Strom Thurmond                Trent Lott                  Lydia Chassaniol

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

We have been asking how a Mississippi State Senator can be a proud member of the most racist organization in America without drawing comment from the regional media.  Even when Lydia Chassaniol addressed the annual gathering of the resegregationist Council of Conservative Citizens, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger declined comment.

I realize that my repeated references to a faithful Methodist and loyal Republican makes me look mean, cheap and petty.  What has Lydia Chassanoil ever done to me?

Nothing personal, but Senator Chassaniol happens to be the walking embodiment of a question: How far has small town Mississippi traveled down the civil rights highway?

Mississippi, like every state in the Union, is a complex tangle of individuals and interests.  In a controversail article in Look, Hodding Carter II, a Mississippi Delta newspaper editor, challenged the White Citizens Councils.   Retribution came swiftly.  A member of the Mississippi House of Representatives called the article a “Willful lie by a nigger-loving editor” and the  House put the question to a vote.

Carter responded in a front-page editorial:

By vote of 89 to 19, the Mississippi House of Representatives has resolved the editor of this newspaper into a liar because of an article I wrote. If this charge were true, it would make me well qualified to serve in that body. It is not true. So to even things up, I hereby resolve by a vote of one to nothing that there are eighty-nine liars in the state legislature.

The 0utcome of the vote suggests that Carter was swimming against a strong tide.

More representative of mainstream opinion in the state is Strom Thurmond, the man who ran for President on the segregationist State’s Rights ticket in 1948.  Harry Truman had recently integrated the US Army and Thurmond didn’t like it.

Strom Thurmond stood for the same resegregationist policies the Council of Conservative Citizens currently endorses, but Thurmond took his stand back when segregation was cool.  For the most part, Dixiecrats like Thurmond never changed their stripes.  Speaking in the Dirkson Senate Office Building on the occasion of his political mentor’s 100th birthday, Lott raised eyebrows across the nation.

“I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.”

Lott later suggested that he had been quoted out of context.  But consider this.  When Thurmond spoke at a Ronald Reagan rally in Mississippi in 1980, Lott expressed the same views in public: “You know, if we had elected that man 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.”

The unavoidable import of these remarks is that if the Jim Crow segregation had remained in force America would be a better country.

Lydia Chassaniol agrees with this sentiment–or so it seems.  When Jesse Jackson remarked that he would like to castrate Barack Obama for talking down to black folks, Chassaniol was surprised by the muted response from the media:

The calm with which this has been reported pales in comparison to the coverage of the innocuous remark made by then Sen. Trent Lott several years ago at the 100th birthday party of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.  Sen. Lott didn’t threaten anyone, but merely wished an elder statesman a happy birthday and said things might not have been so bad if he, Thurmond, had been elected President over half a century ago. While we’ll never know if Sen. Lott was right about Strom Thurmond being elected President, we do know that no one was physically threatened by what he said, and yet, there was a maelstrom of media coverage condemning Lott.

Chassaniol can’t prove that a segregated America would have been a better America, but she is certainly open to the possibility.

In 1960, when Lydia Chassaniol was attending elementary school, Mrs. Claudia Hill Minga of Winona, MS wrote an anguished letter to the Jackson Daily News.  The letter caught the attention of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a nefarious arm of state government formed to snoop on civil rights activists.  Between 1960 and 1964, the Sovereignty Commission secretly funded the White Citizens Council (the forerunner to the Chassaniol’s Council of Conservative Citizens).

After closely observing both the Democratic and Republican conservations on television, with a deep resentment of the insults to our Southern delegations; and especially noting the obsequious deference and the glad-hand extended by the Kennedy-Johnson duo to the Negro representatives of the NAACP as they enthusiastically assured them of their support and the enforcement of their demands, I a sixth generation Democrat, realized that I was a woman without a party.

In my opinion, any Southerner with respect for himself, the future generations and his Caucasion blood, could not possibly accept the infamous civil rights planks of either party.

However, Mississippians have received new hope and optimism from the recent organization of the state of Independent Electors headed by Governor Ross Barnett and loyal state officials and citizens who refuse to forfeit our state’s rights and personal freedom or yield to the domination of Negroes and white “liberals”.  We shall fight valiantly and fearlessly and though we should be defeated we shall under no circumstances be found “on a longely island, waving a white flag” in cowardly surrender, according to the jeering, sneering prophesy of Bidwell Adam.

