It’s taken me a few days to confront the dreadful details of Sandra Bland’s arrest and her subsequent death in jail. Perhaps it has become easier to cope with the horrors of police brutality when black male bodies are charged — and despite my awareness of #SayHerName and #BlackWomenMatter, there are still details around Bland’s death that I cannot fully understand.
In finally writing about her death, I think it’s best to process and present this as an intentional outcome of a policy of mass incarceration and of social control.
Bland’s death can only be deemed a tragedy if we believe in a myth that police are a tool for social welfare rather than state violence — that what transpired was a sequence of unfortunate circumstances within a well intentioned system. Instead, watching Sandra Bland, a young black woman, speak of her civil rights, only to be menacingly handled by Brian Encinia, a white police officer, reenacts early civil rights movements, emancipation and the ensuing policies to sway public opinion and keep blacks disenfranchised — it is watching the state apparatus for violence.
Her arrest and martyrdom is the outcome of decades of politicians pushing tough on crime policy by playing to the race fears of America. Not simply the mishandling of justice by a police department. Her death could only have be executed with deliberate blunt political force.
“What you saw is an aggressive, overactive police officer who dragged this woman out of her car, assaulted her, sent her to jail for what crime? A minor traffic violation. That happens all over this country, and it especially happens to people of color … That’s called structural racism, and we have to address it.”
— Bernie Sanders
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Political dissent was criminalized in the 60s, calling for a crackdown of hoodlums and agitators. A political posture that civil rights advocates were “arrogant from the start,” to believe in the dignity and equality of the black body. Beginning with Barry Goldwater, such tough on crime, “law and order” rhetoric worked well on the populace, tapping into America’s preexisting fears given the recentness of desegration.
“History shows us that nothing prepares the way for tyranny
more than the failure of public officials
to keep the streets safe from bullies and marauders.”
— Barry Goldwater, GOP, 1964
Root Causes
What led Officer Encinia to issue Sandra Bland a traffic ticket? Transcripts of the dialog suggests that Encinia was tailing Bland for sometime. Bland, in an attempt to make passage for the police car, changed lanes and slowed down. The citation seems as senseless to us as it does to Bland, who tells him as much.
“I am getting removed for failure to signal?”
It was in 1965 that President Johnson declared “I hope that 1965 will be regarded as the year when this country began in earnest a thorough and effective war against crime.” America’s criminal policy shifted to connecting crime to behavioral pathologies and irresponsibility rather than any root causes like poverty, unemployment or inequality.
As Encinia confrontational encounter suggests, Bland is an undeserving underclass and therefore an acceptable target of policing, removed from any proof of criminal activity.
“I will light you up! Get out! Now!”
Latent Racism
Unsure of how to handle Bland, Encinia begins his line of questioning with, “you seem irritated,” before telling her to put out her cigarette and get out of her car. Encinia places Bland under arrest, although no reasons are given.
“Why am I being arrested, why won’t you tell me that part?”
“You are not compliant.”
American policy makers turned to code for their racial antagonism, where policy could “refer indirectly to racial themes but do not directly challenge popular democratic or egalitarian ideals.” A strategy that grew in practice during the Nixon era, courting the racists vote alongside white surburbanites, white and blue collar works receptive to a racially coded rhetoric. Nixon was steadfast in his conviction for convictions.
“The solution to the crime problem is not the quadrupling of funds for any governmental war on poverty but more convictions.” — President Nixon, GOP
Lenience
Sandra Bland cries out against Officer Encinia for his overly punitive treatment of her in what is reported by Encinia as a provocated assault;
“You just slammed my head into the ground!
Do you not even care about that?”
A female white cop who arrives at the scene simply informs her that;
“You should have thought about that before you start resisting.”
Constitutional law has eroded much of a defendant’s rights, with subsequent presidencies pushing leniency as the cause of crime, a steady erosions of our Fourth Amendment rights. CNN captured that misplaced sentiment when Harry Houck claimed that Bland would not have died in police custody if she were not so arrogant, never mind how over reaching search and seizure laws are in Texas.
Anticrime Package
Despite decades of racial rhetoric of punitive law enforcement, Sandra Bland didn’t die during the arrest, she died in jail, a place she clearly did not want to visit.
“Not compliant cause you just pulled me out of my car”
With a botched first autopsy and another pending, I expect we might never know how Bland died. What we do know is that she died in a Texas prison. For the place where she died, we have Bill Clinton to thank, who rose in popularity thanks to his own anticrime rhetoric with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. A sprawling “law and order” effort which would come to cost $30.2 billion, leading to a more than a doubling of inmates since inception. Administration officials remarked then;
“You can’t appear soft on crime
when crime hysteria is sweeping the country. Maybe the national temper will change, and maybe, if it does, we’ll do it right later.”
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As Sandra Bland’s family prepares to bury their daughter, and the nation once more broaches the subject of civil rights and police brutality, I find my disgust rooted not in individual actions of law enforcement — although the autopsy might prove otherwise — I’m disgusted that in Sandra Bland’s arrest and death, the system worked exactly the way it was intended, erected through a series of presidencies whose policy was much more about social control than any welfare.
“The abuses that have followed from these policies — the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects — are the product of a democratic will.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates
Do we then accept that such fates as Bland’s, are the cost of appeasing a hysteric white electorate and politic, or do we, as Clinton concedes, admit that we “signed a bill that made the problem worse.”
Sandra Bland refused to be controlled in what is claimed a just nation and for that resoluteness in abolition and dignity, she paid American policy with her black body. With the passage of Sandra Bland’s body, we need a people’s movement now.
I ask you to support a group actively challenging the prison industrial complex. The Abolitionist Law Center is currently holding a crowdfunding campaign.
Tough on Sandra Bland sources research from The Origins of the Current Conservative Discourse on Law and Order by Katherine Beckett, Ph.D. and Theodore Sasson, Ph.D. The source is worth a read in it’s entirety.
