The broken record is spinning round and round again, playing the same tired bit of the same tired old song. This time, it’s playing in Waller County, Texas where the death of Sandra Bland is being co-opted by the same movement that burned down Baltimore and Ferguson, and that to date hasn’t said a peep about all the black lives lost in Chicago.
Before going any further, it’s important to acknowledge that Sandra Bland shouldn’t have died in jail. Period.
That said, it’s also important to acknowledge that there isn’t any connection between the dashcam footage and whatever happened to her in the Waller County jail.
Yes, the dashcam footage appears altered. The recurring tow truck driver and the vanishing vehicle all appear very suspicious. Alteration? Computer glitch? That’s something for people who have some degree of expertise in these things to figure out. Right now though, it doesn’t paint law enforcement in a positive light. All the same, it has nothing to do with what happened to Bland in jail. The dashcam video occurred on a road somewhere in Waller County, Texas. She died three days later in a jail cell. Two different locations and circumstances.
Progressives will try their best to conflate the two items. For their narrative to gain strength, they must make it appear that from the very beginning there was a conspiracy by law enforcement against Bland. To believe that the Texas State Trooper and Waller County jail were in cahoots to the point of altering video and then ensuring
Bland didn’t make it out of jail alive requires a very elastic imagination. The same elasticity enjoyed by the tin foil hat crowd, the chem trail folks, and those that believe there is a Katrina virus. It’s a way, way out their conspiracy theory.
Conflation is a frequent tactic used by the left though. They do it all the time. Strawmen are constructed. Apples and oranges comparisons* are then erected alongside it to try and bolster their point. Then we end up debating the conflation, and we end up ignoring critical facts in these important cases.
In the Sandra Bland case a critical fact ignored is her history of depression and previous suicide attempts. Britain’s newspaper The Guardian has reported on it. Chances are the New York Times hasn’t. CNN and MSNBC haven’t either. The fact that she may have suffered depression though is an important part of the story.
Bland herself, upon arrival at the Waller County jail, indicated on intake forms that she had previously attempted to commit suicide. And yes, the staff at the jail who took her handwritten forms and typed them into their system botched up the data and may have established conditions in which Sandra Bland wasn’t monitored as regularly as someone in her mental state ought to have been.
The media and the left, though, will ignore this aspect of the story in their effort to distill the entire tragedy down into a binary us versus them, good versus bad, narrative. If it isn’t already, they will boil it all down to a catchy hashtag, convenient enough for well-heeled 20 somethings in dorm rooms and suburban bedrooms to use in social media.
Sandra Bland’s needless death will simply become fodder for armchair activists and rabble rousers to use in furthering their agendas. A shame. What happened to her in a Texas jail cell could have been a starting point for discussing mental health issues in America.
* Apples and oranges comparisons are why Hillary gets to mimic a southern black woman’s speech in her infamous “I doan fee-uhl no wayz tie-urd” speech, while the racial authenticity of a Clarence Thomas is questioned, for example.
Image: http://www.diggita.it/story.php?title=Michael_Jackson__Il_Messaggero_universale_
della_politica_del_Black_Lives_Matter
