The cover-up that began 13 months ago when a Chicago police
officer executed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald on a busy street might well have
included highly ranked officials who ordered subordinates to conceal
information. But the conspiracy of concealment exposed last week when the city,
under court order, finally released a video of the shooting could also be seen
as a kind of autonomic response from a historically corrupt law enforcement
agency that is well versed in the art of hiding misconduct, brutality — and even
torture.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel demonstrated a willful ignorance when he talked about the
murder charges against the police officer who shot Mr. McDonald, seeking to
depict the cop as a rogue officer. He showed a complete lack of comprehension on
Tuesday when he explained that he had decided to fire his increasingly unpopular
police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, not because he failed in his leadership
role, but because he had become “a distraction.”
Mr. Emanuel’s announcement that he had appointed a task force that will review
the Police Department’s accountability procedures is too little, too late. The
fact is, his administration, the Police Department and the prosecutor’s office
have lost credibility on this case. Officials must have known what was on that
video more than a year ago, and yet they saw no reason to seek a sweeping review
of the police procedures until this week.
The Justice Department, which is already looking at the McDonald killing, needs
to investigate every aspect of this case, determine how the cover-up happened
and charge anyone found complicit. The investigation needs to begin with the
Police Department’s news release of Oct. 21, 2014, which incorrectly states that
Mr. McDonald was shot while approaching police officers with a knife. A dash cam
video that was likely available within hours of the shooting on Oct. 20 shows
Mr. McDonald veering away from the officer when he was shot 16 times, mainly
while lying on the pavement. Why does the video completely contradict that press
release?
The question of what pedestrians and motorists said about what they saw that
night is also at issue. Lawyers for the McDonald family say that the police
threatened motorists with arrest if they did not leave the scene and actually
interviewed people whose versions of the events were consistent with the video,
but did not take statements. Last week, a manager at a Burger King restaurant
near the shooting scene told The Chicago Tribune that more than an hour of
surveillance video disappeared from the restaurant’s surveillance system after
police officers gained access to it.
The dash cam video might have been buried forever had lawyers and journalists
not been tipped off to its existence. Mr. Emanuel, who was running for
re-election at the time of the shooting, fought to keep it from becoming public,
arguing that releasing it might taint a federal investigation.
Justice Department officials, however, said on Tuesday that the department did
not ask the city to withhold the video from the public because of its
investigation. That makes this whole episode look like an attempt by the city,
the police and prosecutors to keep the video under wraps, knowing the political
problems it would most likely create.
Fortunately, a journalist working the case sued for release of the video. When a
county judge ordered the city to make it public last week, more than a year had
passed since the shooting, and public confidence in the police, prosecutors and
the mayor’s office had been exhausted.
All along, Mr. Emanuel’s response, either by design or because of negligence,
was to do as little as possible — until the furor caused by the release of the
video forced his hand. The residents of Chicago will have to decide whether that
counts as taking responsibility.
A version of this editorial appears in print on December 2, 2015,
on page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: The Chicago Police
Scandal.
He was the fourth man in his family to work as a police officer,
but the first to wear the shield of the New York Police Department.
A Guyanese immigrant, Officer Randolph Holder was drawn to law enforcement by
the example of his father, grandfather and great-uncle, all of whom served the
police department in their home country, relatives said. The force there is
roughly one-tenth the size of the New York department.
Officer Holder, 33, arrived in Far Rockaway, Queens, about a decade ago, joining
his father. He worked for a time as a security guard at a Toys “R” Us store.
But he was intent on going into the family trade. He entered the New York Police
Academy as soon as he could, joining the department in 2010 over the objections
of some relatives who wanted him to continue his education. He wore badge number
13340.
A police officer on Wednesday at a memorial for Officer Randolph Holder outside
the station house where he worked. Officer Holder was fatally shot on Tuesday
night in East Harlem.
“He loved the stories,” a cousin, Stacey Lawrence, 29, said of the tales of
police work his relatives would share. “And his father was his hero, and you
want to follow what your hero does.”
Officer Holder quickly embraced the role. “His job was like first in life,” an
aunt, Sherry Holder, said. “He cherished that opportunity to become a policeman
here in America.”
Officer Holder was shot in the head and killed on Tuesday night after responding
to a gunfight between rival crews in East Harlem — an example of the kind of gun
violence he had recently grown concerned about, relatives said.
“It was something that he loved to do,” Ms. Holder, 62, said. “But recently he
was saying that the area in which he worked was a very dangerous area, where
everybody owns a gun. And he felt like his life is threatened.”
The dread that black families face of losing loved ones to gang conflicts and
crime in New York City was on Officer Holder’s mind when he joined the force, a
cousin, Claude Sultan, said. He came of age in an area of Far Rockaway where
many residents knew people who had been shot or killed, as Mr. Sultan said he
did, and recently moved elsewhere in the city.
When one of Mr. Sultan’s friends was killed around Thanksgiving last year,
Officer Holder offered him both comfort and some caution, as he often did.
“Be careful what time you’re going home; be careful the people you’re hanging
with,” Mr. Sultan, 22, recalled his cousin telling him. “Still, at the end of
the day you’re telling me to be careful, but you’re putting yourself on the
line.”
Officer Holder’s extended family, many of whom live near his parents’ Far
Rockaway home, gathered on Wednesday morning at their small, white-shingled
house, where a string of local political leaders, clergy members and police
colleagues came to pay respects. The cries of mourning relatives occasionally
seeped out.
As they were grieving, relatives said the pain was just as strong among Officer
Holder’s family in Guyana. “Everybody crying,” a cousin, Natalie Andrews, 32,
said.
At one point, his father, also named Randolph Holder, emerged from the home to
talk to reporters. He described his son as a loving father to his 16-year-old
daughter. He said Officer Holder had hoped to be promoted to detective, and
planned to close on a home in a month.
“I would have told him not to go out for duty if I had known,” Mr. Holder said.
Despite the dangers, Officer Holder’s line of work never seemed to dampen his
enthusiasm around family and friends, they said. Mr. Sultan said he always knew
Officer Holder was nearby by the heavy scent of his cologne. He was the
designated D.J. at family barbecues, toting his small speaker system to
relatives’ backyards. His parties always lasted until 5 a.m.
“He was always the life of the party,” Mr. Sultan said. “Every time he came
around there was never one type of music playing. It was like you were at a
cultural event.”
His tastes reflected his heritage as well as the diversity of his Queens
neighbors. He played Calypso, reggae, hip-hop and Spanish music, Mr. Sultan
said.
He sent money to siblings who remained in Guyana. He also had extended family in
Trinidad and Tobago and in Antigua and Barbuda.
Relatives said Officer Holder always seemed to work hard not to bring the tumult
of life as an officer in Harlem back to family gatherings, calling on a reserve
and strong will he shared with his father. Police Commissioner William J.
Bratton said on Tuesday night that Officer Holder’s father had been comforting
his son’s colleagues in the Housing Bureau, even as they tried to support him.
On a fence outside the Wagner Houses, a public-housing project near where the
shots were fired that drew Officer Holder’s attention, someone had put up a
poster on Wednesday morning. One message, scrawled in faded purple marker, said
“RIP Officer Holder.” Another said, “Know that you and your kind is appreciated
— The Community.”
The death was felt deeply throughout New York’s Guyanese population, the city’s
fifth-largest immigrant group at about 137,000 people, according to the latest
census data. Immigrants began arriving in greater numbers following Guyana’s
independence from Britain and changes in American immigration policy in the
1960s.
“Officer Holder’s passing has left a great void in our community and it
transcends race, religion or creed,” said Dhanpaul Narine, president of the Shri
Trimurti Bhavan, a Hindu temple in Ozone Park where the congregation is mainly
Guyanese of South Asian descent. “We all feel the hurt and the pain, and the
pain of the family, and we wish to extend our heartfelt condolences to the
family and friends of Officer Holder.”
