فصل 12

Chapter Twelve

Sandra Bland

At 4:27 on the afternoon of July 10, 2015, Sandra Bland was pulled over by a Texas State Trooper on FM 1098 in Waller County, Texas. She was driving a silver Hyundai Azera with Illinois license plates. She was twenty-eight years old and had just come from her hometown of Chicago to start a new job at Prairie View University. The name of the officer was Brian Encinia. He parked behind her, then approached Bland’s Hyundai slowly along the curbside, leaning in to speak to her through the open passenger window.

Brian Encinia: Hello, ma’am. We’re the Texas Highway Patrol, and the reason for your stop is because you failed to signal the lane change. Do you have your driver’s license and registration with you? What’s wrong? How long have you been in Texas?

Sandra Bland: Got here just yesterday.

Encinia: OK. Do you have a driver’s license? OK, where you headed to now? Give me a few minutes.

Encinia takes her license with him to his patrol car. A few minutes pass. Then he returns, this time approaching Bland’s car from the driver side.

Brian Encinia: OK, ma’am. You OK?

Bland: I’m waiting on you. This is your job. I’m waiting on you. When’re you going to let me go?

Encinia: I don’t know, you seem very, really irritated.

Bland: I am. I really am. I feel like it’s crap what I’m getting a ticket for. 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 irritated, but that doesn’t stop you from giving me a ticket, so [inaudible] ticket.

In the many postmortems of the Bland case, this is generally identified as Encinia’s first mistake. Her anger is steadily building. He could have tried to diffuse it. Later, during the investigation, it emerged that Encinia never intended to give her a ticket—only a warning. He could have told her that. He didn’t. He could have explained, carefully, why she should have signaled. He could have smiled, joked with her. Oh, ma’am. You don’t think I’m going to give you a ticket for that, do you? She has something to say and wants to be heard. He could have acknowledged that he was listening. Instead he waits a long, uncomfortable beat.

Encinia: Are you done?

That’s the first missed opportunity. Then comes the second.

Bland: You asked me what was wrong, now I told you.

Encinia: OK.

Bland: So now I’m done, yeah.

She’s done. Bland has said her piece. She’s expressed her irritation. Then she takes out a cigarette and lights it. She’s trying to calm her nerves. In the video we can’t see any of this, because the camera is on the dashboard of Encinia’s squad car; we see just the back of her car and Encinia, standing by her door. If you stopped the tape there and showed it to 100 people, 99 would guess that’s where it ends.

But it doesn’t.

Encinia: You mind putting out your cigarette, please? If you don’t mind?

He’s flat, calm, assertive. Would you mind, said with an edge.

Mistake Number Two: he should have paused, let Bland collect herself.

Bland: I’m in my car. Why do I have to put out my cigarette?

She’s right, of course. A police officer has no authority to tell someone not to smoke. He should have said, “Yes. You’re right. But do you mind waiting until after we’ve finished here? I’m not a fan of cigarette smoke.” Or he could have dropped the issue entirely. It’s only a cigarette. But he doesn’t. Something about the tone of her voice gets Encinia’s back up. His authority has been challenged. He snaps. Mistake Number Three.

Encinia: Well, you can step on out now.

Bland: I don’t have to step out of my car.

Encinia: Step out of the car.

Bland: Why am I…

Encinia: Step out of the car!

Bland: No, you don’t have the right to do that.

Encinia: Step out of the car.

Bland: You do not have the right to do this.

Encinia: I do have the right, now step out or I will remove you.

Bland: I refuse to talk to you other than to identify myself. [crosstalk] I am getting removed for a failure to signal?

Encinia: Step out or I will remove you. I’m giving you a lawful order.

On the internet bulletin boards frequented by police officers after the case broke, Encinia’s actions were supported by some. But just as many were dumbfounded by this final turn: Dude, issue the f**n warning and move on. It’s NOT WORTH IT.…we’re yankin females out of vehicles cause our ego got hurt cause she wouldn’t tremble and put out the stupid cigarette????? Let’s pose this question—suppose she had stepped out when he asked her to.…THEN WHAT??? You were gonna scold her about the cigarette??? What was his plan?? What was going to be the purpose of pulling her out?

But Encinia has now given her a lawful order, and she has defied it.

Encinia: Get out of the car now or I’m going to remove you.

Bland: And I’m calling my lawyer.

Encinia: I’m going to yank you out of here.

Bland: OK, you’re going to yank me out of my car? OK, all right.

Bland: Let’s do this.

Encinia: Yeah, we’re going to.

Bland: Don’t touch me!

