Who Killed Sandra Bland?

[Rajoo]

Is there going to be an independent investigation on her death yet?

[Ike Bana]

Originally Posted by Zeke

The past 5-6 posts are really, really good.

I concur that the stop was probably good. Personally, I believe she landed herself in jail but that can be debated. Then, she killed herself.

Sum? Nothing to see, here.

But most recent thread posts have done a much better job of explaining that than my original missive.

I didn't see a good stop. Where did I say the stop was good? The stop was fine until the asshole decided he wasn't getting the respect he wanted, so he could tell her to put out her cigarette. WTF was it an exploding gelignite cigarette? Fuck him and the horse he rode in on...he's a white asshole who needed to drive it into this woman who refused him the sick, fucking "respect" he requires from niggers. So he found her limit and got what he wanted.

Oh...he's gonna be sued Zeke. His department is gonna be sued. The city is gonna be sued. It will all be civil, but the whole pack of them are going to be found civilly liable for Sandra Bland's death and they're gonna pay. I'd put cash on it with you Zeke...but it's no fun taking a fools money.

-edit- Y'know....it's a fucked up country where the manager of the guy in the McD's cash window makes sure the person in their car is treated with more common courtesy than the watch commander demands of his/her cops on motorized patrol.

[mpholland]

Originally Posted by Ike Bana

I didn't see a good stop. Where did I say the stop was good. The stop was fine until the asshole decided he could tell her to put out her cigarette. WTF was it an exploding gelignite cigarette? Fuck him and the horse he rode in on...he's a white asshole who needed to drive it into this woman who refused him the sick, fucking "respect" he requires from niggers. So he found her limit and got what he wanted.

Oh...he's gonna be sued Zeke. His department is gonna be sued. The city is gonna be sued. It will all be civil, but the whole pack of them are going to be found civilly liable for Sandra Bland's death and they're gonna pay. I'd put cash on it with you Zeke...but it's no fun taking a fools money.

-edit- Y'know....it's a fucked up country where the employer of the person at the McD's cash window makes sure the person in their car is treated with more common courtesy than the watch commander demands of his/her cops on motorized patrol.

I'm gonna go with a settlement, but I've been wrong before.

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by Ike Bana

-edit- Y'know....it's a fucked up country where the manager of the guy in the McD's cash window makes sure the person in their car is treated with more common courtesy than the watch commander demands of his/her cops on motorized patrol.

Here's an insight into why that is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5nPyf-0UMc

This is a really good look into the way police as individuals and departments as institutions think. It's a little long (43 min.) but well worth it.

[donquixote99]

Originally Posted by Ike Bana

-edit- Y'know....it's a fucked up country where the manager of the guy in the McD's cash window makes sure the person in their car is treated with more common courtesy than the watch commander demands of his/her cops on motorized patrol.

If you don't like the cops, they can still arrest you. By contrast, if you don't like McDonalds, they can't make you spend your money there. Both the cops and McDonalds know this. One result is McDonalds giving strokes at the drive-thru.

But police culture goes off another way altogether. Bureaucracies generally find their clients bothersome at best, and there's nothing 'best' about the transactions the police spend their time on.

[Tom Joad]

They're all thugs.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...raming-man-dui

Cop Runs Stop Sign, Hits Sober Driver, Dept Covers it Up By Framing the Man For DUI

continue

[Zeke]

A cigarette is defined as a potential weapon. Fire. Eyes. Hell, I've personally flicked a cigar at a guy's face to distract just before taking him to the ground (personally, not professionally).

You can debate whether the officer should have reengaged but, once the decision is made, she puts it out/down or shit happens.

That's the training.

[Tom Joad]

This is a good article. Sums up pretty well how I feel about this.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...0150724?page=3

Bland was on her way to a new job at Prairie A&M university when she was pulled over for failing to signal when changing lanes, something roughly 100 percent of American drivers do on a regular basis. Irritated at being stopped, she was curt with Encina when he wrote her up. He didn't like her attitude and decided to flex his muscles a little, asking her to put out her cigarette.

She balked, and that's when things went sideways. Encina demanded that she get out of the car, reached for his Taser, said, "I'll light you up," and eventually threw her in jail.

Many editorialists following this narrative case suddenly noticed, as if for the first time, how much mischief can arise from the fact that a person may be arrested at any time for "failing to obey a lawful order," which in the heat of the moment can mean just about anything.

But this same kind of logic has underpinned modern community policing in big cities all over America for decades now. Under Broken Windows and other "zero tolerance"-type enforcement strategies, police move into (typically nonwhite) neighborhoods in big numbers, tell people to move off corners, and then circle back and arrest them for "loitering" or "failing to obey a lawful order" if they don't.

Some cities have tried to put a fig leaf of legal justification on such practices by creating "drug-free" or "anti-loitering" zones, which give police automatic justification for arrest even if a person is guilty of nothing more than standing on the street. Failing to produce ID – even in the halls of your own building, in some cases – or being seen in or around a "known drug location" can similarly be grounds for search or detention.

A related phenomenon is the policy governing "consent searches." Police stop people on the highways, in airports, on buses, really anywhere at all, and ask for their consent to search their property or their persons. Sometimes they do the asking with a drug-sniffing dog standing beside them.

Studies have consistently shown that black and Hispanic people are pulled over at a far higher rate than white people, usually more than double, even though white people are statistically more likely to have illegal drugs on them.

Add to this the whole galaxy of stop-and-frisk type behaviors, also known as "Terry stops," in which any police officer with an "articulable suspicion" that a crime of violence might be committed can pat down and question any person.

The end of New York's infamous program notwithstanding, there are millions of such stops every year. In Chicago, for instance, recent data showed a rate of about a million stops per year, with roughly 72 percent involving black people – and this in a city that's only 32 percent black.

You add all this up, and we're talking about millions upon millions of stops, searches and misdemeanor arrests and summonses that clearly target black people at a far higher rate than the rest of the population.

And if you're continually handcuffing people, sitting on them, putting knees in their backs and dragging them to jail in cases when you could have just handed over a summons, a certain percentage of these encounters are going to end in fights, struggles, medical accidents and other disasters. Like the Bland case.

We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the job. Of course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of depression during an illegal detention should be the same kind of crime. It's especially true given our long and sordid history of overpolicing misdemeanors.

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for such absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."

In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even had stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where any black male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around written proof that he had a job.

What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness" and being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"? What's the difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest for "disorderly conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's anything more than a semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.

Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can avoid getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting cops like dangerous dogs or bees.

But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some instances, it won't stop police from stopping people without reason, putting their hands on suspects or jailing people like Bland for infractions that at most would earn a white guy in a suit a desk ticket. That's not just happening in a few well-publicized cases a year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or even millions of incidents we never hear of.

That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was stopped and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but it's even worse than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass people, using misdemeanors and violations as battering ram – a campaign that's been going on forever, and against which there's little defense. When the law can be stretched to mean almost anything, obeying it is no magic bullet.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...#ixzz3h1iNzof5

[Ike Bana]

Originally Posted by Zeke

A cigarette is defined as a potential weapon. Fire. Eyes.

My favorite potential weapon...



Tickle. Ears.

[Zeke]

Still the law, with good reason.

We can have an open NRA approved society where anything goes or we can have law enforcement actually enforcing.

False choice?

Sure.

But those are the goalposts. The only question is which direction we desire to lean.

If Bland follows instructions, she doesn't feel the need to kill herself based upon the outcome she earned.