Rickford Burke, the president of the Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy,
echoed those sentiments. “I call on all of New York City to come together to
denounce this senseless killing as well as the inability of lawmakers to enact
legislation to curb illicit gun sales and get illegal guns out of the hands of
criminals and off our streets,” he said in a statement.
Relatives said the family planned to send Officer Holder’s body back to Guyana
for burial. In the meantime they were grappling with the absence of a man who
they said gave his life to his adopted city.
As relatives walked into the home of Officer Holder’s parents in Far Rockaway on
Wednesday morning, Malika Clarke-Yarde, 33, said she had known him for 15 years,
since secondary school in Georgetown, Guyana.
“Oh my God, Randolph!” she cried. “Why? Why? Why? Why?”
“His life mattered,” she added.
“He didn’t run from serving his country,” she said. “He ran to serve his
country.”
Kate Pastor and Kirk Semple contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett
contributed research.
When Edward Thomas joined the Houston Police Department in 1948,
he could not report for work through the front door.
He could not drive a squad car, eat in the department cafeteria or arrest a
white suspect.
Walking his beat, he was once disciplined for talking to a white meter maid.
Officer Thomas, who died on Monday at 95, was the first African-American to
build an eminent career with the Houston Police Department, one that endured for
63 years. By the time he retired four years ago, two months shy of his 92nd
birthday, he had experienced the full compass of 20th-century race relations.
His days were suffused with the pressure to perform perfectly, lest he give his
white supervisors the slightest excuse to fire him — and he could be fired, he
knew, for a transgression as small as not wearing a hat.
They were also suffused with the danger he faced in the field, knowing that
white colleagues would not come to his aid.
In 2011, when Officer Thomas retired with the rank of senior police officer, he
was “the most revered and respected officer within the Houston Police
Department,” the organization said in announcing his death, at his home in
Houston.
On July 27, two weeks before he died, the department renamed its headquarters in
Officer Thomas’s honor.
“He was a pioneering figure, not just in the Houston Police Department but in
Southern policing in general, representing an era bookended by Jim Crow and the
modern period,” Mitchel P. Roth, the author, with Tom Kennedy, of “Houston
Blue,” a 2012 history of the city’s police force, said in a telephone interview.
“It’s very rare to find a person of color having as long a career and having had
a career with as much respect.”
Officer Thomas, by necessity and temperament so taciturn as to seem enigmatic,
never spoke to the news media about his work. But interviews with his associates
make it plain that the respect he earned was hard won, over a very long time.
“We all know what America was like in 1948,” Charles A. McClelland Jr.,
Houston’s police chief, the fourth African-American to hold that post, said by
telephone. “If you think about some of the milestones in the civil rights
movement, when Rosa Parks would not give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery,
Ala., in 1955, Mr. Thomas had undergone this disparaging treatment for seven
years. When major civil rights legislation was passed in 1964 which made his
treatment unlawful in the workplace, he’d been a cop for 16 years.”
On Jan. 12, 1948, the day Officer Thomas joined the force, and for years
afterward, he could not attend roll call in the squad room: His attendance was
taken in the hall.
He could arrest only black people. Apprehending white suspects, he could merely
detain them until a white officer was dispatched to make the arrest.
He patrolled his beat — a half-dozen-mile-wide swath spanning largely black
neighborhoods — twice a day, alone, on foot: The department long refused to
issue him a squad car.
“He told me,” Chief McClelland said, “that the very first time he was given
permission to drive a squad car, when the sergeant gave him the keys, his
instructions were: ‘You better make sure that you don’t wreck it, but if you do’
— and he referred to him by the N-word — ‘you better pin your badge to the seat
and don’t come back.’ ”
For years to come, to spare the car, and his job along with it, Officer Thomas
drove it to his beat, parked it, locked it and, as he had before, pounded the
pavement on foot.
For talking to the meter maid, who had asked him to accompany her past a line of
wolf-whistling construction workers as she made her rounds, Officer Thomas was
fined a day’s pay.
Edward Thomas was born on Sept. 23, 1919, in Keachi, La., near Shreveport. His
father, Edward, was a local landowner; his mother, Dora, was a schoolteacher.
When Edward was about 9, his father died, and he became the de facto man of the
house.
As a young man, he attended what is now Southern University and A&M College, a
historically black institution in Baton Rouge, but he was drafted by the Army
before graduating. Serving in a segregated unit, he took part in the Normandy
invasion and the Battle of the Bulge.
After his discharge, he returned home and embarked on a career as a postal
worker. Then one day, while traveling by bus to visit family in California, he
picked a stray piece of paper off the floor. The paper was an application for
the Houston Police Department. He would graduate as a member of its first
organized cadet class.
African-Americans had served with the department since Reconstruction, hired to
patrol Houston’s black wards. In the 20th century, three are known to have
preceded Officer Thomas on the force. But by the time he graduated from the
police academy, he was the department’s only black member.
“The others were driven out of the organization: They were forced to quit,” C.
O. Bradford, Houston’s second black police chief and now a member of its City
Council, said. “He endured it.”
He endured vitriol not only from his fellow officers but also from the very
community he wanted to serve.
“The police were not friendly to the black community during that era, and the
black community did not welcome the police, for justifiable reasons,” Councilman
Bradford said. “The black community did not want Mr. Thomas because he was the
police, and the police did not want Mr. Thomas because he was black.”
Yet it was imperative that he win the trust of that community, not only for its
well-being but also for his own.
“He had to depend on the relationship that he had with people in the community
to help him if he got into a fight with a suspect or had to arrest a suspect,”
Councilman Bradford explained. “He had no one to call: He could not put out an
assist-the-officer call. Today, you press a button and all the help comes. But
back then it wasn’t like that, and he was by himself.”
Little by little, through an approach that would now be called community
policing, Officer Thomas won the residents over. Today, Chief McClelland said,
many Houstonians in their 60s and 70s warmly recall his escorting them back to
school when they played hooky, rather than arresting them — truancy was then an
arrestable offense.
He also earned the esteem of his fellow officers. He did so, colleagues said,
partly by keeping his head down and doing his job unimpeachably, precisely as he
had in 1948 — including wearing his police hat every day of his working life,
long after officers were no longer required to do so.
“At one point I asked him: ‘Why do you wear that hat all the time? We don’t wear
hats anymore,’ ” Constable May Walker, a 24-year veteran of Houston’s police
force and the author of the 1988 book “The History of Black Police Officers in
the Houston Police Department, 1878-1988,” said on Wednesday.
“They told me to wear a hat,” she recalled his replying, “and I’m going to wear
my hat.” Constable Walker added, “He never said who ‘they’ were.”
By the late 1960s, Chief McClelland said, Officer Thomas’s deep fealty to the
past struck some younger, more politically minded black officers as
accommodationist.
“I think that some may not fully appreciate that someone has to be first through
the door,” said the chief, who knew Officer Thomas for almost 40 years. “He was
the Jackie Robinson of the Houston Police Department.”
Today, 53 percent of the department’s 5,300 officers are members of minority
groups. The proportion begins to approach the demographics of Houston as a
whole, with a population of more than two million that is now about 70 percent
minority, making it one of the most diverse cities in the United States.
“We all owe Mr. Thomas a debt of gratitude,” Chief McClelland said. “Not just
black officers and Hispanic officers, but gays, lesbians. None of those things
would have been possible if someone had not endured that harsh dramatic
treatment.”
