AUSTIN, Tex. — [For more about police violence and unrest, go here] Sandra Bland had just driven in from Illinois to start a new job in Texas when a state trooper pulled her over for failing to signal a lane change. As the exchange grew angry and the officer pulled out a stun gun, she recorded a 39-second cellphone video whose public broadcast this week has prompted calls for a renewed investigation into her arrest and death nearly four years ago. Ms. Bland, a 28-year-old African-American from the Chicago area, was taken into custody in southeast Texas following the confrontational 2015 traffic stop and was found hanging in a jail cell three days later in what was officially ruled a suicide. The case, which drew international attention, intensified outrage over the treatment of black people by white police officers and was considered a turning point in the Black Lives Matter movement. [The Death of Sandra Bland: Is There Anything Left to Investigate?] The video surfaced for the first time publicly Monday night in an investigative report on the Dallas television station WFAA that included interviews with Ms. Bland’s family and supporters, who accused officials of concealing information that they said should have been made public early in the investigation.<doc-sep>Video from the vantage point of Sandra Bland, the black woman found dead in a Texas jail cell in 2015 after she was arrested during a traffic stop, was made public Monday night. The clip, which aired on the Dallas station WFAA, was obtained with the help of the Investigative Network, a nonprofit news organization. Bland's family and state authorities disagree about whether the video, shot by Bland, 28, on her cellphone during the traffic stop, was available during litigation. Bland, from suburban Chicago, was arrested for allegedly becoming confrontational when she was stopped that day in July 2015 for failing to use her turn signal. She was driving in Waller County, Texas, near her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University, where she was due to start a job as a college outreach officer. She was found hanging in a county jail cell three days later, and her death was ruled a suicide. Download the NBC News app for breaking news and politics Bland's death and dashcam videos showing Trooper Brian Encinia trying to pull her out of her car during the stop heightened tensions around police treatment of black people. In the 39-second video that aired Monday, Bland asks Encinia, "Why am I being apprehended?" as she tries to direct her phone's camera at him. By the time she does get the camera to focus on him, Encinia is pointing a stun gun at her. "Get out of the car. I will light you up," Encinia says. "Wow, wow, wow. You’re doing all this for a failure to signal?" Bland asks. Sandra Bland NBC News Encinia then orders Bland to get off her phone, to which she answers: "I’m not on the phone. I have a right to record. This is my property." The video ends seconds later. Bland's sister, Sharon Cooper, said that after watching the tape, it was clear to her that the video revealed contradictions between what transpired and the police report. "What it does, without a shadow of a doubt, validate is that Brian Encinida's behavior in the field, his lack of judgment and his inability to really de-escalate a situation was what was the impetus behind why she was detained and ultimately why she died in police custody," Cooper told NBC News. Cannon Lambert, who represented Bland's family in lawsuits against the state and county jail that were settled for almost $2 million in total, told The Associated Press he hadn't seen the clip until recently. The video wasn't a part of evidence turned over by investigators, he said. "It is troubling that a crucial piece of evidence was withheld from Sandra Bland's family and legal team in their pursuit of justice," said Democratic state Rep. Garnet Coleman, who sponsored a police reform bill named after Bland that her family later criticized as watered down before it was signed into law. "The illegal withholding of evidence by one side from the other destroys our legal system's ability to produce fair and just outcomes," Coleman said. Presidential candidates Julián Castro, Pete Buttigieg and Beto O'Rourke all called for a renewed investigation in light of the video. "This video is compelling proof that Trooper Encinia lied, that Sandra Bland posed no threat, and that there was no basis for her arrest. This case should be reopened and justice should finally be served," Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio, wrote on Twitter. The Texas Department of Public Safety said in a statement to NBC News that Bland's cellphone video "is not newly discovered evidence." "The video recording from Ms. Bland’s cellphone was specifically identified multiple times in the Ranger Report of Investigation. The Ranger report was made available to all the litigants during the civil litigation filed by her family," the department said. Former Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia. Waller County Sheriff's Office via AP A spokesperson for the department also provided documentation that showed the video was also released to Brian Collister, the Investigative Network journalist who reported Monday's story, in 2017 under an open records law. At the time he made the request for the video, he was working for Austin television station KXAN. Collister told NBC News that his editor at KXAN had deemed the video "not newsworthy" when he obtained it in 2017. When he left the station the next year and founded the Investigative Network, he was planning to use the cellphone video as part of a documentary on racial profiling by Texas troopers, Collister said. But after Bland's family and their attorneys told him they had never seen the video, he decided it warranted a separate story. Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis countered in a statement that there "is no 'new evidence' that would justify reopening the Sandra Bland case." "The video making the rounds of social media and the news has been part of the investigation back to 2015," Mathis said. "I have no reason to doubt that the original five outside special prosecutors or the grand jury that considered the facts and circumstances surrounding Ms. Bland’s arrest, subsequent incarceration and untimely death should be second guessed." Encinia was charged with perjury for writing in an affidavit that Bland had been "combative and uncooperative" during the incident and fired from the Texas Department of Public Safety. His attorney, Chip Lewis, also said Bland's cellphone footage was made available during the criminal case. The single misdemeanor perjury charge against Encinia was dropped after he agreed to never work in law enforcement again.<doc-sep>A new video that has emerged this week is raising new questions about the fate of Sandra Bland, a black woman whose death in a Texas jail cell following a July 2015 traffic stop sparked national Black Lives Matter protests, and added fuel to ongoing discussions about the ways black men and women are treated by police officers. Bland, a 28-year-old woman who had recently moved to Texas from Illinois, recorded the 39-second video on her cell phone after she was stopped for a traffic violation on July 10, 2015. The video had never been released publicly until May 6, when it was reported on by Dallas’s WFAA news station and posted online by a journalism nonprofit called the Investigative Network. The video begins with Texas state trooper Brian Encinia yelling at Bland to get out of her car as he points a stun gun at her. When Bland asks the officer to explain why she is being treated so aggressively, Encinia continues to demand that she get out of the car. “I will light you up!” Encinia yells while holding the stun gun. “Wow, you’re doing all of this for a failure to signal?” Bland responds. When she leaves the vehicle, Encinia then demands that she put down her phone, as Bland counters that she has a right to record. The video ends with Bland appearing to end the recording. Encinia claimed that he feared for his safety during the encounter, initially saying that he ordered Bland out of her car because he worried she would reach for something. Bland was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer; Encinia claimed that Bland kicked him, but the encounter was not captured on video. Bland was found dead in a Waller County jail cell three days later, and authorities ruled that she died by suicide, a finding that continues to be disputed by Bland’s family and some activists. Encinia was later charged with perjury for allegedly lying about the reason why he ordered Bland out of her car. Bland’s death, which came in the first years of the growing Black Lives Matter Movement, drew national attention, and racial justice advocates argued that her death highlighted the ways that black women are exposed to police violence. For Bland’s family, the video has spurred new questions and a desire for a new investigation, and the family says that the footage proves that Bland was not posing a threat to the officer as she sat in her car. “Open up the case, period,” Shante Needham, Sandra Bland’s sister, told WFAA after seeing the video. The new cellphone video raises questions about what information was released after Bland’s death Prior to Monday, the only known full video of Bland’s arrest was a dashcam video from Encinia’s vehicle that was released days after Bland’s death. But the discovery of the video recorded by Bland has fueled questions of whether there’s more evidence that has not been disclosed. In the days after Bland’s death, Encinia’s report of the traffic stop, and his claims that his “safety was in jeopardy at more than one time,” largely shaped how police approached their initial investigation. Attorneys who formerly represented Bland’s family say that they were not given access to the cellphone video that countered Encinia’s claims, video that they say would have been useful in the family’s civil lawsuit against the Texas Department of Public Safety and the 2016 perjury case against the officer. “If the video showed that he had no basis of being in fear of his safety, and he lied about that, then you would think they would be using that video,” Bland family attorney Cannon Lambert told the New York Times on Tuesday. Encinia was the only person to stand trial in connection