Page 149 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

I said at the beginning of this book that I was not willing to put the death of Sandra Bland aside. I
have now watched the videotape of her encounter with Brian Encinia more times than I can count—
and each time I do, I become angrier and angrier over the way the case was “resolved.” It was
turned into something much smaller than it really was: a bad police officer and an aggrieved young
black woman. That’s not what it was. What went wrong that day on FM 1098 in Prairie View,
Texas, was a collective failure. Someone wrote a training manual that foolishly encouraged Brian
Encinia to suspect everyone, and he took it to heart. Somebody else higher up in the chain of
command at the Texas Highway Patrol misread the evidence and thought it was a good idea to have
him and his colleagues conduct Kansas City stops in a low-crime neighborhood. Everyone in his
world acted on the presumption that the motorists driving up and down the streets of their corner of
Texas could be identified and categorized on the basis of the tone of their voice, fidgety movements,
and fast-food wrappers. And behind every one of those ideas are assumptions that too many of us
share—and too few of us have ever bothered to reconsider.
Renfro: OK. If Bland had been a white female, would the same thing have occurred?
It’s the end of the deposition. Encinia and his interrogator are still fruitlessly trying to figure out
what happened that day.
Encinia: Color doesn’t matter.…We stop vehicles and people for law infractions, not based on
any kind of race or gender at all. We stop for violations.

“We stop for violations,” may be the most honest thing said in their entire episode. But instead of
asking the obvious follow-up—why do we stop for all violations?—Renfro blunders on.
Renfro: What do you think that someone who’s aggravated is going to do once you ask them,
“Are you OK?” And she gives you that type of response, and then you come back with, “Are
you done?” I mean, how’s that building on rapport?
Renfro is firm but understanding, like a father chiding a small child for being rude to the dinner
guests. The two of them have agreed to frame the tragic death of Sandra Bland as a personal
encounter gone awry, and now they are at the stage where Renfro is critiquing Encinia’s table
manners.
Encinia: At no point was I ever trying to be discourteous or trying to downplay any of her
response. I was just simply asking her if she was done, to make sure she had what she needed
out, and that way I could move on with completing the traffic stop and/or identifying what
possibly may or may not be in the area.

Renfro: Is it fair to say that she could have possibly taken that as being sarcastic?
Encinia: It is possible, yes, sir. Those were not my intentions.
Oh, so it was her mistake, was it? Apparently, Bland misinterpreted his intonation. If you are
blind to the ideas that underlie our mistakes with strangers—and to the institutions and practices that
we construct around those ideas—then all you are left with is the personal: the credulous Mountain
Climber, the negligent Graham Spanier, the sinister Amanda Knox, the doomed Sylvia Plath. And
now Sandra Bland, who—at the end of the lengthy postmortem into that fateful traffic stop on FM
1098—somehow becomes the villain of the story.
Renfro: Did you ever reflect back on your training at that point and think about that you may
have stopped a subject that just didn’t like police officers? Did that ever occur to you?
Encinia: Yes sir.…That is a possibility, that she did not like police officers.
Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with
strangers? We blame the stranger.
1 This is why Bland is so irritated, of course. “I feel like it’s crap what I’m getting a ticket for. I was getting out of your way.
You were speeding up, tailing me, so I move over and you stop me,” she says. Meaning: a police car came speeding up behind
her. She got out of its way, as a motorist is supposed to do, and now the same police officer who forced her to change lanes is
giving her a ticket for improperly changing lanes. Encinia caused the infraction.
2 There is significant evidence that African Americans are considerably more likely to be subjected to traffic stops than white
Americans, meaning the particular indignity of the false positive is not equally distributed across all citizens. It is concentrated
on those citizens who already suffer from other indignities.
3 In later projects with Scotland Yard in London, when the police were trying to curb a wave of knife killings among teenagers,
Sherman would insist that patrol officers leave their cards with everyone they talked to.