Encinia: Get out of the car!

Bland: Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me! I’m not under arrest—you don’t have the right to take me out of the car.

Encinia: You are under arrest!

Bland: I’m under arrest? For what? For what? For what?

Encinia : 2547 county FM 1098 [inaudible] send me another unit. [To Bland]: Get out of the car! Get out of the car now!

Bland: Why am I being apprehended? You’re trying to give me a ticket for failure… Encinia: I said get out of the car!

Bland: Why am I being apprehended? You just opened my car door—

Encinia: I’m giving you a lawful order. I’m going to drag you out of here.

Bland: So you’re threatening to drag me out of my own car?

Encinia: Get out of the car!

Bland: And then you’re going to [crosstalk] me?

Encinia: I will light you up! Get out! Now! Bland: Wow. Wow.

Encinia: Get out. Now. Get out of the car!

Bland: For a failure to signal? You’re doing all of this for a failure to signal?

Encinia: Get over there.

Bland: Right. Yeah, let’s take this to court, let’s do this.

Encinia: Go ahead.

The encounter goes on for several more minutes. Bland becomes increasingly heated. He handcuffs her. The second unit arrives. The yelling and struggling goes on—and on.

Encinia: Stop now! Stop it! If you would stop resisting.

Female officer: Stop resisting, ma’am.

Bland: For a fucking traffic ticket, you are such a pussy. You are such a pussy.

Female officer: No, you are. You should not be fighting.

Encinia: Get on the ground!

Bland: For a traffic signal!

Encinia: You are yanking around, when you pull away from me, you’re resisting arrest.

Bland: Don’t it make you feel real good, don’t it? A female for a traffic ticket. Don’t it make you feel good, Officer Encinia? You’re a real man now. You just slammed me, knocked my head into the ground. I got epilepsy, you motherfucker.

Encinia: Good. Good.

Bland: Good? Good?

Bland was taken into custody on felony assault charges. Three days later she was found dead in her cell, hanging from a noose fashioned from a plastic bag. After a short investigation, Encinia was fired on the grounds that he had violated Chapter 5, Section 05.17.00, of the Texas State Trooper General Manual: An employee of the Department of Public Safety shall be courteous to the public and to other employees. An employee shall be tactful in the performance of duties, shall control behavior, and shall exercise the utmost patience and discretion. An employee shall not engage in argumentative discussions even in the face of extreme provocation.

Brian Encinia was a tone-deaf bully. The lesson of what happened on the afternoon of July 10, 2015, is that when police talk to strangers, they need to be respectful and polite. Case closed. Right?

Wrong.

At this point, I think we can do better.

A Kansas City traffic stop is a search for a needle in a haystack. A police officer uses a common infraction to search for something rare—guns and drugs. From the very beginning, as the ideas perfected in Kansas City began to spread around the world, it was clear that this kind of policing required a new mentality.

The person who searches your hand luggage at the airport, for example, is also engaged in a haystack search. And from time to time, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) conducts audits at different airports. They slip a gun or a fake bomb into a piece of luggage. What do they find? That 95 percent of the time, the guns and bombs go undetected. This is not because airport screeners are lazy or incompetent. Rather, it is because the haystack search represents a direct challenge to the human tendency to default to truth. The airport screener sees something, and maybe it looks a little suspicious. But she looks up at the line of very ordinary-looking travelers waiting patiently, and she remembers that in two years on the job she’s never seen a real gun. She knows, in fact, that in a typical year the TSA screens 1.7 billion carry-on bags, and out of that number finds only a few thousand handguns. That’s a hit rate of .0001 percent—which means the odds are that if she kept doing her job for another 50 years she would never see a gun. So she sees the suspicious object inserted by the TSA’s auditors, and she lets it go.

For Kansas City traffic stops to work, the police officer could not think that way. He had to suspect the worst of every car he approached. He had to stop defaulting to truth. He had to think like Harry Markopolos.

The bible for post–Kansas City policing is called Tactics for Criminal Patrol, by Charles Remsberg. It came out in 1995, and it laid out in precise detail what was required of the new, non-defaulting patrol officer. According to Remsberg, the officer had to take the initiative and “go beyond the ticket.” That meant, first of all, picking up on what Remsberg called “curiosity ticklers”—anomalies that raise the possibility of potential wrongdoing. A motorist in a bad neighborhood stops at a red light and looks down intently at something on the seat next to him. What’s that about? An officer spots a little piece of wrapping paper sticking out between two panels of an otherwise spotless car. Might that be the loose end of a hidden package? In the infamous North Carolina case, where the police officer pulled over a driver for a broken brake light—thinking, incorrectly, that this was against North Carolina law—the thing that raised his suspicions was that the driver was “stiff and nervous.” The most savvy of criminals will be careful not to commit any obvious infractions. So traffic cops needed to be creative about what to look for: cracked windshields, lane changes without signaling, following too closely.

