Published June 17, 2010

Henry Louis Gates Jr. said it was about race.

Sgt. James Crowley said it was about disorderly conduct.

Harvard professor Charles Ogletree said it was about class.

C’mon, racism in Cambridge, Massachusetts? people asked.

If Sgt. Crowley, a white cop, made only one disorderly conduct arrest in five years, why was it a black man on his own porch? others retorted.

A wbur.org commenter said it best: It was a case of “Do you know who I am?” versus “Who do you think you are?”

A new study from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, reported by Bianca Vazquez Toness today on WBUR, would seem to put the debate to rest. It reveals no pattern of racial bias in the Cambridge Police Department, which corroborates an internal review of the same matter.

The study analyzed disorderly conduct arrests in the department going back five years. It found that 57 percent of the people arrested were white and 34 percent were black. The racial breakdown of arrests almost exactly mirrored the racial composition of the population that Cambridge police investigated for disorderly conduct.

But the study doesn’t put any debate to rest. No study can. There are large groups of people who still feel like they are unfairly targeted by police.

“People of color feel that police treat them differently,” Professor Ogletree said today in a WBUR interview. “You go to Area 4 in Cambridge, East Cambridge, you’ll see kids who run from police — not because they’ve committed crime but because they think they’re going to be harassed. Now we have to stop that. We have to stop children’s fear of police. We have to stop the sense that people are running because they committed a crime.”

Talk to black and Latino kids at the edge of the South End or in Dorchester or Roxbury. They’ll tell you that Boston cops harass them when they congregate, when they put up their hoodies, when they walk home from school. Maybe the cops do. Maybe they don’t. It doesn’t matter. Perception is everything.