Sandra Bland 2.0: Racist Policing in America

By Betty H. Smith

Sandra Bland Mattered.
Why did Sandra get jail time instead of a traffic fine?
Sandra Bland should be alive today working at Prairie View A&M University, her beloved alma mater, voicing her support of the Black Lives Matter movement and opinions as “Sandy Speaks.”
Sandra Bland 2.0: Racist Policing in America brings readers face-to-face with the root of racist policing, a crisis in America. The unjust use of police force and trigger-happy killing of blacks are commonplace in a supposedly post-racial society. Police bias and racial disparities promulgated by subcultures and other unchecked vices run rampant. Implicit or explicit racism, they’re the same. Both result in racial bias and too often, the death of blacks. The Internet is a memorial gateway to hundreds of African-American victims of police violence and shootings.
Some blacks don’t believe America will ever become post-racial. The alt-right will never disband, white supremacists are here to stay, and racist white police officers continue to terrorize the black community.
Blacks aren’t disillusioned. And wishful thinking doesn’t make African Americans safe. But our voices will be heard. We demand equal protection of the law. Black Lives Matter.
People didn’t like it when Sandra Bland and thousands of protestors shouted “Black Lives Matter.” Bland fell victim to the racism she fought to eliminate. Sandra Bland’s traffic stop debacle and subsequent death inside her jail cell captured the world’s attention.
Sandra Bland 2.0: Racist Policing in America explores Sandra Bland’s convictions about racism, what happened to Bland, and America’s heartbreaking panorama of racist policing.
How do we ensure justice for Sandra Bland and other victims, who died needlessly during or in the aftermath of a simple traffic stop?
Sandra Bland 2.0: Racist Policing in America is a protest against the victimization of African Americans and commentary about racism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796077407

Betty H. Smith

Betty Smith has written several poems and short stories. Room for Love and Faith: The Shunammite’s Blessing is her first published writing. She writes to remind God’s people about the certainty of God’s love, instructions, and promises. With a voice that is certain and compelling, the biblical quotes and real-life stories emphasize God’s love and mankind’s duty to Him and to each other. Betty Smith is a Sunday school teacher at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. She is a retired office manager and a graduate of the University of Alabama where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication. She and her husband, Daryl, have two children and reside in Hueytown, Alabama.

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SANDRA BLAND 2.0

Racist Policing in America

Betty H. Smith

Copyright © 2020 by Betty H. Smith.

Library of Congress Control Number:        2019920607

ISBN:                Hardcover                    978-1-7960-7742-1

                         Softcover                      978-1-7960-7741-4

                         eBook                             978-1-7960-7740-7    

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Rev. date: 12/19/2019

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Epilogue

References

PREFACE

That could be you in that back seat, the white police officer avowed after my father demanded to know why I was in the police car. With the left passenger door opened, I was sitting sideways with my feet touching the door ledge. I heard Dad—my protector, my rescuer, but soon to be my discipliner—speak to the police officer who had a gun. The disdain in my father’s voice revealed his displeasure of seeing me in the officer’s vehicle. I was glad Dad didn’t say much else. He constrained himself, swallowed some choice words, and answered the officer’s questions.

In the early seventies, it didn’t take anything for a white police officer to arrest a disagreeable black man. Abracadabra! Bogus charges appeared like rabbits out of a magician’s hat. You’d be handcuffed, shoved into a police car, and taken to jail. No, it wasn’t unusual for racist white police officers to trump up charges and put innocent blacks behind bars.

Rattled by the officer, the reckless driving ticket, the dark highway, and the possibility of being punished, my knees quaked. And I followed Dad home in my 1963 Chevrolet Impala. Although I was a naive seventeen-year-old, I knew everything wasn’t fair in America, Alabama, and the small town of Greensboro—not for blacks. Where was the fairness of the traffic ticket or my impending punishment from Dad?

Dad said the place where I was pulled over, the juncture of Tuscaloosa and North Street, was a known traffic trap in Greensboro. The police would swoop down on unsuspecting drivers who turned left from North Street onto Tuscaloosa Street. I felt horrible about getting the ticket, but knowing this made me feel somewhat better. I was a young black victim, and Dad paid the contrived traffic violation charge.

Decades later, I still cringe to think about what could have happened. It was dangerous for a black man to stand up to a white Southern police officer. A brusque tone or a tough-guy demeanor could trigger an abracadabra, white-rabbit surprise. And you’d be headed to jail. Of course, even worse things could and did happen. Some people didn’t make it to jail. Although I will never forget the incident, Dad, who is ninety plus, remembers little about it.

It is 2019, decades after the Civil Rights Movement and my run-in with a Jim Crow police officer. Discriminatory policing tactics like racial profiling, bogus charges, and other racist exploitations continue to plague and victimize African Americans in many cities throughout the US.

INTRODUCTION

After decades of Jim Crow—white-only signs, the banning of blacks from towns after sundown, and other racist restrictions—black Americans are still fighting for fundamental American liberties and due process.

Sandra Bland was merely exercising her First Amendment right of free speech during her infamous 2015 traffic stop. The police officer wanted to do all the talking and only expected her to say Yes, sir or No, sir in all the appropriate places. But she cherished the right of discourse that her enslaved ancestors didn’t have. Silenced for more than two hundred years, black slaves had no rights except the right to obey and live or disobey and die. Today, blacks refuse to be silenced after two centuries of being voiceless and the countless deaths of many to secure freedom. The liberty of free speech that many blacks died to secure was precious to Sandra Bland, who didn’t hold her tongue.