“One officer,” Remsberg writes, “knowing that some of the most popular dope markets in his city are in dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs, just parks there and watches. Often drivers will get close before seeing his squad [car], then stop suddenly (improper stopping in a roadway) or hastily back up (improper backing in a roadway). ‘There’s two offenses,’ he says, ‘before I even pursue the car.’” When he approached the stopped car, the new breed of officer had to be alert to the tiniest clues. Drug couriers often use air fresheners—particularly the kind shaped like little fir trees—to cover up the smell of drugs. (Tree air fresheners are known as the “felony forest.”) If there are remains of fast food in the car, that suggests the driver is in a hurry and reluctant to leave his vehicle (and its valuable cargo) unattended. If the drugs or guns are hidden in secret compartments, there might be tools on the back seat. What’s the mileage on the car? Unusually high for a car of that model year? New tires on an old car? A bunch of keys in the ignition, which would be normal—or just one, as if the car was prepared just for the driver? Is there too much luggage for what seems like a short journey? Or too little luggage for what the motorist says is a long journey? The officer in an investigatory stop is instructed to drag things out as long as possible. Where you from? Where are you headed? Chicago? Got family there? Where? He’s looking for stumbles, nervousness, an implausible answer, and whether the driver’s answer matches what he’s seeing. The officer is trying to decide whether to take the next step and search the car.

Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of people with food in their car, air fresheners, high mileage, new tires on an old car, and either too little or too much luggage are not running guns and drugs. But if the police officer is to find that criminal needle in a haystack, he has to fight the rational calculation that most of us make that the world is a pretty honest place.

So what is Brian Encinia? He’s the police officer who does not default to truth. Here’s a day from Brian Encinia’s career, chosen at random: September 11, 2014.

3:52 p.m. The beginning of his shift. He stops a truck driver and tickets him for not having the appropriate reflective tape on his trailer.

4:20 p.m. He stops a woman for an improperly placed license plate.

4:39 p.m. He stops another woman for a license-plate infraction.

4:54 p.m. He notices a driver with an expired registration, stops him, and then also cites him for an expired license.

5:12 p.m. He stops a woman for a minor speeding infraction (that is, less than 10 percent over the speed limit).

5:58 p.m. He stops someone for a major speeding infraction.

He goes on. He stops someone at 6:14 p.m. then at 8:29 p.m. and then ten minutes after that, he stops a woman for noncompliant headlamps, then two more minor speeding tickets over the next half hour. At 10 p.m. a stop for “safety chains,” and then, at the end of his shift, a stop for noncompliant headlamps.

In that list, there is only one glaring infraction—the 5:58 stop for speeding more than 10 percent over the limit. Any police officer would respond to that. But many of the other things Encinia did that day fall under the category of modern, proactive policing. You pull over a truck driver for improper reflective tape, or someone else for “no/improper clearance lamp,” when you are looking for something else—when you are consciously looking, as Remsberg put it, to “go beyond the ticket.” One of the key pieces of advice given to proactive patrol officers to protect them from accusations of bias or racial profiling is that they should be careful to stop everyone. If you’re going to use trivial, trumped-up reasons for pulling someone over, make sure you act that way all the time. “If you’re accused of profiling or pretextual stops, you can bring your daily logbook to court and document that pulling over motorists for ‘stickler’ reasons is part of your customary pattern,” Remsberg writes, “not a glaring exception conveniently dusted off in the defendant’s case.” That’s exactly what Encinia did. He had day after day like September 11, 2014. He got people for improper mud flaps and for not wearing a seat belt and for straddling lanes and for obscure violations of vehicle-light regulations. He popped in and out of his car like a Whac-A-Mole. In just under a year on the job, he wrote 1,557 tickets. In the twenty-six minutes before he stopped Sandra Bland, he stopped three other people.

So: Encinia spots Sandra Bland on the afternoon of July 10. In his deposition given during the subsequent investigation by the Inspector General’s office of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Encinia said he saw Bland run a stop sign as she pulled out of Prairie View University. That’s his curiosity tickler. He can’t pull her over at that point, because the stop sign is on university property. But when she turns onto State Loop 1098, he follows her. He notices she has Illinois license plates. That’s the second curiosity tickler. What’s someone from the other end of the country doing in East Texas?