Mrs. Claudia Hill Minga,

Winona, Miss.

The reference to Bidwell Adam may give the impression that somebody in Mississippi (besides Hodding Carter) was questioning the fight for segregation.  Not so.  Adam, a former Mississippi Lt. Governor (pictured at the left), was state chair of the MS Democratic Party when Ross Barnett took up residence in the governor’s mansion in 1960.  According to a Time  article in 1959, Barnett won the election by employing the most appalling rhetoric the South has ever heard: “The Negro is different because God made him different to punish him. His forehead slants back. His nose is different. His lips are different, and his color is sure different.”

Barnett’s first act as Governor was to arrange a conference of Southern governors to stand four-square for segregation. “I am going to put forth every effort,” Barnett promised, “to organize Southern Governors to create and crystallize public opinion throughout the nation with reference to our traditions and Southern way of life.”

Bidwell Adam was delighted with this development: “I want to say I’m thankful to God that Ross Barnett has saved Mississippi,” he told the press.

In 1963 when 200,000 people marched to the Lincoln Memorial to demand “jobs and freedom” for African American, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger gave the rally a passing mention.   The next day’s headline was more direct: WASHINGTON IS CLEAN AGAIN WITH NEGRO TRASH REMOVED.

This was a time when nothing good could be said about Negroes or civil rights. When Lydia Chassaniol was a school girl, an ugly synergy between hate and resentment controlled Mississippi politics, spilling over into the criminal justice system.

James. P. Coleman, the man Ross Barnett succeeded as Governor, called in the FBI in 1959 when a crowd in the southern Mississippi town of Poplarville tried to break into the local jail to lynch a black man accused of raping a white woman.  The move won warm praise from Roy Wilkens of the NAACP, but Bidwell Adam was unimpressed.  “Wilkins gave Coleman a nice bouquet of roses wrapped in gold foil,” Adam charged, “to sew up the 25,000 Negro votes.”

Were there 25,000 black voters in the state of Mississippi in 1959.  According to Randall Kennedy, “In many rural areas, black voters were virtually non-existent; in Mississippi in 1955, fourteen rural counties with large black populations had no black registered voters.”

When a band of civil rights workers passed through Winona in 1963 all hell broke loose.

But that’s the next chapter of this story.

Now that all the relevant tapes and manuscripts have been released some folks are growing weary of the Gates-Crowley affair.  When one side in a dispute says the issue has been overblown and it’s time to move on, you know the facts aren’t sliding their way.

So it is with the Cambridge controversy.

We now know that the the Cambridge Police Department had no solid grounds to suspect a break-in.  The woman who reported the incident surmised that the men at the front door might live there.  She reported that the men had suitcases with them (as opposed to the backpacks Sgt. James Crowley cited in his report), which suggests their intentions were innocent (you might bring a duffel bag to a burglary, but a suitcase?)

 In fact, Lucia Whalen told police that the presence of suitcases suggested that the two men she had seen lived in the home.  Whalen said nothing about the race of the men she observed on the porch, yet, if Sgt. Crowley’s incident report is accurate, he entered the home with two black men on his mind.  This suggests that racial profiling was a bigger part of the picture than some of us initially suspected.

The point may be subtle but it is important.  Crowley remembers being told that two black men with backbacks were in the home; where did he get that idea?  He didn’t get it from Whalen?  Perhaps the fact that Gates is black “colored” his memory.   It is also possible, even likely, that a reference to two men with suitcases automatically triggered a mental image in Crowley’s mind of two black guys with backpacks. 

You can disagree with my explanation, but Crowley is clearly the victim of false memory (a subject I am currently researching) and something triggered the two-black-men scenario.

The released tapes also tell us that Sgt. Crowley asked for backup from the Cambridge PD and Harvard campus police after Dr. Gates had clearly identified himself.  Was the strapping young cop really that afraid of a short middle-aged man with a cane?  Obviously not.  So why did he need the backup? 

