I still think the accusations of racism we're hearing in this thread are too hasty--on both sides. We should never assume bias when simple foolishness would suffice.
Judging from my own experience, once again, I would still call this an unfortunate mistake. Professors don't often have to deal with police, and police don't often have to deal with professors. The potential for miscommunication and misunderstanding in this situation would have been quite high.
On the one hand, you have a very distinguished professor who, like I said, has probably gotten accustomed to a degree of deference from others.
On the other hand, you have a police officer who likely has to deal with anything but deference from others, every day, and is accustomed to dealing forcefully with uncooperative subjects.
What seemed like perfectly reasonable speech and behaviour to both men could easily have seemed unreasonable and even outrageous to the other.
In the absence of additional information, I think it would be a mistake to impute any wider significance at all to this incident.
