Harvard academic agrees to meet white officer who detained him as president seeks to defuse tension

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who was arrested on suspicion of breaking into his own home, has accepted Barack Obama’s invitation to visit him at the White House to have a beer with the white police officer who detained him.

Gates told the Boston Globe last night that he had spoken to Obama and agreed to meet Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley. Gates, one of the country’s most prominent black academics, said he hoped his arrest would lead to greater sensitivity on racial profiling.

“My entire academic career has been based on improving race relations, not exacerbating them,” Gates said in an email, adding: “It is time for all of us to move on, and to assess what we can learn from this experience.”

Obama phoned the two men to invite them to the White House yesterday as he sought to calm the debate sparked when he said the police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates.

The president told the policeman he should have chosen his words more carefully, but stopped short of issuing an apology.

“Because this has been ratcheting up and I helped to contribute to ratcheting it up, I want to make it clear that in my choice of words I unfortunately gave the impression I was maligning the Cambridge police department and Sergeant Crowley and I could have calibrated those words differently,” he said. However, the president also said he felt both men could have handled the situation better.

He said he had invited both Crowley and Gates for “a beer here in the White House”. It is not yet clear whether Crowley has accepted the invitation.

A joint statement by three Massachusetts police unions said they appreciated the president’s “sincere interest” and added that Crowley had a friendly and meaningful conversation with Obama.

Crowley has not spoken to the media, but his brother, JP Crowley, a fellow officer on the Cambridge department, said: “I think he just wants to get back to a sense of normalcy, back to work. He didn’t ask for this.”

Earlier, Steve Killian, president of the Cambridge police patrol officers’ association, denied that race was a factor in the arrest and demanded an apology from Obama and the state governor, Deval Patrick, who is African-American and had described the arrest as “every black man’s nightmare”.

“Cambridge police are not stupid. It is a great department. I think everyone that knows us knows that,” said Killian.

Other police union officials said the charges against Gates should not have been dropped. Crowley arrested the professor for disorderly conduct after neighbours saw him and a taxi driver attempting to force the jammed front door of his home. Gates said he showed identification and asked Crowley for his name and badge number because he did not like the way he was spoken to. The professor accused the policeman of racial profiling and apparently raised his voice.