By Lallan Schoenstein
Sandra Bland was arrested in Prairie View, Texas, in July 2015. She was driving on a rural road traveling to a new job at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, a historical Black university after a holiday visit with her family in Naperville, Ill.
State Trooper Brian Encinia pulled Bland over because he claimed she had failed to put on her turn signal while changing lanes to let his vehicle pass. The blurry police car dash-cam recorded a terrifying confrontation where Bland ended up face down on the ground with Enchinia’s knee in her back. Ms. Bland was booked and placed in the one-story Waller County Jail, where three days later she was found hanged in her cell.
The scenes from the dash-cam video, which became viral, along with the questionable jailhouse report of her “self-inflicted” death, created a storm of international outrage. In the subsequent investigation and hearing the only evidence was the dash-cam and a video shot by a bystander.
Four years later, on May 6, 2019, the Dallas television station WFAA broadcast for the first time a 39-second video that Sandra Bland made with her cellphone from inside her car. Bland had recorded the behavior of the state trooper who pulled her over.
In the U.S., where Black people face criminalization, racial profiling and violence at the hands of the law, police officers rarely face criminal charges or jail time for murder. Racism in the U.S. is so endemic that all a police officer has to do to justify killing a Black person is to claim she or he acted in self defense.