“I was checking the condition of the vehicle, such as the make, the model, if it had a license plate, any other conditions,” Encinia testified. He was looking for an excuse to pull her over. “Have you accelerated up on vehicles at that speed in the past, to check their condition?” Encinia is asked by his interrogator, Cleve Renfro. “I have, yes sir,” Encinia replies. For him, it’s standard practice.

When Bland sees Encinia in her rearview mirror coming up fast behind her, she moves out of the way to let him pass. But she doesn’t use her turn signal. Bingo! Now Encinia has his justification: Title 7, subtitle C, Section 545.104, part (a) of the Texas Transportation Code, which holds that “An operator shall use the signal authorized by Section 545.106 to indicate an intention to turn, change lanes, or start from a parked position.” (In the event that Bland had used her turn signal at the very last moment, just before she changed lanes, Encinia even had a backup option: part (b) of Section 545.104 holds that “An operator intending to turn a vehicle right or left shall signal continuously for not less than the last 100 feet of movement of the vehicle before the turn.” He could have stopped her for not signaling and he could have stopped her for not signaling enough.)1 Encinia gets out of his squad car and slowly approaches Bland’s Hyundai from the passenger side, leaning in slightly to see if there’s anything of interest in the car. He’s doing the visual pat-down: Anything amiss? Fast-food wrappers on the floor? A felony forest hanging from the rearview mirror? Tools on the back seat? Single key on the key ring? Bland had just driven to Texas from Chicago; of course she had food wrappers on the floor. In the normal course of events, most of us looking in that window would cast our doubts aside. But Brian Encinia is the new breed of police officer. And we have decided that we would rather our leaders and guardians pursue their doubts than dismiss them. Encinia leans in the window, tells her why he pulled her over, and—immediately—his suspicions are raised.

3.

Renfro: OK. After you asked Bland for her driver’s license, you then asked her where she was headed and she replied, “It doesn’t matter.” You wrote in your report, “I knew at this point based on her demeanor that something was wrong.” In his deposition, Encinia is now being questioned by state investigator Cleve Renfro.

Renfro: Explain for the recording what you thought was wrong.

Encinia: …It was an aggressive body language and demeanor. It appeared that she was not okay.

Brian Encinia believed in transparency—that people’s demeanor is a reliable guide to their emotions and character. This is something we teach one another. More precisely, it is something we teach police officers. The world’s most influential training program for law enforcement, for example, is called the Reid Technique. It is used in something like two-thirds of U.S. state police departments—not to mention the FBI and countless other law-enforcement agencies around the world—and the Reid system is based directly on the idea of transparency: it instructs police officers, when dealing with people they do not know, to use demeanor as a guide to judge innocence and guilt.

For example, here is what the Reid training manual says about eye contact: In Western culture, mutual gaze (maintained eye contact) represents openness, candor, and trust. Deceptive suspects generally do not look directly at the investigator; they look down at the floor, over to the side, or up at the ceiling as if to beseech some divine guidance when answering questions.… Truthful suspects, on the other hand, are not defensive in their looks or actions and can easily maintain eye contact with the investigator.

The post–Kansas City textbook, Tactics for Criminal Patrol, instructs officers in police stops to conduct a “concealed interrogation,” based on what they can gather from their initial observation of the suspect.

As you silently analyze their stories, their verbal mannerisms, and their body language for deception cues, you’ll be trying to convince them that suspicion is far from your mind.…The longer you can delay their tumbling to the fact that you are actually appraising them, their vehicle, and their reason for being in transit, the more likely they are to unwittingly provide you with incriminating evidence.

So that is exactly what Encinia does. He notices that she’s stomping her feet, moving them back and forth. So he starts to stretch out their interaction. He asks her how long she has been in Texas. She says, “Got here just yesterday.” His sense of unease mounts. She has Illinois plates. What is she doing in Texas?

Renfro: Did you have safety concerns at that point?

Encinia: I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what was wrong. I didn’t know if a crime was being committed, had been committed, or whatnot.

He returns to his squad car to check her license and registration, and when he looks up and observes Bland through the rear window of her car, he says he sees her “making numerous furtive movements including disappearing from view for an amount of time.” This is a crucial point, and it explains what is otherwise a puzzling fact from the video. Why does Encinia approach Bland’s car from the passenger side the first time around, but from the driver side the second time? It’s because he’s getting worried. As he wrote in his report, “Officer safety training has taught me that it was much easier for a violator to attempt to shoot me on the passenger side of the vehicle.” Renfro: So explain for the recording why you would go from “This is a routine traffic stop with an aggravated person that in your opinion is not being cooperative or she’s agitated,” to your thought process that there’s a possibility that you need to make a driver’s-side approach due to the training on officers being shot.