Officer Thomas’s marriage to Helen A. Thomas ended in divorce; a son, Edward,
died before him. His survivors include a daughter, Edna Kay Thomas-Garner; a
sister, Lillie Harrison; two grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
The Houston Police Department has no mandatory retirement age, and had he been
physically able, Officer Thomas would gladly have worked there to the end of his
life.
“Mr. Thomas, when are you going to retire and draw some of that pension money?”
Councilman Bradford recalled hearing colleagues ask.
“This is what I want to do,” he replied.
To the end of his career, however, Officer Thomas did not eat in the department
cafeteria. If in his early years he could not set foot there, in his later ones
he would not — a small, telling act of free will.
Officer Thomas retired on July 23, 2011. Until then, in his 80s and 90s, he
manned the security desk at the staff entrance of Police Headquarters, in
downtown Houston.
His was the first face that his colleagues encountered as they passed through
the back door — today the designated entrance for all officers — of the building
that now bears his name.
A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2015, on
page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Edward Thomas, 95, Policing
Pioneer Who Wore a Burden Stoically, Dies.
Writing about the wave of deadly encounters — many caught on
video — between unarmed black people and police officers often draws a
particular criticism from a particular subset of readers.
It is some variation of this:
“Why are you not writing about the real problem — black-on-black crime? Young
black men are far more likely to be killed by another young black man than by
the police. Why do people not seem to protest when those young people are
killed? Where is the media coverage of those deaths?”
This to me has always felt like a deflection, a juxtaposition meant to use one
problem to drown out another.
Statistically, the sentiment is correct: Black people are more likely to be
killed by other black people. But white people are also more likely to be killed
by other white people. The truth is that murders and other violent crimes are
often crimes of intimacy and access. People tend to kill people they know.
The argument suggests that police killings are relatively rare and therefore
exotic, and distract from more mundane and widespread community violence. I view
it differently: as state violence versus community violence.
People are often able to understand and contextualize community violence and,
therefore, better understand how to avoid it. A parent can say to a child: Don’t
run with that crowd, or hang out on that corner or get involved with that set of
activities.
A recent study by scholars at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at
Yale found that homicides cluster and overwhelmingly involve a tiny group of
people who not only share social connections but are also already involved in
the criminal justice system.
We as adults can decide whether or not to have guns in the home. According to a
study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, having a gun may increase the chances
of being the victim of homicide. We can report violent family members.
And people with the means and inclination can decide to move away from
high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods.
These measures are not 100 percent effective, but they can produce some measure
of protection and provide individual citizens with some degree of personal
agency.
State violence, as epitomized in these cases by what people view as police
abuses, conversely, has produced a specific feeling of terror, one that is
inescapable and unavoidable.
The difference in people’s reactions to these different kinds of killings isn’t
about an exaltation — or exploitation — of some deaths above others for
political purposes, but rather a collective outrage that the people charged with
protecting your life could become a threat to it. It is a reaction to the
puncturing of an illusion, the implosion of an idea. How can I be safe in
America if I can’t be safe in my body? It is a confrontation with a most
discomforting concept: that there is no amount of righteous behavior, no
neighborhood right enough, to produce sufficient security.
It produces a particular kind of terror, a feeling of nakedness and
vulnerability, a fear that makes people furious at the very idea of having to be
afraid.
The reaction to police killings is to my mind not completely dissimilar to
people’s reaction to other forms of terrorism.
The very ubiquity of police officers and the power they possess means that the
questionable killing in which they are involved creates a terror that rolls in
like a fog, filling every low place. It produces ambient, radiant fear. It is
the lurking unpredictability of it. It is the any- and everywhere-ness of it.
The black community’s response to this form of domestic terror has not been so
different from America’s reaction to foreign terror.
The think tank New America found in June that 26 people were killed by jihadist
attacks in the United States since 9/11 — compared with 48 deaths from “right
wing attacks.” And yet, we have spent unending blood and treasure to combat
Islamist terrorism in those years. Furthermore, according to Gallup, half of all
Americans still feel somewhat or very worried that they or someone in their
family will become a victim of terrorism.
In one of the two Republican debates last week, Senator Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina seemed to be itching for yet another antiterrorism war, saying at one
point: “I would take the fight to these guys, whatever it took, as long as it
took.”
Whatever, however, long. This is not only Graham’s position, it’s the position
of a large segment of the population.
Responding to New America’s tally, Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Washington Post
in July:
“Americans have accepted an unprecedented expansion of government powers and
invasions of their privacy to prevent such attacks. Since 9/11, 74 people have
been killed in the United States by terrorists, according to the think tank New
America. In that same period, more than 150,000 Americans have been killed in
gun homicides, and we have done … nothing.”
And yet, we don’t ask “Why aren’t you, America, focusing on the real problem:
Americans killing other Americans?”
Is the “real problem” question reserved only for the black people? Are black
people not allowed to begin a righteous crusade?
One could argue that America’s overwhelming response to the terror threat is
precisely what has kept the number of people killed in this country as a result
of terror so low. But, if so, shouldn’t black Americans, similarly, have the
right to exercise tremendous resistance to reduce the number of black people
killed after interactions with the police?
How is it that we can understand an extreme reaction by Americans as a whole to
a threat of terror but demonstrate a staggering lack of that understanding when
black people in America do the same?
ARLINGTON, Tex. — A white rookie police officer who shot and
killed an unarmed black college football player after the youth had broken into
a car dealership in this Dallas suburb was fired on Tuesday for “inappropriate
judgment” in his handling of the situation, officials said.
The Arlington police chief, Will D. Johnson, said that the officer, Brad Miller,
49, had been fired for making mistakes in the fatal shooting of Christian
Taylor, 19, which included entering the building without his more experienced
partner and which led to “an environment of cascading consequences.” Officer
Miller was hired last fall and was still in training when the shooting occurred
early Friday morning.
Officer Miller’s lawyer did not return multiple phone calls or an email sent on
Tuesday evening.
The police had said that Mr. Taylor — an Arlington native who was a football
player and student at Angelo State University in the West Texas city of San
Angelo — was shot around 1 a.m. Friday as he was confronted by officers who had
been dispatched to the Classic Buick GMC dealership after reports of a suspected
burglary. At a news conference, Chief Johnson said Officer Miller made bad
decisions in communicating with other officers and initially approaching Mr.
Taylor on his own without a plan for an arrest. There were other officers at the
scene, the chief told reporters, including Officer Miller’s training officer,
who tried to use a Taser to subdue Mr. Taylor.
“Based on a preponderance of evidence available to me and facts revealed by the
investigative team,” Chief Johnson said, “I have decided to terminate Officer
Miller’s employment with the Arlington Police Department for exercising poor
judgment.”
The chief’s announcement represented a shift in the official police narrative of
the events leading up to the shooting. Previously, Chief Johnson told reporters
that Officer Miller and his training officer had a confrontation with Mr. Taylor
inside the dealership as they tried to arrest him, and that led Officer Miller
to fire his weapon. The chief had declined to describe that event, explaining
that investigators had not determined “the nature of the confrontation.”
But in Tuesday’s news conference, Chief Johnson offered a detailed account of
the confrontation, saying that Mr. Taylor never made physical contact with any
of the officers at the scene and indicating that Officer Miller’s own actions
had escalated the confrontation.
The chief also said that the officers had said they saw a bulge in Mr. Taylor’s
pocket. It turned out to be a wallet and a cellphone. “It is reasonable that
officers were concerned that a weapon may be present,” Chief Johnson said. “This
further underscores the questionable nature of Officer Miller’s decision of
entering the building alone and without an arrest plan.”
Chief Johnson said that the criminal investigation would proceed and that the
evidence would be turned over to the district attorney, who would make a
decision on whether to present it to a grand jury for a possible indictment. He
said he had spoken to Mr. Taylor’s family.
