Civil Liberties

Sandra Bland's Death in Jail: All For Not Putting out a Cigarette When Illegitimately Ordered to by Cop

Cop's chilling declaration: "You should have thought of that before you start resisting."

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The dashcam video of when and how the police ended up dragging Sandra Bland out of her car in Texas, then sending her to jail where she died, is circulating, and it's as appalling as anyone could have guessed.

This is the modern police state, as we've been warning/revealing to you for many years here. The police have an array of ridiculously petty reasons to begin interacting with us, all intended just to get money from us. (In this case, lane change with failure to signal.)

Once such an interaction begins, the cop can and will order you to do anything he wants for any reason he wants.

If you resist, he will physically assault you and arrest you and, in this case, essentially kill you as Bland died in jail, an alleged suicide now being investigated as murder, as Matt Welch wrote earlier today.

Here are edited portions of the dialog starting around 8:45 of the video below between Sandra Bland and Officer Brian Encina. The transcription is mine, and might be rough. It skips a bit, noted by ellipses. (You can hear it all yourself below.)

Officer Brian Encina (while writing ticket): You seem very irritated.

Sandra Bland: I am, I really am…..(something slightly unintelligible, about how she was just "getting out of your way")

Encina: Are you done?

Bland: You asked me what was wrong and I told you….

Encina: Mind putting out your cigarette please?

Bland: I'm in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette?

Encina: You can step on out now.

Bland: I don't have to step out of my car.

Encina: Step out of the car….

Bland: You do not have the right….

Encina: Now step out or I will remove you…I'm giving you a lawful order get out of the car now or I'm gonna remove you…

Bland: I'm calling my lawyer.

Encina: I'm gonna yank you out of here….

Bland: Don't touch me, I'm not under arrest.

Encina: You are under arrest.

Bland: I'm under arrest for what ? For what?…

Encina: Get out of the car now!

Bland: Why am I being apprehended?

Encina: I'm gonna drag you out of there….I will light you up!

Bland: Wow…failure to signal, doing all this for failure to signal?

Encina: Get off the phone, put your phone down…right now…..

Bland: For a fucking failure to signal my goodness y'all are very interesting….feeling good about yourself don't you?….Why am I being arrested, why won't you tell me that part?…..

Encina: You are not compliant.

Bland: Not compliant cause you just pulled me out of my car….

Encina: If you would have just listened…stop moving!

Bland: I can't wait til we go to court…ooh I cant wait….You gonna throw me to the floor? Feel better about yourself?….

Encina: Now you're going to jail!…

Bland: You about to break my wrist….about to fucking break my wrists…..

Encina: You started creating the problems!…You are yanking around, when you pull away from me you're resisting arrest…..

Bland: For a traffic ticket…for a traffic ticket!….Gonna slam me, knock my head into the ground. I got epilepsy motherfucker…

Encina: Good, good.

A new female cop on scene: You should have thought about that before you start resisting.

Then the cop starts telling a citizen filming, for no legal reason, that he has to leave. That citizen was the source of the earlier video, which started with Bland already out of her car and under submission. This dashcam video keeps going, and contains later on what some people think are obvious edits in the video, with the same cars coming by making the same moves and cars straight-up disappearing before our eyes. That is all long after the portion I'm transcribing above, though.

[UPDATE: The Texas Department of Public Safety swears no deliberate editing was done, and that the obvious glitches are a result of some unspecified technical kerfuffle involved in uploading. I am not technically qualified to judge whether that's a load of crap or not.]

Ms. Bland never got the day in court she was, rightly, looking forward to.

The video. [UPDATE: The version I originally linked to was removed by user for some reason. Here is another version, same timing]: