions also released by Cambridge officials showed that a dispatcher told the officers responding to the scene that two people were still in the house, “unknown on the race. One may be a Hispanic male. Not sure,” the dispatcher said.
The dispatcher asked officers to “respond to a possible B and E [breaking and entering] in progress,” saying the caller had reported two people had “barged their way into the home. They have suitcases.”
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. The charge of disorderly conduct brought by Crowley was dropped, but that didn’t stop the controversy from gaining momentum last week.