Encinia: OK. Because when I was still inside the patrol car, I had seen numerous movements to the right, to the console, her right side of her body, that area as well as disappearing from sight.

His immediate thought was Is she reaching for a weapon? So now he approaches with caution.

Encinia: She has untinted glass on her windows so I can be able to see if anything could possibly be in her hands, if she had to turn over her shoulder or not. So that’s why I chose that route… To Encinia’s mind, Bland’s demeanor fits the profile of a potentially dangerous criminal. She’s agitated, jumpy, irritable, confrontational, volatile. He thinks she’s hiding something.

This is dangerously flawed thinking at the best of times. Human beings are not transparent. But when is this kind of thinking most dangerous? When the people we observe are mismatched: when they do not behave the way we expect them to behave. Amanda Knox was mismatched. At the crime scene, as she put on her protective booties, she swiveled her hips and said, “Ta-dah.” Bernie Madoff was mismatched. He was a sociopath dressed up as a mensch.

What is Sandra Bland? She is also mismatched. She looks to Encinia’s eye like a criminal. But she’s not. She’s just upset. In the aftermath of her death, it was revealed that she had had ten previous encounters with police over the course of her adult life, including five traffic stops, which had left her with almost $8,000 in outstanding fines. She had tried to commit suicide the year before, after the loss of a baby. She had numerous cut marks running up and down one of her arms. In one of her weekly “Sandy Speaks” video posts, just a few months before she left for Texas, Bland alluded to her troubles: I apologize. I am sorry, my Kings and Queens. It has been two long weeks. I have been missing in action. But I gotta be honest with you guys. I am suffering from something that some of you all may be dealing with right now.…It’s a little bit of depression as well as PTSD. I’ve been really stressed out these last couple of weeks… So here we have a troubled person with a history of medical and psychiatric issues, trying to pull her life together. She’s moved to a new town. She’s starting a new job. And just as she arrives to begin this new chapter in her life, she’s pulled over by a police officer—repeating a scenario that has left her deeply in debt. And for what? For failing to signal a lane change when a police car is driving up rapidly behind her. All of a sudden her fragile new beginning is cast into doubt. In the three days she spent in jail before taking her own life, Sandra Bland was distraught, weeping constantly, making phone call after phone call. She was in crisis.

But Encinia, with all of the false confidence that believing in transparency gives us, reads her emotionality and volatility as evidence of something sinister.

Renfro asks about the crucial moment—when Encinia requests that Bland put out her cigarette. Why didn’t he just say, “Hey, your cigarette ashes are getting on me”?

Encinia: I wanted to make sure that she had it out without throwing it at me or just get it out of her hand.

Renfro then asks why, if that were the case, he didn’t immediately tell her why she was under arrest.

Encinia: ‘Cause I was trying to defend myself and get her controlled.

He’s terrified of her. And being terrified of a perfectly innocent stranger holding a cigarette is the price you pay for not defaulting to truth.

Renfro: When she tells you, “Let’s do this,” you respond, “We’re going to.” What did you mean by that?

Encinia: I could tell from her actions of leaning over and just she made her hand to me, even being a non-police officer if I see somebody balling fists, that’s going to be confrontational or potential harm to either myself or to another party.

Renfro: Is there a reason why you just didn’t take her down?

Encinia: Yes, sir.

Renfro: Why?

Encinia: She had already swung at me once. There was nothing stopping her from potentially swinging again, potentially disabling me.

Another of the investigators chimes in.

Louis Sanchez: Were you scared?

Encinia: My safety was in jeopardy at more than one time.

And then:

Sanchez: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, so after this occurred, how long was your heart rate up, your adrenaline pumping? When did you calm down after this?

Encinia: Probably on my drive home, which was several hours later.

It was common, in the Bland postmortem, to paint Encinia as an officer without empathy. But that characterization misses the point. Someone without empathy is indifferent to another’s feelings. Encinia is not indifferent to Bland’s feelings. When he approaches her car, one of the first things he says to her is, “What’s wrong?” When he returns to her car after checking her license, he asks again: “Are you okay?” He picks up on her emotional discomfort immediately. It’s just that he completely misinterprets what her feelings mean. He becomes convinced that he is sliding into a frightening confrontation with a dangerous woman.