As I suggested in an earlier post, college professors and police officers are accustomed to deference and sometimes behave badly when they don’t get it.  Hopefully, a beer with the biggest cheese of all will help put things in perspective for both men.

Has the Cambridge stand-off been exaggerated by the media?

I don’t think so.  When was the last time Americans have enjoyed so much good conversation about race, racial profiling, homeowner’s rights, and the proper role of law enforcement? 

Juan Williams, a familiar face on Fox News and a familiar voice on NPR, has developed a reputation as a black herald of a post-racial society.  This morning, Williams was on Morning Edition arguing that the Gates affair has nothing to do with racial profiling.  Williams developed that opinion before the tapes were released and he’s sticking to it. 

President Obama hopes the Gates incident will become “a teachable moment” in America.  Juan Williams doesn’t think the Gates-Crowley encounter has nothing to teach.

Gates has been criticized for whining about a mean cop while poor blacks experience far more egregious treatment at the hands of officers who make Crowley look like Dudley Dooright.  Why hasn’t professor Gates, the man with posh accommodations in Cambridge, Martha’s Vineyard and Manhattan, been talking about the plight of poor blacks all along.  And why has President Obama gone to bat for his friend Skip while refunding the notorious Byrne Grant system so still more black guys can go to prison?

These are very good questions.  But here’s the point: because of what happened in Cambridge people are asking questions, making comments, sharing insights and expressing opinions of every conceivable sort.  Attorney General Eric Holder was right on the money when he called America “a nation of cowards” on the race issue.  Back in February, Holder admitted that the workplaces of America are much more integrated than they once were, but he noted that “Certain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks at best embarrassment and at worst the questioning of one’s character.” 

Well, thanks to Gates and Crowley we’re all talking now.  We’re not all making sense, but we’re talking. 

Like the Jena 6 story or the Tulia drug sting, the Gates affair was fraught with moral ambiguity.  This wasn’t a story pitting a dastardly villain and a virtuous hero–real life doesn’t work that way.  People don’t talk much about hero-villain stories where the moral issues are obvious.  These stories flash across the evening news, we all say “ain’t it awful” and then we move on to the next story about an explosion, a wildfire or a trainwreck. 

But stories like the Gates-Crowley stand-off spark controversy and endless conversation precisely because the issues are subtle and open to a range of interpretation.  Juan Williams is talking about professor Gates and officer Crowley even though, as always, he takes the moderate white position that there’s nothing to it.  Williams is talking about Gates-Crowley because it’s what people are talking about–you can’t avoid the issue if you’re a black commentator paid the big bucks to tell white folks how far they’ve come on the race issue.

Robert Jenson is a white University of Texas professor who tells white people they haven’t come as far on the race issue as they like to think.  Here’s Jenson’s take on the Gates-Crowley brouhaha (highly recommended).

And then, contra Williams, we have the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers decrying racial profiling and siding with professor Gates.

Thousands of articles, hundreds of thousands of blog commentaries and millions of comments have flowed from a single incident.  Maybe Professor Gates doesn’t have much to complain about compared to most poor black victims of racial profiling, but people can identify with Gates precisely because of his academic attainments and lofty social position.  We say, “If it could happen to him . . .”  

Many white homeowners are thinking about the paramaters of police authority because of my-home-is-my-castle concerns. 

Moral ambiguity drives controversy, controversy drives conversation and conversation sometimes produces genuine insight.

You couldn’t dismiss the Jena 6 case by preaching that violence is not the answer (although people certainly tried).  You couldn’t erase the damage done in Tulia by surmising that some of the 46 people arrested were guilty as charged.  And you can’t dismiss the Gates-Crowley stand-off with snide references to professorial arrogance. 

If there weren’t valid points to me made on both sides of these national narratives they wouldn’t inspire so much ardent debate. 

Friends of Justice uses narrative campaigns to pose hard questions about the issues Eric Holder thinks America needs to be talking about: history, race and the criminal justice system.  Our stories aren’t “ripped from the headlines”; we focus on anonymous narratives that would pass unnoticed if we didn’t put the facts together and ask the questions legal professionals aren’t allowed to ask. 

Friends of Justice gives defendants, lawyers, reporters and advocacy groups something to work with.

Statistics and studies don’t inspire debate; stories do. 

