...or just class?

Gates again, in The Root. He comes off as an idiot.
And there’s a second police statement by a latino officer and there are already attempts to psychoanalyze him. It reminds me of the response to Clinton's tears. Rationalism without facts, and without paying attention.

Maureen Dowd was right about John Edwards in the same way she was right about Clinton, because she paid attention not just to the words but their performance.  It would be much harder to defend political commentary by theater critics if those who mocked it actually paid as much attention to the meanings of words as they claim, but as with Clinton when the words say things the earnestly rationalizing faithful don't want to hear they're ignored. How long is the list of articles, blogs posts, and comments, laced with bitter irony on the subject of Gates in "post-racial America" -"This is what happens to a black man in America!"- when he was arrested by a post-racial assortment of cops?

Crooked Timber hosts a cop. Read the post and comments, including his.
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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 overweening assumptions of self-worth can't tell the difference.  Many conservatives, from the other side of the argument, can't tell it either.

continuing
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The post by the cop was deleted, at some point after May 2013. "Police Discretion: A Different Perspective", by Brandon del Pozo. Found at Archive.org.