To the editors:


On my graduation night from Yale Divinity School, May 1980, I witnessed an example of racial profiling by Yale Police hauntingly similar to that endured by Professor Gates this year, only the unfortunate handcuff victim was neither famous nor in his own home. And unfortunately, the term ‘racial profiling” had not been coined.

Rather, the victim was a young African American male who was reclining on the front steps of Hendrie Hall, a Yale building on a public street in New Haven, early in the evening while it was still light outside. His “crime” brought three Yale Police to handcuff and arrest him. When I inquired as a passerby what these police accused him of doing, he wept and replied that he had been sitting or lying on the steps.

After I sent several letters to Yale’s President A. Bartlett Giamatti and other Yale faculty, his arrest for trespassing was “nolle’d” when it went to court.



Paul Keane

White River Junction, VT.

September 10, 2009