to Bland’s death; none of the guards at the jail faced charges. Because grand jury records remain sealed, it is unclear if a grand jury was ever shown Bland’s cellphone video. Local authorities counter that the video was given to the family as part of the discovery process in their civil case. But the family maintains that they never received the video, and were still unaware of its existence when they settled a wrongful death lawsuit for $1.9 million in 2016. WFAA notes that the cellphone video was mentioned in an investigative report looking into Bland’s death but that the reference to the video comes 60 pages into the document. In 2017, the perjury case against Encinia was dropped after he agreed to never work in law enforcement again. That same year, the Texas legislature passed the Sandra Bland Act, which included new guidance for how officers should avoid escalating police stops, guidance around diverting people who are in need of mental health services away from county jails, and required that an independent law enforcement agency investigate local jail deaths. Bland’s cellphone video isn’t the first time important details about a high-profile police incident came to light years later The release of new footage has reignited the controversy over Bland’s arrest, leading local politicians and Texas-based presidential candidates like Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro to call for a new investigation into Bland’s case. But the fact that it took nearly four years for the footage to come out also fits into a larger conversation about what information is—and is not—released in the wake of controversial incidents involving police officers and black citizens. Bland’s cellphone video is just the latest to raise questions about this. Fact that never before seen evidence/videos/docs only become public years later in even the most high profile cases -Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland- underscores need for deep skepticism about police narratives of every use of force incident https://t.co/UuXdkc2vLW — Wesley (@WesleyLowery) May 7, 2019 The woman who said Emmett Till came onto her lied about what he said. The officer who killed Oscar Grant lied about what he did. The police withheld video of Sandra Bland that tells a different story. There’s a long history of black ppl being killed based on someone else’s lie. — Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) May 7, 2019<doc-sep>Officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety denied those claims and say the cellphone video was included in a large batch of evidence given to the Bland family’s attorneys. “The premise that the video was not produced as a part of the discovery process is wrong,” the department told the ABC affiliate in a statement. “A hard drive containing copies of 820 Gigabytes of data compiled by DPS from its investigation, including the dash cam videos, jail video footage and data from Sandra Bland’s cellphone, was part of discovery.”<doc-sep>
The family of Sandra Bland has called for renewed investigation into her death after Dallas television station WFAA released previously unseen cellphone footage of the 2015 traffic stop that preceded her death, the New York Times reports. What's new: Bland filmed the traffic stop on her cellphone. The footage shows former Texas state trooper Brian Encinia yelling at Bland to "get out of the car" before he brandished a taser and said "I will light you up!" "What the video shows is that Encinia had no reason to be in fear of his safety," Bland family attorney Cannon Lambert told the NYT. "The video shows that he wasn't in fear of his safety. You could see that it was a cellphone, he was looking right at it." What they're saying: Bland family attorney Cannon Lambert says Bland's footage was not shown to him as evidence during the family's lawsuit against the Texas Department of Public Safety and Waller County, per the Washington Post. to him as evidence during the family's lawsuit against the Texas Department of Public Safety and Waller County, per the Washington Post. Texas department officials say they provided the footage to Lambert: "The premise that the video was not produced as a part of the discovery process is wrong ... A hard drive containing copies of 820 Gigabytes of data compiled by DPS from its investigation, including the dashcam videos, jail video footage and data from Sandra Bland's cell phone, was part of discovery." Background: Bland, an African-American woman from Chicago, was found dead in her jail cell 3 days after a traffic stop in 2015. Her death was officially ruled a suicide but her family protested that conclusion, saying she would have not tried to kill herself. Charges against Encinia were ultimately dropped in exchange for him promising to leave law enforcement, the NYT notes. The bottom line: Bland's death was a catalyst for nationwide protests against police brutality and police misconduct, which many protesters believed to be causes of her death. Those protests were led largely by Black Lives Matter, which later incorporated Bland's death into the #SayHerName movement. Go deeper ... Watch "Say Her Name: The Life and Death Of Sandra Bland" on HBO