The brutal and baseless treatment by the officer in question and her eagerness to take it to court. And that they hid it for four fuckin’ years.
She absolutely had the right to record the officer, and the officer undoubtedly mishandled the situation from the beginning. Unfortunately, in most cases, it’s still better to not fight back against an officer and to let courts decide whether the officer violated her civil rights or not. We live in a society in which cops can murder civilians and civilian juries will hold officers for it in only the most extreme cases of abuse, and only where there is an overwhelming amount of proof. And even then those criteria aren’t always enough.
Like, just so we’re clear…
…I dunno, I feel like this is a pretty good reason to be suspicious about her suicide.
You’re right, you don’t know, and it isn’t a good reason. Do you think it wasn’t a suicide? Do you think the video of her jail cell for the hours before her body was found were faked? By who - the jail personnel? Did you think her previous suicide attempts were a hoax? Do you believe the medical records that showed her to be at increased risk for suicide were not real?
Flesh out your thoughts a little here. These cell phone videos don’t really show anything new. We know she was Tazer-ed for resisting, that the Tazer-ing was against police policy, that her arrest was legal under the laws of that state, etc.
If Ms. Bland wanted to go to court, why did she kill herself? Why didn’t she wait?
Regards,
Shodan
I think it’s that question that leads BPC to question the official narrative of what happened to her in jail. I’m not saying I view it that way, but if you wonder why people are suspicious of her death, you’ve answered your own question by raising the question you asked. Even so, you’ve raised an issue of circumstantial logic, which isn’t the same as forensic evidence.
That’s a fair point, but my point in response is that the cell phone video isn’t circumstantial evidence of Bland being murdered. And there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that it was suicide. And if video recording of Bland’s cell is forensic evidence, there is forensic evidence that it wasn’t murder.
I suspect BPC is either Just Asking Questions, or pushing a conspiracy theory. AFAICT all such questions were already addressed in the monster thread about the Bland arrest and death (and the cell phone video adds nothing that we didn’t already know), and conspiracy theories aren’t susceptible to refutation by evidence or reason.
As mentioned before, God Himself descends from heaven to a collection of conspiracy theorists, and announces that Oswald acted alone, the WTC towers collapsed from the airliners crashing into them, Obama was born in Hawaii, and Sandra Bland committed suicide.
“Wow”, says one theorist to another. “The conspiracy goes deeper than we thought!”
Regards,
Shodan
If you look at every tree in isolation, you’ll never see the forest.
See that thing over there on the corner, about six feet tall, red, metal, and it says STOP? That’s a tree. Therefore, we live in a forest.
Regards,
Shodan
Okay, so best case scenario, an at-risk woman was assaulted, threatened, falsely imprisoned, and then took her own life in the process.
There is some circumstantial evidence that Bland committed suicide. Granted. I still think it’s really hard to rule out murder when people close to her insist that this suicide came out of nowhere, and she was pretty insistent on having her day in court. Particularly given the other shit we’ve seen cops get away with.
Story from my weekend visit to Lowe’s:
I was browsing in the garden tool section when I heard someone behind me say “Excuse me.”
I turned around to see a young black man holding up an axe in each hand.
:eek:
After experiencing a momentary cortisol surge, I heard him asking my opinion on which axe I thought would be better for him to buy for his younger brother (who needed an axe for an unnamed project).
I noticed one ax had a plain wooden handle and the other some type of rubberized grip, and observed that it might be advantageous to buy the slightly more expensive ax with the better grip, so as to lessen the possibility of the ax slipping during use.
“You know, that’s a good point” said the man.
When I left to shop elsewhere, he was still staring at the axe display.
So: was it racist of me to have a split-second of omigod when I turned around to see him wielding an axe in each hand, and should I have been ashamed of thinking about monitoring news broadcasts for awhile to see if any axe murders were being reported?
These are momentous questions.
It’s easier to rule out murder when you have video of her jail cell showing no one else in or out of it for hours before she died, and when people close to her say it came out of nowhere and she attempted it before, and that she had conditions like PTSD (and epilepsy) that put her at elevated risk for suicide, as well as the usual objections to conspiracy theories.
We went over all this at inordinate length in a previous thread and the cell phone video isn’t bringing up any new evidence.
Regards,
Shodan
Do you think you would have reacted differently if it was someone with ancestry from Korea, Finland, or Bolivia wielding two axes?
Aren’t most ax murderers white? You should have been relieved it was a black guy.
Another (i.e. SPLC) white liberal tries to show his racial sensitivity and ends up demeaning the hard work of blacks, including the president of the council he’s on, and he has since doubled down. Search for “Terry Witkowski” if the link doesn’t work - the URL has the name of the wrong alderman.
Unless it’s Mississippi, the officer is black and the victim is white. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/us/mohamed-noor-guilty.html
The icing on the cake is the mayor in question is a woman. It was not that long ago that women were prohibited from politics based on scripture, right?
This is just another example of “hurting the right people”.
Mississippi or Minnesota?
“The Sandra Bland video is why the term “conspiracy theory” doesn’t apply to Black Americans. There is no existing language to describe the constant, routinely validated suspicion of foul play that haunts you as a people when your murder was functionally legal for over 200 yrs.”
It also explains why some black people just can’t trust the white people in America, particularly when it’s white people who vote the government into power, who hire its administrative civil servants and its local police force, who serve on juries that wrongfully convict and condemn black people for crimes they didn’t commit on one hand, and who on the other hand let officers who commit murder go free because “I was afraid for my life”. Maybe it’s a little easier to understand someone like Huey Freeman when you stop and think about the ugly truth of this country’s history, which isn’t to say that you have to like him or necessarily agree with him, but it helps to understand the anger and the distrust, and where it comes from.
I understand why people like Huey are angry and distrustful. That doesn’t excuse him or anyone from the consequences of being a rampaging asshole.