“I certainly expressed regret that their son had been killed,” Chief Johnson
said. When reached by phone on Tuesday evening, Mr. Taylor’s father hung up the
phone. Another relative — Adrian Taylor, Mr. Taylor’s older brother — was asked
Tuesday evening what he thought about Officer Miller being fired. “It doesn’t
bring my brother back, but it’s a step in the right direction,” he said,
declining to comment further.
The episode began when the Arlington police received a 911 call from the
security company for the dealership reporting a possible burglary by a person
later identified as Mr. Taylor.
In a nine-minute segment of surveillance video footage that was released, Mr.
Taylor can be seen stepping over a gate blocking the entrance to the
dealership’s parking lot and roaming among the cars in the lot.
At one point, he struck the driver’s side window of one car and jumped on the
vehicle. He then kicked a hole in the windshield, climbed into the car and
exited it soon after. He returned to his own vehicle, rammed the gate to open it
and then drove through the windows of the showroom.
There appeared to be no surveillance footage of the critical moments leading up
to the shooting, however, and neither of the two officers were wearing body
cameras.
Mr. Taylor’s death came days before the anniversary of another death caused by a
police shooting: Michael Brown, the black teenager fatally shot by a white
police officer last year in Ferguson, Mo., and whose death helped touch off a
debate around the country about police interactions and excessive use of force
in African-American communities.
Activists have held rallies outside the Arlington police headquarters,
questioning why the officer fired at Mr. Taylor, and protesters in Ferguson in
recent days have invoked Mr. Taylor’s name in their demonstrations. On Tuesday,
more than 30 people gathered outside the Arlington police headquarters, with
speakers calling for Officer Miller to be prosecuted.
Chief Johnson has described Mr. Taylor’s death as a “tragedy” and vowed days ago
that “there will be consequences” if the shooting turned out to be unjustified.
He had asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to participate in and review
its investigation, based on the department’s “commitment to transparency,” Chief
Johnson said.
But in a statement released Monday, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. office in
Dallas said the bureau declined the request, saying it had “full confidence in
the ability of the Arlington Police Department and Tarrant County district
attorney’s office to conduct a thorough investigation of this matter.” The
spokeswoman, Allison Mahan, said that if information came to light indicating a
potential federal civil rights violation, “the F.B.I. is prepared to
investigate.”
The F.B.I. did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
According to the Tarrant County medical examiner’s office, Mr. Taylor died of
gunshot wounds to the neck, chest and abdomen. It remains unclear how many of
the four rounds Officer Miller fired struck Mr. Taylor. Officer Miller told
police investigators that after he arrived and went inside the dealership, Mr.
Taylor held up a pair of keys and said he intended to steal a vehicle, Chief
Johnson said. Mr. Taylor then ran toward a back door. When he was unable to open
it, he turned and walked back toward Officer Miller, who told investigators Mr.
Taylor was acting “aggressively” and using profanity, the police chief said.
The training officer, identified as Cpl. Dale Wiggins, a 19-year veteran, told
investigators he heard “a pop” that he thought was Officer Miller’s Taser
weapon, according to Chief Johnson. Corporal Wiggins then took out his Taser and
discharged it at Mr. Taylor.
But that “pop” appeared to have been the sound of Officer Miller’s gun. After
Corporal Wiggins’s Taser gun was discharged, three more shots were fired by
Officer Miller, the police chief said.
Officer Miller joined the department in September 2014 and graduated from the
police academy in March. He was nearing the completion of his field training
under the supervision of Corporal Wiggins. Before joining the Arlington force,
he had no previous police experience, officials said.
Patrick McGee reported from Arlington, and Manny Fernandez from Houston. Ashley
Southall contributed reporting from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on August 12, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Officer Is Fired in Texas Killing of Black
Man.
FERGUSON, Mo. — The St. Louis County executive declared a state
of emergency here on Monday as officials and activists sought to regain control
of the volatile streets after plainclothes police officers shot and critically
wounded an 18-year-old black man who they said was firing on them late the night
before.
The police said the man, Tyrone Harris Jr., was among two groups of young people
who exchanged gunfire near peaceful protests late Sunday on the first
anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager who was killed by
a white police officer in Ferguson. Prosecutors on Monday charged Mr. Harris, of
the St. Louis suburb Northwoods, with 10 counts, including four of felony
assault on a law enforcement officer.
The declaration of a state of emergency by the county executive, Steve Stenger,
empowered the county police force and its top commander, Chief Jon Belmar, to
oversee police operations in and around Ferguson, where police units from
surrounding towns arrived on Monday to bolster efforts to maintain calm. Gunfire
on the fringes of demonstrations commemorating Mr. Brown’s death — which set off
looting, arson and confrontations with the police last year — unnerved residents
and demonstrators over the weekend.
“The recent acts of violence will not be tolerated in a community that has
worked so tirelessly over the last year to rebuild and become stronger,” Mr.
Stenger said in a statement. “Chief Belmar shall exercise all powers and duties
necessary to preserve order, prevent crimes, and protect the life and property
of our citizens.”
On Monday, protesters who had commemorated Mr. Brown throughout the weekend
staged acts of civil disobedience across the region. They protested
incarceration rates and prison contractors in Clayton, the county seat, and held
a rally outside the federal courthouse in St. Louis, where nearly five dozen
people were arrested. Another 60 or so were arrested after blocking traffic for
about 30 minutes during the evening rush on Interstate 70 in the St. Louis
suburbs.
Around 10 p.m., police officers and state troopers began to make arrests after
some demonstrators did not clear West Florissant Avenue, which was scarred by
vandalism and looting a year ago. There were isolated scuffles, and some frozen
water bottles were hurled toward officers.
Some protesters were not so quick to embrace the police version of the shooting
of Mr. Harris, whose family has questioned whether he fired on the police or was
even carrying a weapon. The authorities said they had recovered a 9-millimeter
Sig Sauer next to Mr. Harris that was reported stolen last year.
Still, there seemed to be agreement among some protest leaders — many of whom
were from the region, but others who had come into town to commemorate Mr. Brown
— that much of the trouble has been caused by young people with no connection to
the demonstrations and who were hanging out along the street.
“We continually talk and engage folks and try to help them understand what it is
to actually be in confrontation, what resistance looks like, what organized
resistance looks like versus like some of what happened last night,” Montague
Simmons, the executive director of the Organization for Black Struggle, said
Monday. “Some of those folks were not there to protest, obviously. They were
just there for their own reasons. I guess the point for us is making sure we’ve
got enough people on hand that when that happens, we’re able to help keep folks
safe.”
Still, Mr. Simmons faulted the county’s decision to declare a state of
emergency, warning that an overly aggressive police stance might provoke new
unrest. Protest leaders had also criticized the police for showing up in riot
gear late Sunday.
“The state of emergency is the result of county government’s unwillingness to
control the police and authorities, who used excessive force on a crowd that was
retreating as instructed,” he said in a statement.
The executive order will allow for certain staffing changes to bolster the
police presence, a spokeswoman for Mr. Stenger said. It also could allow for a
curfew to be put in place, though that step has not been taken.
Thousands of peaceful demonstrators commemorated Mr. Brown’s death with rallies,
concerts, demonstrations and church services through the weekend. Though both a
local grand jury and federal prosecutors cleared the white police officer who
killed him, Darren Wilson, of criminal wrongdoing, Mr. Brown’s death led to
protests against police violence across the country and helped start a national
debate on law enforcement policies in minority communities.
On Sunday, the mood of the demonstrations started to become tense after a couple
of people broke into a beauty supply store along West Florissant Avenue and
several police cars responded, with officers lining up along the storefront.
Dozens of protesters blocked traffic and started moving off the roadway to yell
at the police officers. But when several squad cars raced to an intersection
nearby and dozens of officers in riot gear formed a skirmish line, the
demonstrators surged back into the street.
