Officials grilled over Bland video access
State authorities dispute withholding cellphone footage
State officials on Friday pushed back on allegations that they withheld newly released cellphone video of the arrest of Sandra Bland, a black woman who died in a Waller County jail cell several days after the escalation of a traffic stop.
Leaders from the Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas Attorney General’s Office avowed during a Texas House committee meeting that attorneys representing Bland’s family received the video during a civil litigation discovery process.
The authorities who spoke at the meeting suggested that the opposing lawyers never saw — or couldn’t find — the video among what they obtained from state agencies. Nichole Bunker Henderson, associate deputy attorney general for civil litigation, said that a thumb drive provided to the attorneys wasn’t sorted with a table of contents.
“We are conceding that it was not indexed,” she said.
Officials on the committee referred to statements made by Chicago-based lawyer Cannon Lambert, who represented Bland’s mother, saying that he never saw the 2015 traffic stop as represented in Bland’s phone. The 28-yearold’s arrest and death became a national issue, making her a face of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Democratic state Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, chair of the County Affairs committee, accused two DPS officials at the hearing of either not personally sending him the video, or hiding it in a “data dump” of files.
The cellphone video made it clear that the trooper who stopped Bland wasn’t in fear of his life before making threats, said Coleman, who carried the criminal justice reform “Sandra Bland Act” to law in 2017.
“Seeing the video really makes one think differently about what actually occurred,” he said. “It shows a very different scenario.”
DPS officials repeatedly answered that they provided Coleman with a “Ranger Report” that described the footage extracted from Bland’s phone.
“You got it,” DPS Director Steve McCraw said during a tense moment.
DPS general counsel Phillip Adkins said that the agency gave the video to Lambert the same year as the incident. The attorney couldn’t be reached for comment on Friday.
Bland’s mother, Geneva Reed-Veal, attended the committee meeting but did not testify.
The 39-second recording was published this month by Dallas television station WFAA in partnership with the nonprofit Investigative Network, showing for the first time Bland’s perspective of the confrontation.
The cellphone video offered another perspective from what was visible in dashboard camera footage. Bland’s video showed the state trooper pointing a stun gun at her, ordering her out of the vehicle and saying, “I will light you up.”
Bland was found hanging in her jail cell northwest of Houston three days after her arrest. Her death was ruled a suicide. Waller County officials would not comment on Bland’s mental state when she arrived at jail. They insisted the standard entry evaluations and any additional medical services she received were private.
The trooper who stopped Bland, Brian Encinia, was indicted on a perjury charge in 2016. That charge was dropped when Encinia agreed to turn over his police credentials and sign a sworn statement promising not to work as a licensed peace officer again.
Reed-Veal’s attorney settled the civil lawsuit for a total of $1.9 million, recovering the maximum possible amount from the Department of Public Safety.
During Friday’s hearing, Coleman asked DPS and Attorney General officials to turn over everything they had on the case. After two hours, he ended the hearing because of a lack of time.
“Quite frankly, we still have some progress to make,” he said. “We’ll have to do another hearing, y’all.”