Hey! Remember this story? Where a racist cop claimed he “feared for his safety” when he arrested a harmless woman for driving while black? And he got off easy for it? Well, the video from her cellphone has finally come to light, and it shows the ugly truth:
Yup, that’s right. Sandra Bland was arrested — and lynched in jail — for supposedly failing to signal a lane change. A minor traffic infraction that should have gotten her let off with a warning, maybe a demerit point or two — and would have resulted in nothing more, had she been white. Certainly it was nothing worth arresting her over.
And the cop responsible for the whole mess was not only NOT afraid for his own safety, he was quite loudly and needlessly aggressive to her in the process of what should have been just a calm, routine traffic stop. Curiously, he picked a spot right in front of a local black college, which strongly suggests that he was cruising around there to racially profile black drivers. He even made an explicit death threat (which was also caught on his own dashcam): “I will light you up!” He — or one of his colleagues — apparently made good on that threat later, because Sandra Bland later told a friend, in a phone call, that she had been “roughed up”.
Three days later, she was “found” dead and hanging in her cell. And the six-minute clip of security camera footage that could have shown the moment of her death was missing. And that, in turn, allowed her death to be painted as a suicide, even though all who knew her well also knew that she was far from suicidal at the time of her arrest, and said so repeatedly.
And all this hokum somehow passed public scrutiny. Even though it failed the sniff test at every turn.
And even worse: The local “news” station didn’t think that this shocking video, which was available to them at the time, was “newsworthy” enough to publish in their coverage of the case. How the hell is that possible, unless they were as racist — and determined to cover up the prevalent societal racism — as the cops who claimed Sandra Bland, a totally non-suicidal person, “hanged herself” in a jail cell?
And they would have all gotten away with it, too, if not for one gutsy reporter who didn’t let the story go.
If you still believe the “official” version of the story, or ever believed it, you might just be as racist as that cop, the local police in this case, and the media who protect them.
And that’s pretty fucking racist.