Sandra Bland’s Facebook postings, like other millennials’ postings, were lively, passionate, and opinionated. A proud African American female with ambitions of bridging the racial divide when and where she could, she was a vocal part of the growing, empowering, and engaging panorama, the Black Lives Matter movement. It wasn’t uncharacteristic of her to voice an unsolicited, dissenting, and candid viewpoint about the treatment of blacks in America.

Like all Americans, the law gave her rights, and the law was right to protect her. Contrary to the belief of some, she knew that right didn’t have a color or ethnicity—it was not white, black, or any other color. She respected the law and the authority. But she knew that a person with a badge or insignia of power on a blue or gray uniform didn’t always do the right thing. The law is supposed to be rightly enforced without respect of color. The perversion of the law based on skin color isn’t right; it’s against the law.

In the highly publicized Sandra Bland traffic stop, Sandra accepted the officer’s authority to pull her over. However, she wanted the officer to know what precipitated the traffic infraction. Motorists know that failure to signal a lane change is a routine public safety mistake. There are standard procedures for frequent but minor traffic errors. No big deal, right? Take the ticket, and go on your way. The interaction between Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia and Sandra Bland was anything except routine.

So, sometimes a traffic stop can be a delicate balancing act similar to standing on a wooden rolling pin. You not only have to find that sweet spot to stay on (keep the encounter positive) but also have to propel the roller pin in the right direction (get back on the highway). Sandra reeled between freedom (her perceived rights as a citizen) and captivity (Encinia’s daunting authority and malevolent discretion to do as he wished).

A new job, with prospects of financial stability, had brought her to Prairie View, Texas; but a state trooper’s discriminatory actions jeopardized not only her new career but also her future and her life.

The beginning and end of Sandra Bland’s story isn’t a simple narrative. And indeed, it isn’t independent of a much larger and more complex narrative that not only has unjustly incarcerated thousands of African Americans but also has wrongfully taken many of their lives. Racism was the MO, modus operandi, in Sandra Bland’s tragic story. The same MO has contributed to many of the brutal and sometimes fatal encounters between dishonorable police officers and unarmed African Americans—primarily African American men. Many say America is in a post-racial era. Based on the government-defined racial categories (white, black, Asian, Native American, or Pacific Islander), which race would disagree? Indeed the victimized race, African Americans, would disagree. And maybe one or two others. Can an entire race be wronged? Can an entire race be wrong about being victimized?

From the time blacks were brought to America, racism hasn’t skipped a generation, and the perennial seeds of white superiority are still producing fruits of injustices: white privilege, black inferiority, and deprivation. Today, Jim Crow caricatures aren’t used to humiliate blacks, and no white-sheet specters (the KKK) make terrorizing visits during the night. These overt tactics are replaced with covert social, political, and judicial inequities that affect education, employment, and incarcerations of blacks. In other words, the injustices are systematic, even the policing tactics that disparately impact blacks, such as higher rates of police stops, searches, and arrests. Unfortunately, we must also add a higher fatal-shooting frequency of unarmed African Americans to the disproportionate impact list.

The American Civil Liberties Union states that a typical police recruit spends fifty-eight training hours on how to use a gun, forty-nine hours on defensive tactics, but only eight hours on how to de-escalate or calm a contentious encounter. With so little emphasis on de-escalation tactics, greater safety risks exist for officers as well as suspects. A shoot first and ask questions later policing strategy isn’t in the best interest of public safety. Most Americans would agree that excessive or lethal force should only be an option after de-escalation attempts and when other feasible maneuvers have failed.

All lives matter.

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CHAPTER ONE

In the past several years, African Americans have increasingly become victims of police brutality and shootings. I’m not a fan of horror cinema or films with profuse bloodshed. But if I want to watch a bloody movie, all I have to do is sign in to the internet and watch police officers shoot black suspects surrendering with hands raised, defenseless and pinned down on the ground, or fleeing the scene. Lifeless bodies and real corpses litter the internet. Many of these African Americans were weaponless, nevertheless fatally shot.

Google police officer kills black man in Baltimore, Maryland; Ferguson, Missouri; or Charleston, South Carolina—pick a city, almost any city in America. At your leisure, you can click on dashboard camera (dashcam), body camera (body cam), and even YouTube video footage and watch officers shoot and kill alleged suspects. There are lifeless bodies on pavements, on sidewalks, on the grass, and in cars. Head and body wounds bleed out, and fabric, dirt, and asphalt soak it up. The raw videos of sons, brothers, fathers, husbands, uncles, and nephews are sickening, horrific, and real. The producers of this carnage are often agents of discrimination and racism who coexist in the ranks of honorable police officers.

In one of her Facebook postings, Sandra Bland stated she was not racist. She held no personal animosity toward whites. And she knew that the bloodshed against blacks was not a problem that blacks could solve by themselves. Violence between the police and citizens of any sector of the public affects the masses. Everyone needs to speak out against unnecessary cruelty and injustice whenever and wherever it occurs. All colors in the racial rainbow have a stake in the matter because all lives matter—without exception. Put it on a placard; Sandra was willing to carry