Gates 911 Caller Left Dangling in the Wind

Posted by Terry Francke, General Counsel | Jul 29, 2009 | Legal Issue: Public Information | 0 |

PUBLIC INFORMATION — This is what can happen when police needlessly release only scraps of information rather than the actual records bearing on a controversial incidentuntil the predictable ignorance-based speculation forces an about-face.

It took more than a week to clarify that 911 caller Lucia Whalen never alluded to the race of the two men she saw struggling to open Harvard Professor Henry Louis Henry Gates' front door. Even when pressed on this issue by the police dispatcher she contactedjust why has never been explainedshe speculated only that one "might be" Hispanic.

Eight days after the incident, Cambridge's police officials and lawyers were still mulling whether it was safe for them to release the 911 call tape, after a Boston Herald poll showed 92 percent favoring that move.

Officer Crowley's handling of his encounter with Gates may not have been stupid, but it's hard to think of a better word for this delay.

About The Editor

Terry Francke, General Counsel

Terry Francke has a 39-year history of helping journalists, citizens and public officials understand and use their First Amendment and open government rights. With CalAware, Francke has authored comprehensive and authoritative guidebooks to California law on access to government meetings and public records and the news gathering and publication rights of journalists. Focusing on these issues in public forum law, he supervises CalAware's legislative and litigation initiatives; conducts workshops on legal compliance; helps design public records audits; supports local sunshine ordinance drafting efforts; writes CalAware Today, a blog on current developments and proposals in the law and best practices; and answers countless queries by phone and e-mail from citizens, journalists, public officials and employees, and lawyers. Francke previously served 14 years as executive director and general counsel to the California First Amendment Coalition, after a 10-year post as legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association. He has served as an advisory panel member to the National Center on Courts and the Media; taught journalism law at the Department of Communication at Stanford University; and served as an expert contributor to the 1994 major revisions to the Ralph M. Brown Act and the 2004 ballot proposition making open government a basic right of citizens under the California Constitution. Francke is a 1967 graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a 1979 graduate of McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific. Prior to his legal career, Francke worked as a weekly newspaper editor and in military and local government public affairs positions.

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