Wickham: Sandra Bland's fate sealed by bad policing

Sandra Bland is dead because of the treatment she received at the hands of Brian Encinia.

While the question of whether the 28-year-old Illinois woman actually committed suicide after her encounter with the Texas state trooper landed her in jail is being debated, what’s certain is that it was Encinia’s bad policing that put Bland on a rendezvous with death.

After stopping her for changing lanes without signaling — a minor traffic infraction — Encinia behaved more like a thin-skinned guy with a gun than an officer of the law when he sensed that Bland was really irritated that he pulled her over.

Returning to her car after writing a warning ticket, an action that would have sent Bland on her way had he simply given it to her, Encinia didn’t tell Bland he was about to let her go. Instead, as she sat in her car smoking a cigarette and looking away from him, Encinia picked a fight.

“You mind putting out your cigarette, please? If you don’t mind,” he said to Bland.

When she responded by asking why she had “to put out my cigarette,” Encinia ordered her to get out of the car. He would later tell a supervisor that he tried to de-escalate his confrontation with Bland, a Chicago-area native who just arrived in Texas to take a job at Prairie View A&M University. But the recording of his interaction with Bland that was caught on the dashboard camera of his patrol car tells a different story.

It showed that he was spiraling out of control.

It showed Encinia was the instigator of the verbal sparring that led him to pull his Taser and threaten to “light you up” when Bland resisted his order to get out of her car. It showed he told her she was under arrest while she sat in her car, and not much later in their confrontation, as he would tell a supervisor.

A close reading of the transcript of this encounter also shows that Encinia misled his supervisor on another point when he radioed in his account of what happened. “I tried to de-escalate her. It wasn’t getting anywhere, at all. I mean I tried to put the Taser away. I tried talking to her and calming her down, and that was not working,” he said.

In fact, he did just the opposite. When Encinia returned to Bland's car with a warning ticket, he could have simply handed it over and let her drive off. But she was still smarting over being stopped, and he didn’t like her attitude. He extended the traffic stop for no good reason, which is something the Supreme Court said this year in Rodriguez v. United States that cops can’t do.

In that 6-3 decision, the high court ruled that stopping someone “for a traffic violation justifies a police investigation of that violation,” and that the officer’s authority over the person ends “when tasks tied to the traffic infraction are — or reasonably should have been — completed.”

But after writing Bland a warning ticket, Encinia didn’t let her go; he ordered her to stop smoking and get out of the car for no good legal reason.

Then, to cover his tracks — an apparent violation of the Rodriguez ruling — Encinia told his supervisor during their radio exchange that his confrontation with Bland happened while “we were in the middle of a traffic stop and the traffic stop was not completed.”

That's bunkum.

The trooper's authority over Bland ended when he wrote her a warning ticket. But he extended that traffic stop — and goaded her into a confrontation that would give him cause to arrest her — because he didn’t like her attitude.

And for that he is morally — and a civil court may find him legally — responsible for what happened to Sandra Bland in that jail cell.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes weekly for USA TODAY.

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