EDITORIAL: What we see in Sandra Bland’s cellphone video

When a police officer gets rough with somebody, he often says later that he feared for his safety and had no choice.

Most of the time, we believe, this is undoubtedly true. Cops do a dangerous job and must protect themselves.

The claim of self-defense, though, is also a script, as we have learned in Chicago. It is the claim made by every poorly trained or hot-headed cop who crosses a line that should not have been crossed.

Based on a cellphone video that surfaced this week, it looks to us — more than ever — that a Texas trooper lied three years ago when he claimed he feared for his safety to justify why he roughly handled and arrested Sandra Bland, a resident of Naperville, during a traffic stop.

Bland was found dead in a jail cell three days later, and her death was ruled a suicide. The case stirred a fury across the country, becoming a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.

The cellphone video, recorded by Bland, adds to the evidence that Trooper Brian Encinia was never in danger, as he claimed, and a charge of perjury against him should not have been dropped. The video also reinforces the notion that the criminal justice system — here, there and everywhere — is reluctant to hold cops fully accountable.

Prosecutors in Texas say the perjury charge would have been hard to prove, but the cellphone video is awfully compelling evidence.

That said, we can’t see what would be gained by reopening the investigation into Bland’s arrest and death, as others are calling for. Prosecutors cut a deal with Encinia, like it or not, and he did not go unpunished. He was fired from his job, and the perjury charge was dropped only after he promised he would never again work in law enforcement.

Reopening the investigation might be justified if prosecutors had hidden the evidence of the cellphone video, but apparently that’s not the case. The video was referred to “multiple times” in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s original investigative report, according to a statement by the department, and it was given to a reporter two years ago when the reporter asked for it.

The existence of the video became known to the general public this week because the reporter, learning that the Bland family’s attorney had never seen it, finally wrote a story about it.

The cellphone video, along with a police dashcam video, demonstrate how the dynamics of race and gender can play out disastrously in American society. A simple traffic stop becomes a power struggle between a white, male authority figure — a uniformed cop — and an African American woman who’s had enough of it all.

The encounter, as shown in the two videos, seems to begin reasonably enough.

“You OK?” the trooper asks Bland, whom he has stopped for failing to signal a lane change. “You seem very irritated.”

But within minutes it becomes about something more than a traffic stop.

“Get out of the car now,” the trooper shouts.

“Why am I being apprehended?” Bland shoots back. “You’re trying to drag me out of my car.”

As we watch the videos, we wish the trooper were better trained. We wish Bland were less argumentative. We see nothing that indicates the trooper is in danger.

“Get out of the car,” he says again, now pointing a stun gun. “I will light you up.”

“Wow,” says Bland.

The dashcam video is more complete, but the 39-second cellphone video offers something previously unseen — Sandra Bland’s point of view.

We see the trooper as she saw him, looming over her. We can’t read his eyes, just as she could not, because he’s wearing sunglasses.

We see his stun gun just as she did, too, pointed at her.

And we see all the psychological baggage, too, involving race and gender and power.

It’s always right there, if we’re ready to see it.

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