My friend Lisz Rea wrote a blog about this incident regrading the cop and professor in Boston http://www.restorativejustice.org/RJOB/harvard-scholar-versus-cambridge-police and I wrote this comment in response:
Thank you for the great commentary Lisa!  President Obama provided a wonderful service by modeling how conflicting people can communicate and come to understand each other better.  As painful as this [...]

It takes practice to get in touch with our emotions and if we did more often we could avoid a lot of conflict.  Western culture prefers logic over emotions.  We get a lot of training in logical reasoning and not much training in understanding emotions and how to express our feelings.  We end up with [...]