Page 144 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Encinia: I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what was wrong. I didn’t know if a
crime was being committed, had been committed, or whatnot.
He returns to his squad car to check her license and registration, and when he looks up and
observes Bland through the rear window of her car, he says he sees her “making numerous furtive
movements including disappearing from view for an amount of time.” This is a crucial point, and it
explains what is otherwise a puzzling fact from the video. Why does Encinia approach Bland’s car
from the passenger side the first time around, but from the driver side the second time? It’s because
he’s getting worried. As he wrote in his report, “Officer safety training has taught me that it was
much easier for a violator to attempt to shoot me on the passenger side of the vehicle.”
Renfro: So explain for the recording why you would go from “This is a routine traffic stop with
an aggravated person that in your opinion is not being cooperative or she’s agitated,” to your
thought process that there’s a possibility that you need to make a driver’s-side approach due to
the training on officers being shot.
Encinia: OK. Because when I was still inside the patrol car, I had seen numerous movements to
the right, to the console, her right side of her body, that area as well as disappearing from
sight.
His immediate thought was Is she reaching for a weapon? So now he approaches with caution.
Encinia: She has untinted glass on her windows so I can be able to see if anything could possibly
be in her hands, if she had to turn over her shoulder or not. So that’s why I chose that route…
To Encinia’s mind, Bland’s demeanor fits the profile of a potentially dangerous criminal. She’s
agitated, jumpy, irritable, confrontational, volatile. He thinks she’s hiding something.
This is dangerously flawed thinking at the best of times. Human beings are not transparent. But
when is this kind of thinking most dangerous? When the people we observe are mismatched: when
they do not behave the way we expect them to behave. Amanda Knox was mismatched. At the
crime scene, as she put on her protective booties, she swiveled her hips and said, “Ta-dah.” Bernie
Madoff was mismatched. He was a sociopath dressed up as a mensch.
What is Sandra Bland? She is also mismatched. She looks to Encinia’s eye like a criminal. But
she’s not. She’s just upset. In the aftermath of her death, it was revealed that she had had ten
previous encounters with police over the course of her adult life, including five traffic stops, which
had left her with almost $8,000 in outstanding fines. She had tried to commit suicide the year
before, after the loss of a baby. She had numerous cut marks running up and down one of her arms.
In one of her weekly “Sandy Speaks” video posts, just a few months before she left for Texas, Bland
alluded to her troubles:
I apologize. I am sorry, my Kings and Queens. It has been two long weeks. I have been missing
in action. But I gotta be honest with you guys. I am suffering from something that some of you
all may be dealing with right now.…It’s a little bit of depression as well as PTSD. I’ve been
really stressed out these last couple of weeks…
So here we have a troubled person with a history of medical and psychiatric issues, trying to pull
her life together. She’s moved to a new town. She’s starting a new job. And just as she arrives to
begin this new chapter in her life, she’s pulled over by a police officer—repeating a scenario that
has left her deeply in debt. And for what? For failing to signal a lane change when a police car is
driving up rapidly behind her. All of a sudden her fragile new beginning is cast into doubt. In the
three days she spent in jail before taking her own life, Sandra Bland was distraught, weeping
constantly, making phone call after phone call. She was in crisis.
But Encinia, with all of the false confidence that believing in transparency gives us, reads her
emotionality and volatility as evidence of something sinister.
Renfro asks about the crucial moment—when Encinia requests that Bland put out her cigarette.
Why didn’t he just say, “Hey, your cigarette ashes are getting on me”?
Encinia: I wanted to make sure that she had it out without throwing it at me or just get it out of
her hand.
Renfro then asks why, if that were the case, he didn’t immediately tell her why she was under
arrest.