After an hourlong standoff, gunfire broke out about 300 yards away in a strip
mall where dozens of people who were not part of the protest were milling about.
Shots were being exchanged between two groups, according to the police. Mr.
Harris fired a handgun as he ran across West Florissant, the police said in
court documents. Four plainclothes officers in an unmarked sport-utility vehicle
drove toward Mr. Harris with the S.U.V.’s red and blue lights flashing, the
police said, and he fired upon them. They got out and chased him, and after an
exchange of gunfire, Mr. Harris was hit, the police said.
But Mr. Harris’s grandmother said that his girlfriend, who was with him, told
her that Mr. Harris was running across West Florissant to her car to escape
gunfire.
The grandmother, Gwen Drisdel, said she did not know whether Mr. Harris was
armed. It would not be unreasonable that he might carry a firearm because of how
violent the streets are, she said, but added, “I don’t believe that he would
disrespect police like that.”
Mr. Harris was a friend of Mr. Brown’s, Ms. Drisdel said, and he graduated from
the same high school, Normandy, this year. Mr. Harris was searching for a job,
she said, and was interested in truck driving.
No family members have been allowed to visit Mr. Harris in the hospital, she
said. But she did learn that doctors were concerned about a bullet near his
spine that they might not be able to remove, she said. Mr. Harris was being held
on a $250,000 cash bond.
Hours after Mr. Harris was wounded, two other teenagers were shot and wounded by
an unknown assailant on Canfield Drive, where Mr. Brown was killed, according to
the police. The authorities were still investigating whether there was a
connection between the shootings. The Police Department also said it deployed
smoke canisters to disperse crowds on Canfield, though demonstrators said the
substance was tear gas.
Some political leaders who have denounced the police in the past were not so
critical in the wake of the recent violence.
“I didn’t see anything related to the shooting that I personally saw police
handle improperly,” said Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman who was in the
strip mall near where the gunfire originated Sunday night. “Based upon being out
there and what I saw and heard and even felt go whizzing by my head, it was not
initiated by police. It was a violent encounter that then apparently spread
across the street.”
State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a Democrat whose district includes
Ferguson, said Monday that she was working to understand what led to the
officer-involved shooting. The shootings reinforced the need for protesters to
police themselves and ensure that demonstrations remain peaceful, she said.
“I want people who are interested in protesting to continue doing that in a very
peaceful way,” she said. “We also have to learn a lot of lessons and teach.”
Alan Blinder contributed reporting from Ferguson, and Timothy Williams from New
York.
A version of this article appears in print on August 11, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: An Emergency Is Declared After a Ferguson
Shooting.
ARLINGTON, Texas — A police officer in suburban Dallas shot and
killed a college football player during a struggle after the unarmed 19-year-old
crashed a car through the front window of a car dealership, authorities said
Friday.
The Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office identified the dead man as
Christian Taylor, of Arlington. Taylor was a sophomore at Angelo State
University in San Angelo.
Officers were responding to a burglary call about 1 a.m. Friday in Arlington
when they discovered someone had driven a vehicle through a front window of the
Classic Buick GMC, according to a statement from the Arlington Police
Department. The statement said police approached the suspect and a struggle
ensued. At some point during the struggle, an officer shot Taylor.
Police identified the officer as Brad Miller, a 49-year-old who has been with
the department since last September and who has been working under the
supervision of a training officer since his graduation from the police academy
in March. The police statement said Miller had no police experience before
joining the Arlington police force.
He will be placed on administrative leave, which is routine in such cases.
Independent criminal and administrative investigations, according to the police
statement.
The shooting comes amid increased scrutiny nationwide of police use of force,
particularly in cases involving black suspects. Taylor was black.
Taylor's great uncle, Clyde Fuller of Grand Prairie, Texas, described Taylor as
"a good kid" and said he didn't believe that Taylor was trying to commit a
crime.
"They say he's burglarizing the place by running up in there? Nuh-uh. Something
doesn't sound right," Fuller told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
It was unclear whether there was any video of the shooting. Police Sgt. Paul
Rodriguez said Arlington officers have not been equipped with body cameras, and
police said they haven't found any dealership security video that captured it.
The Star-Telegram reported that court records it reviewed showed Taylor was
sentenced to six months of deferred adjudication last December on a drug charge
stemming from a September 2013 traffic stop in which police reported Taylor was
found with 11 hydrocodone tablets not prescribed to him. The case was dismissed
July 14 after Taylor satisfied the requirement of his probation. He graduated
from Summit High School in Mansfield, Texas, in 2014.
Angelo State officials said they were saddened to hear of the death of Taylor, a
5-foot-9, 180-pound defensive back.
"We're not familiar with any of the details because it happened away from here,
but we'd just like people to know that we are sad and sorry for his family and
friend," university spokeswoman Becky Brackin told the San Angelo
Standard-Times.
In a Twitter posting, football coach Will Wagner said, "Heart is hurting."
Zachary Hammond, a white teenager, pulled up to a drive-through
window last week at a Hardee’s restaurant in Seneca, S.C. A sting operation was
underway, with police officers suspecting a possible drug deal.
Within minutes, an officer used his patrol car to block Mr. Hammond’s vehicle.
According to the Oconee County coroner’s report, an officer identified as Lt.
Mark Tiller then “felt threatened” as Mr. Hammond drove his car toward him. The
officer fired two shots through the open window on the driver’s side, striking
Mr. Hammond once in the shoulder and once fatally in the chest.
Eric S. Bland, a lawyer for the Hammond family, has demanded that the news media
treat the killing of Mr. Hammond as they have recent shootings of unarmed black
men, and some supporters on social media agree.
The national debate over the police and race has grown in the year since Michael
Brown was fatally shot in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9, 2014, as the shootings of
black men have been elevated in the public eye by body cameras, dashboard camera
footage, security cameras and cellphone videos.
The firsthand footage has generated protest and social media campaigns like
#blacklivesmatter.
But the police shooting of Mr. Hammond on July 26 has so far drawn little of the
same public attention, in part because of a lack of video footage.
Thom Berry, a spokesman for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which
has been charged with conducting an independent investigation, said on Friday
that there was dashboard video camera footage in the Hammond shooting.
“At some point in time it will become a public record,” he said. He did not say
when.
Mr. Bland said the Hammond family had obtained an independent autopsy that shows
the young man was shot with the .45-caliber handgun in the back left shoulder
and the left side of his chest: a distinction that was not in the official
autopsy and one that he said dashed the impression that the officer was going to
be hit by the car.
The report by the county coroner, Karl E. Addis, has ruled Mr. Hammond’s death a
homicide.
Mr. Bland said the teenager’s death had fallen through the cracks of public
discourse over police killings and race, and suggested it was because it was a
“white-on-white” shooting. In the shooting of “every kid who is black or white,”
he said, “everybody should be equally offended.”
On social media, Zachary Hammond’s death spawned calls for all officers to be
required to wear body cameras, as well as questions about whether the movement
to protest police shootings was applied equally across racial lines.
A suspect was being sought Sunday night in the killing of a
Memphis police officer who was shot after he interrupted a drug deal the night
before, the police said.
A warrant was issued for the arrest of Tremaine Wilbourn, 29, on charges of
first-degree murder, the police said. Toney Armstrong, the police director, told
reporters that Officer Sean Bolton was shot on Saturday after he spotted an
illegally parked 2002 Mercedes-Benz and approached the vehicle.
There was “a brief struggle” between Officer Bolton and Mr. Wilbourn that ended
when Mr. Wilbourn “shot the officer multiple times,” Director Armstrong said.
