Changing lanes [while black]
by Tom Sullivan
Sandra Bland's name featured prominently in the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) shutdown of the Netroots-Phoenix town hall on Saturday. Like the other black women mentioned, Bland died in police custody, in her case just a week earlier. Why? And how? The Los Angeles Times (emphasis mine):
According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, Bland failed to signal that she was changing lanes so a trooper pulled her over. The trooper was going to give her a written warning but Bland became argumentative and uncooperative, officials say.
The Chicago Tribune provides additional details:
Trooper Erik Burse, a department spokesman, said last week that Bland was going to be left off with a warning for a minor traffic violation, but was charged with assault on a public servant after she kicked the officer.
The trooper who stopped Bland has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation by the FBI and Texas Rangers for allegedly violating the department's "courtesy policy."
The stop escalated over a cigarette, according to the family's lawyer, Cannon Lambert:
Lambert, citing what he had seen on the dashcam video, said the trooper then asked Bland to put out her cigarette.
Bland, who seemed irritated at having been pulled over in the first place, responded: 'Why do I have to put out a cigarette when I'm in my own car?'" Lambert said. "And that seemed to irritate him to the point where he said, 'Get out of the car.'"
Bland, a civil rights advocate who had moved to the Houston area from suburban Chicago for a new job at Prairie View A&M University, "wasn't comfortable getting out of the car," Lambert said. So the trooper "looked to force her to get out of the car by way of opening the door and started demanding that she do," Lambert said.
You don't even need me to finish this story. Sandra Bland exits the car, yadda yadda yadda, she dies in a Texas jail cell three days later.* The local medical examiner rules Bland's death a suicide.
However, the Houston Chronicle reported late Monday:
HEMPSTEAD - With new questions being raised into the arrest and death of Sandra Bland, Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis said Monday that his office has not determined a cause of death for the woman who was found hanging in a cell in the Waller County Jail. Her death was initially ruled a suicide by medical examiners.
"This is being treated like a murder investigation," Mathis said at a news conference late in the afternoon, explaining that he has requested scientific testing from items at the jail, including touch DNA evidence on the plastic trash bag that officials earlier said Bland used to kill herself.
The thing I cannot get out of my head is that this professional woman is dead after failing to signal a lane change [while black]. Who hasn't done that? But for African Americans, everyday acts from walking to shopping to changing lanes [while black] has become a sick version of that stupid game we play with fortune cookies. Only this game can be deadly.
* We "yadda-yadda" African Americans dying in police custody. Ending both was the point of the #BLM action on Saturday.