Another point about Gates et al. and my usual comments on liberals and rationalism. Liberals tend to think that policemen owe them deference, but that's not the case. Cops owe deference to the formal rules of law, not to you. It's not their job to believe you or anything you say. Courtesy is formality not friendship, and certainly not deference.

As always, people who assume their own position as moral or righteous don't like having that questioned, but that's a cop's job.
The cops' mistake is to assume that representing the law is embodying it. Personalizing the law by analogy: 'I am the law," is fascism.
Many liberals, arguing from their own -pedantic, insecure- assumptions of self-worth can't tell the difference.
And most conservatives, from the other side of the argument, can't tell it either.