The driver of the car, who has not been named, and Mr. Wilbourn fled the scene
after the shooting, but hours later the driver turned himself in to police and
surrendered his vehicle. Investigators found a digital scale and 1.7 grams of
marijuana inside the car, Director Armstrong said. The driver was later released
without being charged.
The United States Marshals Service offered a $10,000 reward for information
leading to Mr. Wilbourn’s capture, and Director Armstrong said that he was
“considered armed and dangerous.”
“To show you how senseless this is, we’re talking about less than 2 grams of
marijuana,” Director Armstrong said. “You’re talking about a misdemeanor
citation.”
“I think it’s safe to say when you look at this individual, you’re looking at a
coward,” he continued, his voice straining with emotion as he held up a picture
of Mr. Wilbourn. “He’s a coward. You gun down, you murder, a police officer for
less than 2 grams of marijuana. You literally destroy a family. Look at the
impact that this has on this department, this community, this city. For less
than two grams of marijuana. ”
Speaking at a news conference on Sunday, Mayor A C Wharton Jr. of Memphis said
that the City Council would approve its own $10,000 reward in an executive
session on Tuesday.
In the meantime, he urged calm.
“This is a city in prayer,” he said. “People are just praying and asking for
peace and comfort for the Bolton family and for all the men and women who have
suffered the loss of a brother.”
Mr. Wharton also said that he had received a call from the White House on Sunday
night.
“They are very much aware of what has taken place here and they are standing by
to assist in any way they can,” he said.
Mr. Wilbourn was on supervised release in connection with a federal court
sentence on a bank robbery charge, Director Armstrong said.
Sean Bolton was a veteran of the United States Marine Corps who served in Iraq,
Director Armstrong said, and he joined the Memphis Police Department in October
2010.
Director Armstrong said that Officer Bolton was riding alone in his patrol car
on Saturday night when he was shot and that after the suspect fled the scene, a
nearby civilian used the officer’s radio to call in the shooting. Officer Bolton
was taken to the Regional Medical Center near downtown Memphis in critical
condition, and he later died there.
Director Armstrong said it was the third time in four years that a Memphis
police officer had been fatally shot in the line of duty. Officer Timothy Warren
was killed in July 2011 while responding to a shooting at a DoubleTree hotel in
downtown Memphis. In December 2012, Officer Martoiya Lang was killed while
serving a warrant in East Memphis.
The investigation into the killing of Officer Bolton comes as the Tennessee
Bureau of Investigation is reviewing the fatal shooting of an unarmed man by a
Memphis police officer on July 17. Officer Connor Schilling, 26, said he shot
Darrius Stewart, 19, after Mr. Stewart attacked him with his handcuffs. Mr.
Stewart had been riding in a car that was stopped for having a broken taillight,
and was placed in the back of Officer Schilling’s police cruiser while the
officer checked for warrants, the police have said.
Mr. Stewart’s family said that he had never been arrested and that the police
had mistaken him for someone else.
Correction: August 2, 2015
An earlier version of a headline with this article misstated the status of a man
described as a person of interest in the shooting death of a Memphis police
officer. The man was taken into custody with no charges filed; he was not
arrested. Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article
misspelled, in one instant, the surname of an officer in another case. He is
Connor Schilling, not Shilling.
A version of this article appears in print on August 3, 2015, on page A11 of the
New York edition with the headline: Police Seek Man in Death of Officer in
Memphis.
I AM tired of writing about slain black people, particularly when
those responsible are police officers, the very people obligated to serve and
protect them. I am exhausted. I experience this specific exhaustion with
alarming frequency. I am all too aware that I have the luxury of such
exhaustion.
One of the greatest lies perpetrated on our culture today is the notion that
dash cameras on police cruisers and body cameras on police officers are tools of
justice. Video evidence, no matter the source, can document injustice, but
rarely does this incontrovertible evidence keep black people safe or prevent
future injustices.
Sandra Bland, 28 years old, was pulled over earlier this month in Waller County,
Tex., by a state trooper, Brian T. Encinia. She was pulled over for a routine
traffic stop. She shouldn’t have been pulled over but she was driving while
black, and the reality is that black women and men are pulled over every day for
this infraction brought about by the color of their skin.
We know a lot about Ms. Bland now. She was in the prime of her life, about to
start a new job at Prairie View A&M University. She had posted on Facebook
earlier this year that she was experiencing depression. She was passionate about
civil rights and advocacy. According to an autopsy report, she committed suicide
in her jail cell after three days. What I find particularly painful is that her
bail was $5,000. Certainly, that is a lot of money, but if the public had known,
we could have helped her family raise the funds to get her out.
As a black woman, I feel this tragedy through the marrow of my bones. We all
should, regardless of the identities we inhabit.
Recently, my brother and I were talking on the phone as he drove to work. He is
the chief executive of a publicly traded company. He was dressed for work,
driving a BMW. He was using a hands-free system. These particulars shouldn’t
matter but they do in a world where we have to constantly mourn the loss of
black lives and memorialize them with hashtags. In this same world, we remind
politicians and those who believe otherwise that black lives matter while
suffocated by evidence to the contrary.
During the course of our conversation, he was pulled over by an officer who said
he looked like an escapee from Pelican Bay State Prison in California. It was a
strange story for any number of reasons. My brother told me he would call me
right back. In the minutes I waited, my chest tightened. I worried. I stared at
my phone. When he called back, no more than seven or eight minutes had passed.
He joked: “I thought it was my time. I thought ‘this is it.’ ” He went on with
his day because this is a quotidian experience for black people who dare to
drive.
Each time I get in my car, I make sure I have my license, registration and
insurance cards. I make sure my seatbelt is fastened. I place my cellphone in
the handless dock. I check and double check and triple check these details
because when (not if) I get pulled over, I want there to be no doubt I am
following the letter of the law. I do this knowing it doesn’t really matter if I
am following the letter of the law or not. Law enforcement officers see only the
color of my skin, and in the color of my skin they see criminality, deviance, a
lack of humanity. There is nothing I can do to protect myself, but I am
comforted by the illusion of safety.
As a larger, very tall woman, I am sometimes mistaken for a man. I don’t want to
be “accidentally” killed for being a black man. I hate that such a thought even
crosses my mind. This is the reality of living in this black body. This is my
reality of black womanhood, living in a world where I am stripped of my
femininity and humanity because of my unruly black body.
There is a code of conduct in emergency situations — women and children first.
The most vulnerable among us should be rescued before all others. In reality,
this code of conduct is white women and children first. Black women, black
children, they are not afforded the luxury of vulnerability. We have been shown
this time and again. We remember McKinney, Tex., and a police officer, David
Casebolt, holding a young black girl to the ground. We say the names of the
fallen. Tamir Rice. Renisha McBride. Natasha McKenna. Tanisha Anderson. Rekia
Boyd. We say their names until our throats run dry and there are still more
names to add to the list.
During the ill-fated traffic stop, most of which was caught on camera, Mr.
Encinia asked Ms. Bland why she was irritated and she told him. She answered the
question she was asked. Her voice was steady, confident. Mr. Encinia didn’t like
her tone, as if she should be joyful about a traffic stop. He told Ms. Bland to
put her cigarette out and she refused. The situation escalated. Mr. Encinia
threatened to light her up with his Taser. Ms. Bland was forced to leave her
car. She continued to protest. She was placed in handcuffs. She was treated
horribly. She was treated as less than human. She protested her treatment. She
knew and stated her rights but it did not matter. Her black life and her black
body did not matter.
Because Sandra Bland was driving while black, because she was not subservient in
the manner this trooper preferred, a routine traffic stop became a death
sentence. Even if Ms. Bland did commit suicide, there is an entire system of
injustice whose fingerprints left bruises on her throat.
