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Unfortunately, Sandra. Bland's lack of respect for authority and her lack of couth escalated this situation.
Maybe she got overly emotional and couldn't take it anymore...a city girl moving to the Deep South and is put into a horrible situation with a white cop. She is supposed to be starting a new job and she is in jail instead of at work? It would be a very emotional time for any human being.
. I live on the south side of Chicago so I see this lack of tact and social awareness on a daily basis. It just further perpetuates the notion that many blacks lack respect for education, authority, and social responsibility. Thus, further cementing statistics like 74% of black children are born out of wedlock and blacks represent 13% of the population but over 60% of the violent crimes in this Nation. It's not stereotyping,'it goes right to the core of black America, the family unit or lack thereof and the void of a black father.
According to new data released by the FBI this week, violent crime rates in America continue their steady but dramatic decline, ongoing since 1994. There were 1.16 million overall incidents of violent crime in 2013, which is the lowest total since 1978, when the population was just 222 million (compared to today's 317 million). Reports of negligent manslaughter were the lowest since 1968.
But there's one type of violence that is bucking the trend: civilian deaths at the hands of police. The FBI tallied 461 felony suspects killed by police in 2013, the highest total in two decades. And while FBI data is adequate to demonstrate a rising trend in police killings, it is notoriously incomplete: The data is all self-reported by police departments using a wide variety of methodologies, and it only includes felony suspects. One estimate based on media reports puts the number of civilians killed by police in 2013 as high as 1,700.
originally posted by: raymundoko
a reply to: TWILITE22
Did she comply with a lawful (i.e. Legal) order to exit her vehicle?
there so much wrong with how he handle the situation it wasn't his business to ask her what's wrong nor how long she was in Texas,nor where she was going.these questions had nothing to do with a traffic stop.so he again asks "are you ok?"she reply's... he says "you seem very irritated?" after she explain and answers the question,he asks "are you done"? this is where he escalates the situation and he becomes ticked off.then come the cigarette issue and he really comes unhinged.
nothing she did deserved how the leo reacted, his reaction was emotional he got pissed off because she did not put her cigarette out she was well within her rights to smoke in her car if he didn't like it he could have behaved differently he didn't have to let it come to the level it did...the last time I checked our country is not dictatorship(or is it?) numerous ways to handle the situation.she should not have been arrested at all.
a stop may be extended if the officer uncovers new evidence that provides reasonable suspicion that a suspect has committed some other crime, but cigarette smoking is legal so that could not have justified extending the length of the stop.
The first is just how rapidly Encinia escalated this confrontation. The officer never gives Bland a direct order to extinguish the cigarette — his exact words to her are “you mind putting out your cigarette, please, if you don’t mind?” So, even if Encinia did have the lawful authority to demand that she put out the cigarette, Bland reasonably could have viewed this as a request that she could refuse. When Bland did refuse, Encinia immediately orders her out of the car without taking the intermediate step of actually ordering her to put out the cigarette. This rapid escalation extended the length of the stop without a clear justification for doing so.
Additionally, Trooper Encinia did not mention the argument over the cigarette (or the fact that he pulled his stun gun) in his official incident report. If Encinia truly believed that the lit cigarette was a danger to his safety that offered a legal justification for his actions, then it is unlikely that he would not have mentioned it in the report.
By the time Encinia asks Bland to put out her cigarette, the “mission” of his encounter with Bland is almost at completion.