First of all, I never said it wasn’t plausible to begin with; I questioned whether it was “necessary,” and argued that when a police officer confronts someone for breaking into a house, and it turns out it was his own house, he should get “a little leeway” in terms of getting offended. If police made arrests anytime there was a “plausible” case for a catch-all charge like “disorderly conduct,” we’d all be in jail.

Second, since when is it illegal to yell at a police officer? Stupid and disrespectful, sure, but if the same confrontation had transpired between two neighbors — rather than between a civilian and the very people who get to decide whether the behavior is “disorderly” enough to warrant arrest — I highly doubt an arrest would have occurred. The bottom line is that the officers could have simply left once it became clear there was nothing illegal happening; instead, they listened to Gates’s paranoid rant for a while and then arrested him.

Like Roger Clegg, I don’t have much sympathy for people who go out of their way to make cops’ lives harder (my father was an officer for several decades). Also like Clegg, I suspect Gates deliberately provoked a response that he could later label as racism. But I’m not seeing how an arrest is the proper response to such behavior.

Also, before reading Auster’s post, I’d recommend reading the previous one of mine he was responding to for context — he took a minor typing error on my part and blew it up into an assertion that I didn’t “know the basic facts.” Even though my post included a lengthy excerpt of a news story with all the “basic facts” I supposedly didn’t know (and that the media were supposedly burying).