In his impassioned new memoir, “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates
writes, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is
heritage.” I would take this bold claim a step further. It is also traditional
to try and destroy the black spirit. I don’t want to believe our spirits can be
broken. Nonetheless, increasingly, as a black woman in America, I do not feel
alive. I feel like I am not yet dead.
Roxane Gay is the author of “An Untamed State” and “Bad Feminist” and a
contributing opinion writer.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 25, 2015, on page A21 of the
New York edition with the headline: On the Death of Sandra Bland.
HEMPSTEAD, Tex. — A county prosecutor in Texas said Thursday that
an autopsy of Sandra Bland, who died in a jail cell here nearly two weeks ago
after a minor traffic stop, concluded that her injuries were consistent with
suicide, not homicide, a finding that underscored growing doubts that the jail
did enough to monitor her.
Ms. Bland had told two jail intake workers on July 10 that she had tried last
year to kill herself after losing a baby and told at least one of them that she
had experienced bouts of depression. Yet they did not place her on a suicide
watch or summon a mental health expert to evaluate her, steps national experts
say should be standard practice. Nor did they follow other mandatory procedures
aimed at protecting inmates at risk, state inspectors said last week.
Ms. Bland, a 28-year-old African-American who was moving to Hempstead from the
Chicago area for a job at a local college, was found hanged from a plastic trash
can liner in her cell on July 13. She was supposed to start her new job, at
Prairie View A&M University, which was her alma mater, two days later.
On Thursday, the chairman of the State Senate committee that oversees Texas
corrections said that the jail where she died, in Waller County outside Houston,
had mishandled her case, and that state rules governing potentially suicidal
inmates needed to be overhauled.
“When we lock somebody up, we have a responsibility to take care of them,” said
Senator John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and the longest-serving member of the
Republican-dominated State Senate. “What I’ll be seeking is a review of jail
standards, much more than we’ve ever done before. I personally believe it is
long overdue.”
At a news conference, Warren Diepraam, Waller County’s first assistant district
attorney, said that the autopsy showed that the condition of Ms. Bland’s head,
neck and hands lacked any of the telltale signs of a violent struggle, and that
the markings around her neck were consistent with suicide.
“I have not seen any evidence that this is a homicide,” Mr. Diepraam said. He
added that there were some abrasions on her back that might have occurred during
the arrest, and abrasions on her wrists consistent with being handcuffed.
Preliminary testing showed marijuana in her system, but he said the results of a
more accurate test were still pending.
Prosecutors said they were releasing information from the autopsy, conducted by
the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences in Houston, because the case
has drawn national attention and, in part, to dampen suspicions.
“We’re trying to be open in this investigation,” the Waller County district
attorney, Elton Mathis, said at the news conference.
Friends of Ms. Bland and her suburban Chicago family have said they had no
indication that she had sought to take her life, saying that she was ecstatic
about her new job at the college. Her family has indicated that it will seek an
independent autopsy to corroborate the findings of the one conducted by Texas
officials.
Ms. Bland’s death came three days after a traffic stop for changing lanes
without signaling mushroomed into a furious confrontation with a white Texas
state trooper who threatened her with a stun gun, then handcuffed and arrested
her. State public safety officials have said that the trooper, Brian T. Encinia,
30, violated police procedures in the confrontation, and he has been moved to a
desk job while state and federal inquiries are underway.
Her death, like those of a number of other African-Americans who died after
encounters with police officers, has set off a national outcry as well as deep
suspicion among some critics, including her family, of the Texas authorities who
are investigating it.
A screening form for “suicide and medical and mental impairments” completed when
officials admitted Ms. Bland to the jail on July 10 indicates that she said she
had tried to kill herself last year with pills after losing a child, had battled
depression and was feeling depressed at the time she was entering the jail. But
a second questionnaire prepared hours later says that Ms. Bland had not ever
been depressed and was not feeling depressed at that moment, though it does note
her attempted suicide.
Explaining the discrepancy, Mr. Mathis said, “They’re telling me they asked her
those questions two different times, that she gave different answers the second
time.”
The intake forms also said that Ms. Bland was taking an antiseizure medication,
Keppra, for epilepsy. The drug comes with a warning label approved by the Food
and Drug Administration that includes a long list of possible side effects,
including depression, aggressive behavior and thoughts of suicide. It was
unclear whether she had access to the drug while in jail.
During a news conference illustrated with photographs of Ms. Bland’s corpse, Mr.
Diepraam said her body carried abrasions on the back and lacerations on the
wrists that could have been suffered during her arrest, or later by handcuffs.
But there was no sign of serious injuries, he said, and no cuts or bruises that
might suggest she had fought in her jail cell to keep someone from killing her.
Examiners also found scars and scabs from about 30 cuts on Ms. Bland’s left
forearm, which they said had probably occurred two to four weeks ago.
Prosecutors declined to say definitively what caused them, but “in multiple
instances I have seen, those injuries, they are consistent with self-inflicted
wounds,” Mr. Diepraam said.
An initial toxicology test also indicated that Ms. Bland had recently smoked or
eaten marijuana, Mr. Diepraam said. He noted that because traces of marijuana
leave the body quickly, she had to have consumed it not long before she died,
and he said it could have been used in the jail.
Inmates near Ms. Bland’s cell did not smell marijuana smoke, and the cell
contained no evidence of the drug, he said. He raised the possibility that she
could have ingested it right before the traffic stop to avoid being arrested for
drug possession. Explaining why the information was relevant, he said, “It is a
mood-altering substance and a mood amplifier.”
More extensive drug tests may shed more light on that question later, he said.
The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences is headed by the chief medical
examiner, Dr. Luis A. Sanchez, a University of Massachusetts medical school
graduate who joined the staff as a senior deputy in 2001 before becoming the top
medical examiner in 2003. He was previously deputy and acting medical examiner
in Washington and served as a liaison to the United States attorney’s office.
Waller County officials said they asked Harris County to conduct the post-mortem
inquiry because of inadequate medical facilities in Waller County.
Nearly two weeks after her death, it remains unclear why Ms. Bland was allowed
to remain under minimal supervision despite telling her jailers that she was
depressed and had tried to kill herself.
The rules governing inmates with medical and mental problems in Texas’ 245
county jails are basic and, some experts say, inadequate. Jails must give mental
health training to workers who deal with inmates. They must screen new inmates
for signs of mental illness. And they must have a policy for dealing with
suicide risks. Within those broad outlines, individual jails can design their
own procedures as long as they pass muster with regulators.
Ms. Bland was screened for mental illness twice in three hours after being
brought to the jail, documents show. But despite disclosing depression and a
previous suicide attempt during one of those screenings, she was never
designated a risk and marked for closer supervision.
That decision is left to the intake clerks who interview new prisoners —
employees who, under the plan that Waller County submitted to the state, were to
receive two hours a year of training in recognizing and handling mentally ill
inmates. But after Ms. Bland’s death, inspectors for the Texas Commission on
Jail Standards found that Waller County could not prove that its employees had
received the training.
State regulations require that jail employees conduct a face-to-face inspection
of each prisoner no less than every hour. Inmates who are deemed at risk — of
assault, say, or of bizarre behavior — are seen no less than once every 30
minutes, and can even be placed under constant supervision if a doctor orders
it.
In Waller County, state inspectors found, jailers did not even meet the minimum
requirement of a personal inspection once an hour. Inspectors cited the jail for
the same violation in 2012, after another inmate hanged himself in his cell with
a bedsheet.
State Senator Whitmire said in an interview that the jail had made “a huge
mistake” both by failing to order a suicide watch on Ms. Bland and by leaving a
trash bag that could be used as a noose in the cell.
“If they had not had the trash in there with the plastic liner,” he said, “we
would not be having this conversation.”