And what does Tactics for Criminal Patrol instruct the police officer to do under these conditions? “Too many cops today seem afraid to assert control, reluctant to tell anyone what to do. People are allowed to move as they want, to stand where they want, and then officers try to adapt to what the suspect does.” Encinia isn’t going to let that happen.

Brian Encinia’s goal was to go beyond the ticket. And when the situation looked as if it might slip out of his control, he stepped in, firmly. If something went awry that day on the street with Sandra Bland, it wasn’t because Brian Encinia didn’t do what he was trained to do. It was the opposite. It was because he did exactly what he was trained to do.

On August 9, 2014, one year before Sandra Bland died in her cell in Prairie View, Texas, an eighteen-year-old African American man named Michael Brown was shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown had been a suspect in a robbery at a nearby grocery store. When Darren Wilson—the police officer—confronted him, the two men struggled. Brown reached inside the driver’s window of Wilson’s patrol car and punched him. Wilson ended up shooting him six times. Seventeen days of riots followed. Prosecutors declined to press charges against Officer Wilson.

Ferguson was the case that began the strange interlude in American life when the conduct of police officers was suddenly front and center. And it should have served as a warning. The U.S. Department of Justice almost immediately sent a team of investigators to Ferguson—and their report, published six months later, is an extraordinary document. One of the leaders of the DOJ team was a lawyer named Chiraag Bains, and Bains says that what struck him, almost immediately, was that the anger in Ferguson wasn’t just about Brown’s death—or even largely about Brown. It was, instead, about a particular style of policing that had been practiced in the city for years. The Ferguson Police Department was the gold standard of Kansas City policing. It was a place where the entire philosophy of law enforcement was to stop as many people as possible for as many reasons as possible.

“It was very disturbing,” Bains remembers.

One officer said, “It’s all about the courts.” Another said, “Yeah, every month they’ll put up, our supervisors will put on the wall lists of officers and how many tickets they issued that month.” We understood that productivity was the goal.

Ferguson had an entire police department full of Brian Encinias. Bains went on: They knew that their job was to issue tickets and arrest people who hadn’t paid their fines and fees and that’s what they were going to be evaluated on.

Bains said one incident shocked him the most. It involved a young black man who had been playing basketball at a playground. Afterward, he was sitting in his car cooling off when a police car pulled up behind him. The officer approached the driver’s window and demanded to see identification, accusing the driver of being a child molester.

I think [the police officer] said something to the effect like, “There are kids here and you’re at the park, what are you, a pedophile?”…The officer then orders him out of the car and the guy says, “Well, I’m not doing anything. I mean, I have constitutional rights. I’m just sitting here just playing ball.” The officer then actually pulls his gun on the guy and threatening him and insisting that he get out of the car. The way the incident ends is that the officer writes him up for eight different tickets including not having a seatbelt on, he was sitting in his car at the park, not having a license, and also having a suspended license. He managed to issue both charges.

The man even got a ticket for “making a false declaration” because he gave his name as “Mike” when it was actually Michael.

What happens to him is he gets charged with eight offenses in the Ferguson Municipal Code and tries to fight his case. He ends up, he was arrested on that occasion. He ends up losing his job where he was a contractor for the federal government. That arrest really derailed him.

Mike’s arrest is a carbon copy of Sandra Bland’s, isn’t it? A police officer approaches a civilian on the flimsiest of pretexts, looking for a needle in a haystack—with the result that so many innocent people are caught up in the wave of suspicion that trust between police and community is obliterated. That’s what was being protested in the streets of Ferguson: years and years of police officers mistaking a basketball player for a pedophile.2 Is this just about Ferguson, Missouri or Prairie View, Texas? Of course not. Think back to the dramatic increase in traffic stops by the North Carolina State Highway Patrol. In seven years they went from 400,000 to 800,000. Now, is that because in that time period the motorists of North Carolina suddenly started running more red lights, drinking more heavily, and breaking the speed limit more often? Of course not. It’s because the state police changed tactics. They started doing far more haystack searches. They instructed their police officers to disregard their natural inclination to default to truth—and start imagining the worst: that young women coming from job interviews might be armed and dangerous, or young men cooling off after a pickup game might be pedophiles.

How many extra guns and drugs did the North Carolina Highway Patrol find with those 400,000 searches? Seventeen. Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 Mikes and Sandras in order to find 17 bad apples?

