Panel to Begin Review of Gates, Cambridge Police Incident

Nearly two months after the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ignited a debate on racial profiling that drew in President Obama, an independent panel will begin the work of reviewing the incident.

The task of leading the review falls to Chuck Wexler, whose Washington, D.C. based research group will dig through the facts of Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley arrest of Gates and study the after effects of the incident, which made Cambridge a topic of national discussion this summer.

"I'm just hoping to make sense of this thing," said Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. "This is one of those cases where everyone has an opinion about it. It's almost like some kind of Rorschach test. People see it and they read into it what they want."

Wexler's panel was first announced by Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas after Obama said his department had "acted stupidly" in arresting the professor on his front porch. Obama later pulled back from that statement and invited both Crowley and Gates to the White House to talk and sip beer.

The 12-member panel will not look specifically for wrongdoing, but rather will focus on what actions could have created a better outcome, Wexler said. It will answer questions such as the kind of training that could have helped avoid the incident and why this particular episode received so much attention.

"People want to know, 'How did we get here?'," said Wexler, who will travel to Cambridge Thursday to name the other members of the panel. "Our starting point is the incident, but the incident only took six minutes."

Wexler described the panel membership as diverse. Half are Cambridge community members, the other half experts in a variety of fields from around the country. Wexler and the others will interview Crowley and Gates and look at previously unreleased police records. They will then meet periodically for three to five months and produce a report.

"This is not an investigation," Wexler said. "President Obama called this a teaching moment. I'm hoping that the committee will provide some teaching moments."

Wexler's organization has been studying issues of race and policing for more than a decade, including participating in a project funded by the U.S. Justice Department to write guidelines for departments on the issue of racially-biased policing. Wexler's history with the issue goes back even farther. He grew up in Boston and during the city's tumultuous busing desegregation period oversaw a police unit specifically tasked with investigating racially-motivated crimes. Last year, he served as an expert on a committee that studied racial tensions between Harvard students and the university police.

"On something like this, that is so volatile, you may never get closure," Wexler said. "The best we can hope for is insight."