Texas DA Told Family that Sandra Bland “Swallowed Or Smoked ‘Large Quantity Of Marijuana’ In Jail”
by Gaius Publius
Ok, this kind of seals it. And we really really need an independent autopsy. If this proves to be murder, everyone in the county who touched this case and perpetuated the cop cover-up need to be indicted, including the medical examiner who ruled suicide.
The news story first, then the reason I said what I said. Huff Post:
Sandra Bland Swallowed Or Smoked ‘Large Quantity Of Marijuana’ In Jail: DA
Sandra
Bland, the black woman found hanging dead in a Texas jail days after a
traffic stop, smoked or possibly swallowed a large amount of marijuana
while in custody, her family’s attorney reported the district attorney
as saying.Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis made the
disclosure in a text message to attorney Cannon Lambert, who has called
the state’s autopsy on the Chicago-area woman defective, Lambert said.“Looking at the autopsy results and toxicology, it
appears she swallowed a large quantity of marijuana or smoked it in the
jail,” Mathis said in a text message to Lambert that the attorney
provided to Reuters.Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the text. Repeated calls to Mathis’ office were not returned.
There aren’t many options, not many ways to analyze this. If it’s true (that her dead body was filled with
marijuana), it’s bad for the cops for being true. If it’s false, it’s bad for the
cops for saying it’s true. If she got the marijuana without the cops knowing, it’s (a)
not believable — an angry black woman in a white county jail gets dope? — and (b) their fault anyway if she did.
And
the final option, of course, is the one that’s frankly obvious. She may
well have been murdered, and this is as bad, as ham-fisted a cover-up as
you could imagine.
The story just blew up.
Cops Who Kill and the Crisis Management Profession
A side thought, and a speculation, but I’m betting this is true.
When Burger King, say, or Jack in the Box, or Ford Motor Company, kills its customers through neglect or “cost-benefit analysis” — and the public learns about it — the organization whose reputation faces ruin brings in a PR team specializing in “crisis management.” Crisis managers, good ones, cost a ton of money. It’s a real profession and a lucrative one. The job is to turn public perception around, to make the public return to thinking, “This is the corporation that loves us” from “This is the corporation that kills us.”
(All corporate advertising, by the way, sells corporations in general as loving and caring. Then some of it sells a product.)
It’s got to be obvious by now that the cop profession needs crisis management, so that when these “eruptions” (a Clinton-era term) occur, they can be dealt with.
So, a thought exercise: Let’s assume cops know they need this help (they’d have to be blind not to). Let’s also assume that they know it can’t be just on a county-by-county, or department-by-department basis. That’s too haphazard, it “reinvents the wheel” each time, and it’s also too pricy. There has to be “industry-wide” help so cops can can devise responses once, then leverage the results to departments in crisis as needed. Sure, departments will need a crisis management team, but there have to be templates and coordinated wisdom.
The goal — Cops need a way to re-delude (or re-educate) the public into thinking that “protect and serve” still means protecting and serving the public, not protecting and serving the cops and their needs.
For example, here’s an instance of excellent crisis management–style turnaround. The Notre Dame women’s basketball team was photographed wearing Eric Garner “I can’t breathe” T-shirts at practice. The cops “met” with the team. The team showed public support for cops at the next game. (Write-up, with pictures, here.) Complete with salutes and hands over hearts. Female black athletes standing shoulder to shoulder with cops, affirming the “goodness” and patriotism of cops.
(By the way, I don’t blame the athletes. At a fairly right-wing university like Notre Dame, the pressure on them to deny that their protest had meaning must have been enormous.)
Very professionally done, on the part of the cops. Rebellion entirely shut down. Rebels made to bow and recant, black rebels at that. And quickly. So how was it managed? Did the South Bend PD hire a crisis manager and come up with the solution on their own, or did they look to some more centralized source for guidance?
In a more general way, looking forward, what would you do if you were a high-level cop strategist? How would you hire a crisis management team to do triage on all these stories? Where
would the money come from? Who would manage and oversee the project? How
would you nationalize and distribute the results on a county-by-county basis so that each department facing “crisis” got the benefit?
I’m going to let you think about that. As you do, ask yourself, what are largest, most well-funded national cop organizations? I’ll bet you know. And yes, that’s my guess too, and that this speculation may already be happening.
GP
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