When Larry Sherman designed the Kansas City gun experiment, he was well aware of this problem. “You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad gallbladders,” Sherman says. “You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath—“First, do no harm”—applies equally to law enforcement. “I’ve just bought myself a marble bust of Hippocrates to try to emphasize every day when I look at it that we’ve got to minimize the harm of policing,” he went on. “We have to appreciate that everything police do, in some ways, intrudes on somebody’s liberty. And so it’s not just about putting the police in the hot spots. It’s also about having a sweet spot of just enough intrusion on liberty and not an inch—not an iota—more.” That’s why the police officers involved in Sherman’s Kansas City experiment underwent special training. “We knew that proactive policing was a legitimacy risk for the police, and I stressed that repeatedly,” Sherman said.3 Even more crucially, this is why the Kansas City gun experiment was confined to District 144. That’s where the crime was. “We went through the effort of trying to reconstruct where the hot spots were,” Sherman said. In the city’s worst neighborhood, he then drilled down one step further, applying the same fine-grained analysis that he and Weisburd had used in Minneapolis to locate the specific street segments where crime was most concentrated. Patrol officers were then told to focus their energies on those places. Sherman would never have aggressively looked for guns in a neighborhood that wasn’t a war zone.

In District 144, the “Mike and Sandra problem” didn’t go away. But the point of confining the Kansas City gun experiment to the worst parts of the worst neighborhoods was to make the haystack just a little smaller, and to make the inevitable trade-off between fighting crime and harassing innocent people just a little more manageable. In an ordinary community, for the police to be as aggressive as Sherman wanted them to be would be asking for trouble. On the other hand, to people suffering in the 3 or 4 percent of streets where crime is endemic—where there might be as many as 100 or even 200 police calls in a year—coupling theory suggested that the calculus would be different.

You tell the police, ‘Go on the ten streets out of the one hundred in that neighborhood, or out of a thousand in that neighborhood, and spend your time there.’ That’s where things are happening,” Weisburd says. “And if you do that, there’s a good chance the neighborhood will say, ‘Yeah, that intrusion is worthwhile because I don’t want to get shot tomorrow.’” The first question for Brian Encinia is: did he do the right thing? But the second question is just as important: was he in the right place?

Prairie View, Texas, where Sandra Bland was pulled over, is sometimes described as being “outside” Houston, as if it were a suburb. It is not. Houston is fifty miles away. Prairie View is the countryside.

The town is small: no more than a few thousand people, short streets lined with modest ranch homes. The university sits at one end of the main street, FM 1098, which then borders the west edge of the campus. If you drive around the school on the ring road, there is a small Episcopal Church on the left, the college football stadium on the right, and after that lots of pasture land, populated with the occasional horse or cow. Waller County—where Prairie View is located—is predominantly Republican, white, middle- and working-class.

Renfro: OK, talk to me about that area. Is it a high-crime area?

Encinia: That portion of FM 1098 is a high-crime, high-drug area. It’s—with my experience in that area, I have, in similar situations, with what I’ve seen, I’ve come across drugs, weapons, and noncompliant individuals.

Encinia then goes on to tell Renfro that he has made multiple arrests for “warrants, drugs, and numerous weapons, almost [all] within that vicinity.” Encinia’s official record, however, shows nothing of the sort. Between October 1, 2014, and the Sandra Bland incident on July 10 of the following year, he stopped twenty-seven motorists on that mile-long stretch of highway. Six of those were speeding tickets. Those were compulsory stops: we can assume that any reasonably vigilant police officer, even in the pre–Kansas City era, would have done the same. But most of the rest are just Encinia on fishing expeditions. In March 2015 he cited a black male for “failure to drive in a single lane.” Five times he pulled someone over for violating “FMVSS 571.108,” the section of federal vehicle-safety regulations governing turn signals, license-plate lighting, and brake lights. The worst thing on the list are two cases of drunk driving, but let’s keep in mind that this is a road that borders a college campus.

That’s it. FM 1098 is not “a high-crime, high-drug area.” You’d have to go three miles away to Laurie Lane—a half-mile stretch of trailer homes—to find anything in the vicinity that even remotely resembles a hot spot.

“Why are you stopping people in places where there’s no crime?” Weisburd says. “That doesn’t make sense to me.” Sherman is just as horrified. “At that hour of the day in that location, stopping [Sandra Bland] for changing lanes is not justifiable,” he said. Even during the initial Kansas City gun experiment—in a neighborhood a hundred times worse than Prairie View—Sherman said that the special police officers made their stops solely at night. That’s the only time of day when the crime rate was high enough to justify aggressive policing. Sandra Bland was pulled over in the middle of the afternoon.

Brian Encinia may have deliberately exaggerated the dangers of that stretch of road to justify his treatment of Sandra Bland. It seems just as likely, though, that it simply never occurred to him to think about crime as something so tightly tied to place. Literary theorists and bridge engineers and police chiefs struggle with coupling. Why would patrol officers be any different?