So hats off to Sgt. James Crowley and Dr. “Skip” Gates.  Because you weren’t “at your best” our minds and hearts have been stretched.

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

James Bibbs’ perjury trial has been postponed.  Jury selection was originally scheduled to begin on Tuesday, July 28th.  (You can find background material for this post here.)

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger may be ignoring state senator Lydia Chassaniol’s intimate ties to one America’s most racist organizations, but the paper has been faithfully following the Bibbs case.  Earlier this year, Chassaniol sponsored legislation designed to expand the jury pool in the Curtis Flowers case to a five-county district (Flowers is pictured to the left).  Current law stipulates that a defendant has a constitutional right to stand trial in his or her county of residence.

Because Montgomery County is over 50% black, it will inevitably produce more black jurors than most Mississippi counties.  Moreover, the Flowers family has a reputation in the African American community as stable, religious and friendly.  As a result, most black jurors are open to the possibility that Curtis Flowers might be innocent.  After five murder trials and three convictions, it is difficult to find a white resident of socially segregated Winona who doesn’t think the case against Flowers is overwhelming.

This racial perception gap is evident in the comments section at the end of the Clarion-Ledger article.  Those who think Flowers murdered Bertha Tardy and three other innocent people in 1996 also tend to believe that juror James Bibbs is guilty of perjury.  Readers who think the case against Flowers is weak see Bibbs as the victim of a vindictive prosecutor.

“It’s a shame race has been used to prohibit justice in this case,” one reader writes.  “This is about a violent animal with no compassion for anyone that took the lives of innocent people. Everyone (black and white) should be united in bringing these animals to justice not matter the race. This could happen to any of us as long as thugs like Flowers are allowed to walk free. With the overwhelming evidence in this case and the fact that he has already been tried and convicted three times should be enough for anyone. Instead we continue to waste taxpayer money on technicalities. What a farce.”

Another reader disagrees:

NO, that is NOT the way the justice system is supposed to work. You do not base your decision or vote on past trials and juries. I don’t know if he is guilty or not. However I do know the verdict should be based on evidence presented during this trial alone.

A third person thinks DA Doug Evans prosecuted juror Bibbs as tactic of intimidation:

It appears to me that they are trying to send a message to the next group that serve on the jury that if you don’t find Flowers guilty you could be charged with the same charges as Bibbs! It won’t work! People will vote the way they see it! I agree when you prosecute someone on the thin evidence here, it could send an unfortunate message that people are being prosecuted because of the way they vote on the jury. That is completely improper.  Only in Mississippi! It’s time for the Feds to come in and clean this up!

Did Curtis Flowers casually massacre four innocent people in a furniture store and then go about his business as if nothing had happened?  If so, he defintely fits the “violent animal” profile.

But what if the “violent animal” shoe doesn’t fit?

Prior to the Tardy murders, Curtis was known as a goodnatured gospel singer.  Since being locked up in 1996, Flowers has been a model prisoner best known for leading the singing at worship services.

I recently talked to a prison guard who has been watching Flowers carefully for several years and is convinced the man isn’t capable of committing such a heinous crime.

“He ’bout one of the finest young men I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” the guard told me.  “He’s one of the nicest people ever put on a pair of pants.  He goes to church, he’s free-hearted, he’d give you his last dime.  He doesn’t look like somebody who did the crime.  He sleeps sound.  If you puttin’ on, there’ll be a time when you slip up.”

According to the guard, other prisoners frequently remark that Curtis doesn’t fit the killer profile.

But I digress.

You may be wondering why the perjury trial of James Bibbs was postponed at the eleventh hour?

When Judge Joseph Loper hauled Mr. Bibbs into court and pronounced him guilty of perjury, the case should have been turned over to the Attorney General’s office.  Bibbs had just robbed prosecutor Doug Evans of a long-sought conviction and Evans could hardly be seen as objective.  Moreover, Evans was a potential fact witness at trial.  Eventually, the case was turned over the Mississippi AG’s office and handed down to the first prosecutor with the time to take it.

Unlike DA Evans, the new prosecutor has nothing personal against the defendant; he’s just doing his job.  Defense attorney Rob McDuff suggested that the AG’s office should take a good hard look at this case before proceeding.  The special prosecutor agreed to do that.