Mr. Mathis, the district attorney, noted that Ms. Bland also had a bedsheet. “We
need to take the most precautions possible,” he said. “I do wish she would have
been on a suicide watch. We all do.”
In an interview Wednesday, the Waller County sheriff, R. Glenn Smith, said that
although Ms. Bland had told two intake workers she had attempted suicide last
year — and also told one of them that she was feeling depressed at that moment —
jail workers felt that her behavior was “just normal.”
On Thursday, LaVaughn Mosley, who had known Ms. Bland since college, said he had
been among the last people to talk to her. An aspiring dietitian, Ms. Bland had
driven to Texas from Chicago to interview on July 9 for a job involving a study
of weight at Prairie View A&M.
She got the job that day and was ecstatic. She was to start the next week. But
the next evening, she called Mr. Mosley from the jail and “told me she was going
to press charges,” he said. They traded missed calls over the weekend as her
family struggled to raise money to pay her bail. By Monday, she was dead.
Mr. Mosley said he remained in disbelief. “You don’t drive 16 hours, have the
interview, get the job, get all excited and then kill yourself,” he said.
Correction: July 23, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the charge on which Sandra Bland
was held. It was assaulting a public servant, not resisting arrest.
David Montgomery reported from Hempstead, and Michael Wines from New York.
Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting from Hempstead, Mitch Smith from Chicago
and Gina Kolata from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on July 24, 2015, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Texas Autopsy Is Said to Point Toward
Suicide.
I have so many questions about the case in which Sandra Bland was
arrested in a small Texas town and died in police custody. These are questions
that ought to be easy to answer, questions that I suspect many others may share.
Here are just some of my areas of inquiry.
1. On the video released by the Texas Department of Public Safety of Bland’s
traffic stop, the arresting officer, Brian Encinia, tells her that the reason
for her stop is that she “failed to signal a lane change.” The officer returns
to his car, then approaches Bland’s vehicle a second time. He remarks to Bland,
“You seem very irritated.” Bland responds, “I am. I really am.” She continues,
“I was getting out of your way. You were speeding up, tailing me, so I move
over, and you stop me. So, yeah, I am a little bit irritated.”
Was Bland simply trying to move out of the way of a police vehicle?
The video shows the officer’s car accelerating behind Bland’s and passing a sign
indicating a speed limit of 20 miles per hour. How fast was the officer closing
the distance on Bland before she changed lanes? Was it completely reasonable for
her to attempt to move out of his way?
2. The officer, while standing at the closed driver’s side door, asks Bland to
extinguish her cigarette. As soon as she refuses, he demands that she exit the
vehicle. Was the demand to exit because of the refusal? If so, what statute in
Texas — or anywhere in America! — stipulates that a citizen can’t smoke during a
traffic stop?
3. According to Encinia’s signed affidavit, Bland was “removed from the car” and
“placed in handcuffs for officer safety.” The reason for the arrest is unclear
to me. At one point, Encinia says, “You were getting a warning until now you’re
going to jail.” So, what was the arrest for at that point? Failure to comply?
Later in the video, Encinia says, “You’re going to jail for resisting arrest.”
If that was the reason, why wasn’t Bland charged with resisting arrest? The
affidavit reads, “Bland was placed under arrest for Assault on Public Servant.”
Encinia’s instructions to Bland are a jumble of confusion. After she is
handcuffed, he points for her to “come read” the “warning” ticket, then
immediately pulls back on her arm, preventing her from moving in the direction
that he pointed, now demanding that she “stay right here.” He then commands
Bland to “stop moving,” although, as she points out, “You keep moving me!” What
was she supposed to do?
4. According to Encinia’s affidavit, at some point after being handcuffed,
“Bland began swinging her elbows at me and then kicked my right leg in the
shin.” On the dashcam video, a commotion happens out of view of the camera, with
Bland complaining that she is being hurt — “You’re about to break my wrist!” and
“You knocked my head in the ground; I got epilepsy!” Encinia and another officer
insist that Bland stop moving. Encinia can be heard to say, “You are yanking
around! When you pull away from me, you are resisting arrest!” (Neither the
dashcam video nor a video taken by a bystander shows a discernible kick.)
When Encinia re-enters the frame of the dashcam, he explains to a female
officer: “She started yanking away, then kicked me, so I took her straight to
the ground.” The female officer points to Encinia’s leg as she says: “Yeah, and
there you got it right there.”
Encinia says, “One thing for sure, it’s on video.” Only, it isn’t. Why exactly
was Bland walked out of the frame of view of the dashcam for the arrest
procedure?
5. The initial video posted by Texas authorities also has a number of visual
glitches — vanishing cars, looping sequences — but no apparent audio glitches.
The director of “Selma,” Ava DuVernay, tweeted: “I edit footage for a living.
But anyone can see that this official video has been cut. Read/watch. Why?” She
included a link to a post pointing out the discrepancies in the video.
According to NBC News:
“Tom Vinger, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, blamed a
‘technical issue during posting.’ He said that the department was working to
correct the video.”
What kinds of “technical difficulties” were these? Why wouldn’t the audio also
have glitches? (Authorities have now released a new, slightly shorter video.)
6. Texas authorities say that, while in the Waller County jail cell, Bland used
a trash bag from a trash can in the cell to hang herself. Is it standard
procedure to have trash cans with trash bags in jail cells? Is the can secured
to the floor? If not, couldn’t it be used by an inmate to hurt herself, or other
inmates or jail staff?
According to a report on Wednesday by The Houston Chronicle:
“Bland disclosed on a form at the jail that she previously had attempted suicide
over that past year, although she also indicated she was not feeling suicidal at
the time of her arrest, according to officials who attended the Tuesday meeting
with local and state leaders investigating the case.” Shouldn’t they have known
it was a suicide risk?
The Bureau of Justice Statistics points out that suicide is the No. 1 cause of
non-illness-related deaths in local jails (although blacks are least likely to
commit those suicides), and between 2000 and 2011 about half of those suicides
“occurred within the first week of admission.”
Why weren’t more precautions taken, like, oh, I don’t know, removing any suicide
risks from the cell?
7. Houston’s Channel 2 aired “exclusive video from inside the Waller County jail
cell where Sandra Bland was found dead.” In the video, a trash can — a very
large one — is clearly visible. But, strangely, it appears to have a trash bag
in it. If Bland used the trash bag to hang herself, where did the one in the can
come from? Did they replace it? Why would the jail staff do that?
8. NBC News’ John Yang also toured the cell, and in his video he says that
“things are really the same as it was that morning” when officers found Bland’s
body, including food (“Dinner Untouched” was the language used in title of the
video on NBCNews.com) and a Bible on the bed opened to Psalms. (That Bible
appears to be closed in the Channel 2 video. Who opened it between the two
videos?).
And what page is the Bible opened to in the NBC video? It is open to Psalm 119
and at the top of the page are verses 109-110: “Though I constantly take my life
in my hands, I will not forget your law. The wicked have set a snare for me, but
I have not strayed from your precepts.” Eerie. Or, convenient.
Also in the Channel 2 video, there are orange shoes on the floor by the bed. In
the NBC video, they are gone. Who moved them? Why? Where are they?
Yang says of the trash bag in the can: “Around her neck, they say, was a trash
bag, an extra trash bag from this receptacle.” So what gives here? “Extra trash
bag”? Was there more than one trash bag in the cell or had that one been
replaced?
(It is also worth noting that the video shows what appears to be a rope holding
a shower curtain.)
Isn’t this an active investigation? Shouldn’t that cell be treated like a crime
scene? Why are reporters allowed to wander through it? Who all has been in it?
Maybe there are innocent and convincing answers to all these questions, and
others. I hope so. People need things to make sense. When there are lapses in
logic in what people think would be reasonable explanations, suspicion spreads.
