We all view events through the prism of our own experience. That goes for everybody, including Presidents of the United States, Harvard Professors, and Massachusetts policemen. Trying to untangle the reality of events is difficult at this stage, but as a brown man, and having grown up as a young brown man in Darryl Gates' Los Angeles, I think I have a reasonable lens to view this through.
Clearly the most important actor in this little reality play was President Barak Hussein Obama. Obama even prefaced his comments on the situation by pointing out that he might be biased given his personal relationship with Gates. I suspect that there were a few more unspoken biases as well. For the most part, I do believe that Black and Brown my age and older to have a gut check distrust of police. I expect that Obama has that gut reaction as well based on his characterization of the police officer's actions despite his admission that he didn't know all the facts and that he had a personal bias.
If people wanted to evaluate the incident itself, there are a number of other witnesses to the event that could be questioned. Also note that Professor Gates had an unnamed driver with him, who from what I can tell had either left the scene by the time the Officer Crowley arrived, or was there and managed to avoid arrest as well as other police officers who had arrived at the scene.
The issue isn't what happened though, it is what Obama said about it. Obama is a "post-racial" figure in American Politics. Given that status, I think that the teachable moment here is for Obama himself. He needs to recognize that incidents that involve different racial groups happen all the time in the United States, and that they do not ALWAYS have racist overtones. Obama may not have realized that he was even treading on racially charged ground by using the phrase "acted stupidly." His gut reaction was to assume that the police were in the wrong, and he went with that despite the fact that he is the President of the United States (and the first black one at that). Being President means you have to move beyond your own personal biases and take a bigger picture approach. To some degree (and you can decide how great that degree was), Obama was elected because he is seen as a racially healing figure. That is a very challenging. He has to let white folks know that sometimes minorities actually are out of line, while acknowledging that racism does still exist. To do that well, he has to get his facts straight if he is going to get involved in the discussion of any such incident. By his own admission, he said he wasn't clear on all the facts of the incident, but he still chose to judge the action taken by the police. He judged them before getting all the facts. He pre-judged them. There is another word for that, but I won't use it here.
Thing is, we all pre-judge things at some time or another, about all sorts of things. But when we pre-judge people we don't know, we need to take a step back and really think about what we are saying. Obama failed to do that this time. I hope he can learn something from this.