That’s all we know at present and I’m not inclined to read any deeper meaning into the postponement.  I will be writing more about the background of the Flowers case in the near future.  In addition to the post cited earlier, you can find more information about the deep social cleavage in Winona  here, here and here.

I met Reginald Lyles in September, 1998 when I was Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church of Kansas City, Kansas, a mostly white church in an ethnically changing neighborhood. We had called Marcus Goodloe, a young Black man, as Associate Pastor for Community Outreach and Children and Youth Ministry. Marcus was a member of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, California, where Dr. J. Alfred Smith Sr. was pastor. Dr. Smith came to Kansas City to speak at the installation service for Marcus.  Several Allen Temple members came along, Reggie among them. I got to know Reggie over that weekend, and to appreciate his heart for racial reconciliation. So I sit up and pay attention to anything he has to say regarding race relations.

Charles Kiker, Friends of Justice

As a retired 30 year cop (Captain) I was offended by our President’s backtracking in the latest example of racial profiling that occurred to Dr. Henry Louis Gates. I understand the politics.  I realize the track the President is currently pursuing may be best for his political goals.   However, I am still offended that he is being forced to backtrack on his original statement that the Cambridge police officers acted stupidly. 

The officer who decided to arrest Dr. Gates did act stupidly.

Only a Black man can be accused of disorderly conduct (actually insulting a policeman) in his own living room and end up in jail. Dr. Gates, a Black man, eventually identified himself (whether quickly or slowly is immaterial).  That identification proved that Dr. Gates was Dr. Gates, he was in his own home and he was employed as a professor at Harvard University. Yes, Dr. Gates was talking loud and was possibly insulting to the police. That may not be the wisest thing to do on the streets, in the wee hours of the morning, in an isolated area.  But Dr. Gates was in his own living room! Not to mention, Dr. Gates is 58 years old, he has a degenerative hip and he walks with a limp and a cane.

Dr. Gates, while attempting to get the name of the investigating officer, was baited to come onto his own porch.  Ah ha! Once Dr. Gates was on his porch he was not in his home but, in theory, in a public area where he could be arrested for disorderly conduct.

You see how totally disengenous the police officers were acting?  How do you act disorderly in your own home?  How do you disturb the peace in the middle of the day? According to the police officer, Dr. Gates was not disturbing the peace of the community, he disturbed the peace of that particular police oficer. Who in the neighborhood complained of disorderly conduct or of their peace being disturbed? No one!

Fortunately, the law doesn’t have a statute on insulting a police officer. A police officer’s peace cannot be disturbed. That is why the case was immediately dropped.

It is interesting that we do not hear of episodes where Black police officers are accused of arresting White folk for disturbing the peace in their own homes?  Every Black Police officer knows there is no defense for arresting anyone for disturbing the officer’s peace. Nevertheless, Black officers must go along with the decision of this partcular Cambridge officer in order to keep the peace for themselves and to protect their own careers.

The President is a law professor and he was initially right. It was momentarily refreshing for me to hear, for once, a Black male being validated for experiencing the racial profiling we all have to endure.  Unfortunately, by backtracking the President has left American Black males in a worse position. Popular culture now believes that police officers can arrest someone in their own home for disorderly conduct when only the peace of the officer has been disturbed.  If an officer is offended for any reason any action he takes is justified, if not by law then by some street morality.

The police officer in the Dr. Gates matter should apologize and Dr. Gates should consider civil action against the City of Cambridge.

Reginald Lyles

President Obama raised eyebrows across the nation by suggesting that the Cambridge Police Dempartment acted “stupidly” in arresting a Harvard professor after his identity and home ownership had clearly been established.

In a recent ABC interview, Obama softened that comment a bit by calling Sgt. James Crowley, an “outstanding police officer,” and suggesting that the outcome could have been avoided if “cooler heads” had prevailed on both sides. 

Yesterday, while attending a Sojourners event in Dallas, I briefly discussed the Gates affair with Rev. Gerald Britt, a prolific blogger and Vice President of Public Policy & Community Program Development Central Dallas Ministries.    “Black people and white people respond to law enforcement differently,” Britt told me, “because we don’t draw from the same experience.”

