On the afternoon of July 10, 2015, Sandra Bland was pulled over on the suspicion that she was involved in criminal activity. A traffic stop became an arrest, and three days later, she was found hanged in a jail cell.
I know I said more to come at the end of the last blog post, but I lied. There is more to come, but not this week. I figured that it’d get boring if I talked about the same book week after week, so I’m switching my focus to Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers.
Talking to Strangers highlights the different aspects of our relationships and how many of those aspects often lead to misunderstandings. While the book does reference different situations, its main objective is to provide some level of understanding as to what occurred in the death of Sandra Bland.
The officer that pulled Sandra Bland over, Brian Encinia, was known for performing pretextual traffic stops*. On that fateful day, Encinia began following Sandra, accelerating on her rear at one point, causing her to change lanes. Gratuitously, Encinia pulled Sandra over for a failure to signal while changing lanes. In the series of events that followed, the interaction between the two became heated and Sandra was arrested. That was on July 10.
On July 13th, Sandra was found “in a semi-standing position” hanging in her cell.
The summary I’ve given of the story is very curt, but I believe I’ve provided the main aspects: Sandra, a Black woman, was pulled over, the interaction between herself and the officer became heated, and Sandra died while in prison. There are a myriad of lenses to analyze this series of events through, namely racism and bad policing, but Malcolm opts to analyze these situations through our inability, as a society, to understand strangers.
Why did Officer Encinia create unsafe driving conditions? Why didn’t Officer Encinia use his training to analyze the situation at hand? The list of questions that this sickening situation produces is endless, but in the coming blogs, I’ll focus on the questions that Malcolm covers in his book.
See you next post.
* When an officer pulls over a motorist for a minor traffic or equipment violation and then uses the stop to investigate a more serious crime. (Pewtrusts.org)
This is definetly a change of pace and I have to say, have I read this book without knowing this background information I would have had quite the shock. Its unfortunate to see such things happening to people and I hope that these kinds of books and materials put things into perspective for many who are unaware of the situation.
This is a very deep topic that I thought that you analyzed well. You analyze such a prominent situation very well, and offer possible explanations for why the situation ended up the way it did. It is a very important issue to this day with police brutality, and I feel that you bringing this to light was very good.