*These facts in the death of Sandra Bland are not in dispute. She was a lone driver on her way to her alma mater Prairie View AM University to interview for a job.
She was stopped for a minor traffic violation by a Texas Highway Patrol officer.
She was threatened with a Taser. She was penned on the ground by the arresting officer and arrested on an assault charge. She was taken to Waller County jail and placed in a holding cell.
Two days later guards found her found hanging by a plastic trash bag in the bathroom partition area of her cell.
Jail officials based on their autopsy called her death a suicide. Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis will investigate her death as a murder. The FBI is also investigating the death.
Murder or suicide? In either case, these facts are also not in dispute. The jail has been repeatedly cited and sanctioned for violating minimal jail standards.
This includes continual failure to watch and monitor inmates, shoddy staff training on jail and inmate management, and that includes providing training and handling and sequestering of inmates with possible emotional challenges. This would certainly include an inmate such as Bland who authorities have professedly said was “combative” with the officer.
This points the finger of blame squarely at jail officials no matter what actually happened in Bland’s cell. If even these minimal safety procedures and precautions had been taken by jailers Bland would almost certainly be alive.
But Bland is just the latest in a growing train of black women that have been directly shoved in harm’s way from law enforcement. In fact the day after Bland’s body was found, Kindra Darnell Chapman, who was arrested first-degree robbery in Alabama, was found dead in her jail cell. Her death was also ruled a suicide.
In recent times, videos have caught an Arizona State University police officer body-slamming a tenured and respected African-American female professor at the university to the ground as she crossed a street. Another video caught a Clayton County, Georgia off-duty officer spitting on and then punctuated that with an N-word verbal harangue of an African-American female motorist. A California Highway Patrol officer pummeled a middle-aged African American woman on a Los Angeles freeway. They, if you can call it that, are the lucky ones. They are still alive. In the past few years, the number of black women………….(Click HERE to Read More)
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