Britt is right.  Intellecutally, I generally come down on the “black” side of racially divisive issues, but my white experience bars me from feeling the emotion so eloquently revealed in the eyes of my black and Lationo friends. 

Reaction to President Obama’s initial comment has been mixed.  At the New York Times, Brent Staples argues that Obama’s willingness to take sides in the controversial Gates episode debunks the widespread view that he sidesteps racially divisive issues.  (more…)

In his Grits for Breakfast blog, Scott Henson suggests there is more to Gates’ reaction than the ghosts of racial history. 

Having read several accounts of the incident, I think its root cause may or may not have been racial but was much more definitely the result of basic police training regarding how officers are taught to engage with the public. In this case, even after learning that Gates was in his own home and they’d been called out based on an error, officers still wanted to maintain a “command presence,” in the policing lingo, and Professor Gates apparently was having none of it.

Henson believes the Harvard professor would have faired better had he simply asked, once the identity issue had been resolved, that the officer leave his property. 

Still, the “I’m in charge here” bluster by police heightened tension in a confrontational situation instead of defusing it and the end result was the President calling the cops “stupid” on national TV. To the extent it was “stupid,” though, it’s also worth remembering it’s probably exactly how the officers were trained to behave, whether they’re dealing with a black man caught breaking into his own home or some blogger who’s babysitting while white. (more…)

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town.  Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

In my first post in this series I suggested that Mississippi State Senator Lydia Chassaniol was in trouble for addressing the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that revels in its hatred of blacks, Jews, Latinos and the civil rights movement.

It appears I misspoke.

Apart from the Greenwood Commonwealth, the Mississippi media has chosen to avert its eyes from the senator’s strange social dalliance.  Even when it was disclosed that Lydia Chassaniol is a proud, card-carrying member of the CCC, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger ignored the story. (more…)

Riot police separated black separatists from white supremacists in Paris, Texas today.  Not a pretty sight.

Not pretty, but certainly popular.  Nothing sells like white folks and black folks exchanging insults.  The rally in Paris has attracted national and international attention.

I can understand the frustration of Brandon McClelland’s mother.  No one wants a tragic story to end with a question mark.  But let’s face facts: the State of Texas didn’t have a strong enough case to prosecute anyone for murder in the McClelland case.  Convicting defendants on shakey evidence would have compounded the tragedy.

It appears that the Nation of Islam wisely decided to give this protest a miss.  I applaud their restraint.  I only wish the New Black Panther Party had done a better job of thinking things through.  Check out the comments section in this story and you don’t get people shouting across the racial divide–everyone is saying “a pox on both your houses”.  That’s the kind of reaction this sort of protest deserves.  What, beyond getting an organization’s name in the regional headlines, is the point here? (more…)

The Boston Globe reports that a District Attorney has decided not to press charges against Henry Louis Gates Jr.  

No surprise there.  As I said in my first post on this story, they picked the wrong man to mess with.  Gates is a highly respected professor and authority on the civil rights movement.  If he had been just another black guy in some small Southern town he would still be locked up.   (Please read this piece of analysis from AP writer, Jesse Washington.  Here is CNN’s take.)

If his first name was “Bill” he would have been treated with far greater deference.

Check out the story in the Globe and scroll down to the comments section.  Most of these people are residents of Greater Boston, but you would get the same range of comments in the Deep South.  Half the readers think Dr. Gates owes Sergeant James Crowley an apology.

An apology?  Really?  If a police officer saw me trying to enter my own home and I presented clear evidence that I owned the place his next move is very simple: offer an effusive apology and to clear off my property.

Had that been done this would be a n0n-story. 

Sure, the initial scene at the front door looked suspicious.  You can’t blame the neighbor for calling the police, nor can you blame the police for checking into the situation.  But don’t expect the homeowner to welcome your intrusion with open arms. 

No one appreciates having to prove that they own their own home.  I would get a bit testy if this happened to me.  I would certainly ask for the officers name and badge number.  If this information wasn’t provided with alacrity I would tell the unresponsive officer what I thought of his non-compliance.  It’s simple human nature. Police officers should understand that when they confront innocent citizens in their own homes a measure of pique is to be expected. (more…)