Those dangerous historians….

A recent encounter between a British citizen and the Atlanta police illustrate the ways in which violence can escalate in the face of cultural miscommunications.

Police say a British historian was handcuffed, thrown to the ground and jailed because he refused to obey a uniformed officer’s order to use a crosswalk and wouldn’t show identification.

The historian says he had no idea the upset young man was a police officer.

”Where I’m from, you don’t associate young gentlemen in bomber jackets with the police. But he was extremely upset I had questioned his bona fides,” said the historian, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, a professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts and expert on colonial history.

More on Fernandez-Armesto’s adventures is here.  The encounter could be read to have broader significance in thinking about the more general –and more pervasive — issue of law enforcement in immigrant communities.

-jmc