I don't need Sandra Bland's death to have been a murder. There's still the question of 'justice'.

I will assume, till there is evidence otherwise, that it was a suicide. I understand why some people smell foul play. There is precedent. I'm certainly not ruling it out myself, but I won't assume it. I'll assume it was a straight up suicide. Fine. The whole damn tragedy is still unacceptable to me. That cop whipped around and followed her, BEFORE there was a lane change. He allegedly closed behind her at a high rate of speed, causing her to change lanes. Forgot her turn signal? Really? If this was a sport, that would be a Forced Error in baseball, tennis, chess, etc. The officer didn't observe Sandra doing anything, until after he interacted with her, and that interaction altered her behavior. When she moved, the movement that led to the alleged infraction was induced by his presence. If he was willing to gloat that he'd have let her go with a warning later, then we already know beyond a shadow of a doubt the attempt to ticket and go beyond that point was unjustifiable. He should have just given her a warning, at most. Not a ticket, a warning. He admitted it. But he was not there to investigate or deal with a turn signal infraction, he was fishing for more. In this case, a 'bad attitude' is sufficiently 'more'. Looks to me like a little bit power trip, a little bit attempting to build probable cause for the profiling-based decision he made when he first spotted her and decided to follow. And how oh-so-convenient the officer led her out of the field of view of his dash cam after coercing her out of the car. 'For safety', no doubt.

People make errors under stress. I'm a nearing-middle-age white guy, and *I* react when an officer pulls in behind me. I know my pulse spikes, adrenaline surges. And that's knowing that, statistically, I'm least likely to be profiled, to be arrested, to be convicted, etc. Doesn't matter. I know the police lie to people. It's allowed. I know the police use drug dogs to fabricate probable cause because the dogs will 'alert' based on their handlers biases. I know I have easy access to a lawyer. I know I'm less likely to be viewed as a threat to the officer and mistakenly shot while being arrested. I know that a traffic court judge is likely to be a white male. I know that if it somehow gets to a jury, I'm likely to GET an actual jury of my racial and economic peers, and I know that that racial jury makeup bodes well for me being found not guilty. All those decks stacked in my favor, still I react when I see a cop. I know my local police department (Seattle) has a Consent Decree with the US DoJ for oversight, because they got just a little too carried away beating the shit out of people for years, and that just won't be tolerated much longer if people keep noticing. Over in New York they have one too. In today's day and age, a police department made of adults with presumably at least high school graduates with at least one semester in Civics had to be told that it's not acceptable to just stop every brown skinned male and search their body. They had to be FORCED to stop it. The mayor and police departments challenged the ruling! Hell, they have two more, one for monitoring Muslims, and another for filming protestors. And there are at least 3 more major metropolitan police departments around the country under similar DoJ oversight.

I know that we would never have heard of Sandra Bland if she wasn't dead. It probably happens thousands of times a day. We never hear those stories. It doesn't filter up to the level of the public consciousness/awareness. Someone has to *die* in custody for anyone to notice. For anyone to realize that something is amiss.

I don't know how she died. It's not a stretch to imagine a level of total despair, the way she was treated in that video, yanked from her car, from her life, thrown in a cage for three days, the way people are treated by the police on average, the way minorities are treated in particular. To be caged and told you're going to court for 'assaulting an officer'. A charge fabricated out of blue sky after, AFTER any point when the officer should have ended contact with Sandra. The despair and doom that comes with that, the fucking Kafkaesque horror of being caught in a system designed to punish people? Horrible. Hell, 'horrible' doesn't even do it justice. 'Horrible' is optimistic.

But even if she took her own life, even if she wasn't 'killed' in the sense of someone wrapping fingers around her throat, or holding her up and tying her by the neck to the ceiling, even if that case... They still killed her. Humans do not do well in captivity. Put them in cages at your peril. Some percentage break. There was no reason to put her through that horror, to cage her, take away her freedom, take her away from family, friends, her means of making a living, her life for three days... Throwing me in a box for three days, that would fuck me up. I don't know anyone who wouldn't be battling against extreme duress under that condition. She might as well have been randomly abducted by violent thugs from her perspective. If that happened to me, I'd be all kinds of fucked up, even WITH my privileged view of the world that suggests that eventually, due process would free me if I only play along.

Those of you that know me, know that I'm an atheist. Or if you don't know me, you can guess by my username. I've never held truck with the Pledge of Allegiance in my life. Not once, for reasons you can guess. But I've added a reason to my list. Liberty and Justice for all is not a thing we have achieved. It should be a lament. A reminder just how insanely far we have yet to go. One more reason it's a fantasy, a lie, an abdication of reason to recite it as if it means anything at all. I don't know how anyone can look around at society today, and think there's even a grain of truth in it.

I don't know if Sandra Bland's death was a murder in the classic sense or a suicide, and I don't think we'll ever satisfactorily know and doubtful everyone will ever agree anyway, (and it actually doesn't matter which it was) but I know this; there wasn't and won't be any justice for her. Not really. If we work really hard, maybe we can build a society with law enforcement that doesn't create these situations in the first place. That would in some small way honor her life, but it's still not Justice. We've already failed.