First of all, people do kill themselves in jail. I want to be clear on that. It’s also possible she died from her head injury. But this case sure stinks to high heaven:
An ABC Chicago affiliate reported late Wednesday that a Naperville, Illinois woman named Sandra Bland died in police custody in Texas on July 13 after having been arrested three days earlier following a routine traffic stop. The sheriff’s department in Waller County, Texas says Bland apparently killed herself, and sheriff Glenn Smith appeared on ABC’s report to say she’d been arrested after a stop for improperly changing lanes because she was “combative.”
However: Video shows Bland complaining that she’d been abused by the officers arresting her, those who know her don’t believe she committed suicide, and now activist-journalist Shaun King of Daily Kos has found that sheriff Smith was fired from a previous job as police chief in 2008 after several allegations that he and members of his department had engaged in racially biased behavior and police brutality.
Details are relatively sparse, but pieces by the Houston Chronicle and an area TV reporter indicate that Smith was fired by the Hempstead City Council after several allegations of police misconduct, not all of which involved racial issues. The council did not name a formal reason why Smith was terminated, but the Chronicle reportedthe year before the firing on an incident in which council members suspended Smith “for two weeks without pay after viewing videotapes and hearing allegations of racism from local residents against him” and other officers. That incident involved the arrest of a black man named Cory Labba; the Chronicle says Smith “acknowledged he used profanity and was unprofessional” during Labba’s arrest but denied race was a motivating factor in his behavior.
A young black person with a new job and a bright future, pulled over for an incredibly minor traffic violation, roughly handled for not being sufficiently meek (not keeping silent or her eyes downcast in the presence of arbitrary white authority) and ends up dead in a cell run by a violent real-life Buford T. Justice. Suicide? Uh, no.