"Presumed Guilty"

While reading Bob Herbert's op-ed on the arrest of Prof. Gates (see the preceding post) I remembered his December 2006 piece entitled "Presumed Guilty." There Herbert wrote that the "death of Sean Bell at the hands of undercover police officers, who also wounded his two companions in their 50-shot barrage in Queens nine days ago, brought to mind a case from a few years back in which undercover cops, acting on bogus information, attacked an innocent group of young people in a car in Manhattan. . . . The cops . . . assumed that the people in the car were lowlifes. They were all Ivy League graduates, and one is currently clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens." Read Herbert's account of how the occupants of the car (two who happened to be black, one of "mixed parentage," and one from the Philippines) were treated and arrested after the police acted on a mistaken computer report that the car was stolen. The driver of the car, then-25 year old Jason Rowley (who happens to be black), stated that "a lot of the officers told me that if this had been elsewhere--for example, if this had been in the Bronx or Harlem--I'd have been dead."