So it was that Brian Encinia ended up in a place he should never have been, stopping someone who should never have been stopped, drawing conclusions that should never have been drawn. The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.

This has been a book about a conundrum. We have no choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern, borderless world. We aren’t living in villages anymore. Police officers have to stop people they do not know. Intelligence officers have to deal with deception and uncertainty. Young people want to go to parties explicitly to meet strangers: that’s part of the thrill of romantic discovery. Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can’t. What should we do?

We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger—even if you were in the room—that does not make you a bad parent. And if you are a university president and you do not jump to the worst-case scenario when given a murky report about one of your employees, that doesn’t make you a criminal. To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.

We should also accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers. In the interrogation of KSM, there were two sides. James Mitchell and his colleague Bruce Jessen were driven by the desire to make KSM talk. On the other side, Charles Morgan worried about the cost of forcing people to talk: what if in the act of coercing a prisoner to open up, you damaged his memories and made what he had to say less reliable? Morgan’s more-modest expectations are a good model for the rest of us. There is no perfect mechanism for the CIA to uncover spies in its midst, or for investors to spot schemers and frauds, or for any of the rest of us to peer, clairvoyantly, inside the minds of those we do not know. What is required of us is restraint and humility. We can put up barriers on bridges to make it more difficult for that momentary impulse to become permanent. We can instruct young people that the kind of reckless drinking that takes place at a fraternity party makes the task of reading others all but impossible. There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires care and attention.

I said at the beginning of this book that I was not willing to put the death of Sandra Bland aside. I have now watched the videotape of her encounter with Brian Encinia more times than I can count—and each time I do, I become angrier and angrier over the way the case was “resolved.” It was turned into something much smaller than it really was: a bad police officer and an aggrieved young black woman. That’s not what it was. What went wrong that day on FM 1098 in Prairie View, Texas, was a collective failure. Someone wrote a training manual that foolishly encouraged Brian Encinia to suspect everyone, and he took it to heart. Somebody else higher up in the chain of command at the Texas Highway Patrol misread the evidence and thought it was a good idea to have him and his colleagues conduct Kansas City stops in a low-crime neighborhood. Everyone in his world acted on the presumption that the motorists driving up and down the streets of their corner of Texas could be identified and categorized on the basis of the tone of their voice, fidgety movements, and fast-food wrappers. And behind every one of those ideas are assumptions that too many of us share—and too few of us have ever bothered to reconsider.

Renfro: OK. If Bland had been a white female, would the same thing have occurred?

It’s the end of the deposition. Encinia and his interrogator are still fruitlessly trying to figure out what happened that day.

Encinia: Color doesn’t matter.…We stop vehicles and people for law infractions, not based on any kind of race or gender at all. We stop for violations.

“We stop for violations,” may be the most honest thing said in their entire episode. But instead of asking the obvious follow-up—why do we stop for all violations?—Renfro blunders on.

Renfro: What do you think that someone who’s aggravated is going to do once you ask them, “Are you OK?” And she gives you that type of response, and then you come back with, “Are you done?” I mean, how’s that building on rapport?

Renfro is firm but understanding, like a father chiding a small child for being rude to the dinner guests. The two of them have agreed to frame the tragic death of Sandra Bland as a personal encounter gone awry, and now they are at the stage where Renfro is critiquing Encinia’s table manners.

Encinia: At no point was I ever trying to be discourteous or trying to downplay any of her response. I was just simply asking her if she was done, to make sure she had what she needed out, and that way I could move on with completing the traffic stop and/or identifying what possibly may or may not be in the area.

Renfro: Is it fair to say that she could have possibly taken that as being sarcastic?

Encinia: It is possible, yes, sir. Those were not my intentions.

Oh, so it was her mistake, was it? Apparently, Bland misinterpreted his intonation. If you are blind to the ideas that underlie our mistakes with strangers—and to the institutions and practices that we construct around those ideas—then all you are left with is the personal: the credulous Mountain Climber, the negligent Graham Spanier, the sinister Amanda Knox, the doomed Sylvia Plath. And now Sandra Bland, who—at the end of the lengthy postmortem into that fateful traffic stop on FM 1098—somehow becomes the villain of the story.

Renfro: Did you ever reflect back on your training at that point and think about that you may have stopped a subject that just didn’t like police officers? Did that ever occur to you?

Encinia: Yes sir.…That is a possibility, that she did not like police officers.

Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.