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Opinion
‘If I Die In Police Custody’: Why Sandra Bland’s Death Is Just The Latest Evidence That Black America Is Under Attack
and her yelling that he had hurt her arm and slammed her head into the ground. She was taken to jail, ar- raigned, given a $5,000 bond, which she made arrangements with her older sister to pay, and set for release on Monday morning. Instead, she was found dead of an alleged suicide, having supposedly hanged herself with a plastic bag.
I do not believe that Sandra Bland hanged herself just a few hours before her sister was set to come and pay the $500 bail it would have taken to get her out of jail.
No one with good sense believes that. And I challenge the sense of any- one who is willing to contort them- selves into intellectual knots to make such a ridiculous story seem remotely plausible.
This is what media reports about Sandra’s prior traffic tickets and minor previous arrest for smoking marijuana are supposed to make us do. This is what reports about her struggles with depression and PTSD are supposed to make us do.
Depression and PTSD should not be conflated with being suicidal, and smoking marijuana is legal in a range of states and municipalities now. Moreover, PTSD diagnoses are rising at alarming levels in Black communi- ties, because of continued exposure to poverty and violence.
Just one day after Sandra Bland was found, authorities in Homewood, Alabama, claimed that 18-year-old Kindra Chapman hanged herself in her jail cell not even two hours after being arrested for taking another per- son’s cellphone. On Tuesday morn- ing, several Black Lives Matter protesters were arrested in Home- wood, for protesting and demanding answers about Kindra’s suspicious
death.
I do not believe the police accounts
of these deaths. When story after story emerges of Black people who end up dead, over crimes for which they should never even have had to exit their cars, we should stop giving police the benefit of the doubt. Those of us with Black lives cannot afford such gambles. And the police should not be afforded such luxuries.
SANDRA BLAND
BY BRITTNEY COOPER
No one should end up dead after receiving a citation for failure to prop- erly signal a lane change. However, this is exactly what has happened to 28-year-old Sandra Bland, a resi- dent of Illinois who was pulled over in Waller County, Texas, two Fridays ago, where she was traveling to take a new job at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University.
According to police, after she re- fused an officer’s instructions to stop smoking a cigarette, she was ordered out of the car, accused of assaulting an officer, and then wrestled to the ground. The video of the arrest only shows an officer’s knees in her back,
Dashcam Video Of Violent Arrest Of Sandra Bland Was Edited
NBC News contacted the Texas Department of Public Safety, which said it is going to investigate the al- leged edits of the Sandra Bland video.
The dashcam video released to the public of the violent arrest of San- dra Bland appears to be edited.
Bland was a 28-year-old, Black Lives Matter civil rights activist and vocal critic of police brutality who died in police custody after a Texas officer pulled her over for a traffic vi- olation. Police say Bland committed suicide, yet the Waller County pros- ecutor says Bland’s case is “being treated just as it would be a murder investigation.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety uploaded dashcam police video of the arrest to YouTube on 21 July. Parts of the approximately 52 minutes of footage it uploaded ap- pears to have been doctored.
It appears that someone cut footage out and looped part of the video in order to correspond with the recorded audio of Texas state trooper Brian Encinia speaking. Who exactly edited the footage is un- known, but the video was recorded by police and released by the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay also agrees that the video has been edited.
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