“Hello ma’am. We’re the Texas Highway Patrol and the reason for your stop is because you failed to signal the lane change.”

This was the first piece of dialogue exchanged between Sandra Bland and State Trooper Brian Encinia. What follows is both a fascinating and horrifying display of the power struggle between a citizen and officer of the law.

There are three important factors that led to the escalation of a simple traffic stop to the arrest that everyone’s talking about: race, gender, and the ego that comes with having power over another human being. (Think back to Psych 101 and the Zimbardo (Stanford) Prison Experiment.)

RACE:

Anyone who’s been following the news lately knows about the tension between people of color and police officers around the country.

  • Bland was a Black Lives Matter activist, according to Huffington Post. During the exchange, Bland repeatedly mentioned the trial she assumed would follow her arrest, “Oh I can’t wait 'til we go to court. Ooh I can’t wait. I cannot wait 'til we go to court. I can’t wait. Oh I can’t wait!”
  • At another point, a man passing by stops to take a short piece of footage of the arrest with his phone. It shows Encinia on top of Bland, with Bland yelling out to the man “Thank you for recording.”
  • She also briefly mentions South Carolina (“That's all y’all are is some straight scared cops. South Carolina got y’all bitch asses scared”), although it is unclear what she meant exactly. South Carolina has been the making the news lately with the whole Confederate flag debacle; perhaps Bland was insinuating that Encinia is racist?

Although she never audibly mentioned her race in her exchange with Encinia, a topic that did present itself was gender.

GENDER

  • “Don’t it make you feel real good don’t it? A female for a traffic ticket. Don’t it make you feel good Officer Encinia? You're a real man now.”
  • “Make you feel real good for a female. Y'all strong, y'all real strong.”

We’ve seen footage of male officers taking down smaller, weaker, female citizens, and the results leave most of us with bitter tastes in our mouths and pits in our stomachs. “That seems unnecessary,” we think, as we watch large male officers shove women half their size to the ground with seemingly excessive force.

In this case, not only did Encinia push Bland to the ground, but also threatened to “light” her up with his Taser.

According to an article by the LA Times, police experts agree that Encinia should not have reached into Bland’s vehicle, and certainly should not have threatened to “light” her up with a Taser.

So what did Encinia do correctly? According to the same experts at the LA Times, everything else was typical protocol. The one critique was that Encinia “missed several opportunities to de-escalate tension and should have explained in calmer tones what he was doing and why,” according to Law professor and ex-cop Seth Stoughton.

POWER AND EGO:

  • Just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s professional.

As we’ve been over thus far, it’s clear that during the interaction, Bland was irritated and upset. Bland addresses Encinia not as a person of authority, but as a person who has irritated her, no different than anyone else.

Back to Psych 101 and what we learned from the Zimbardo/Stanford Prison Experiment: those with authority can get quickly fed up when those who are supposed to be submissive to them begin to revolt and disrespect that hierarchy. In this case, when Bland reacted, Encinia reacted back with equal force by shouting over her voice angrily and, as stated before, threatening her. Bland knew what was going on, and called him out on it every time (see GENDER).

Additionally proving his unnecessarily high level of irritation, when Bland warns him that she has epilepsy as he pushes her to the ground, he responds, “Good.”

Wait what?

Approximately 72 hours later, Sandra Bland was proclaimed dead in her jail cell. A preliminary autopsy has been performed, and her death is currently being declared a suicide. Bland’s family is requesting a secondary, independent autopsy.