The Boston area has a less than stellar history of dealing with race issues, so the region’s latest incident probably isn’t much of a surprise.

Noted African American historian and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested by Cambridge police for breaking into his own home. He says the officers used racial profiling, and arrested him because he was black.

The officer, though, says he won’t apologize. And as far as though allegations that he’s a racist? Impossible! He gave mouth to mouth to Reggie Lewis.

“I wasn’t working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star. I wasn’t working on a black man. I was working on another human being,” Sgt. James Crowley, in an exclusive interview with the Herald, said of the forward’s fatal heart attack July 27, 1993, at age 27 during an off-season practice at Brandeis University, where Crowley was a campus police officer.

This is like the Cambridge cops version of  ”I don’t hate Jews. All of my lawyers and bankers are Jewish.”