Washington: President Barack Obama said on Friday he should have chosen his words more carefully when he said police ''acted stupidly'' in arresting a prominent black Harvard scholar, touching off a debate over race.
Obama made his comments after talking on the telephone to Sgt. James Crowley, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer who made the arrest, and discussing inviting Crowley and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates to the White House for a beer.
''Because this has been ratcheting up and I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up, I wanted to make clear in my choice of words I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sgt. Crowley specifically,'' Obama said. ''And I could have calibrated those words differently.''
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