now bent over, arms inside Bland’s vehicle, tugging at her.
Bland: Let’s do this.
Encinia: Yeah, we’re going to. [Grabs for Bland.]
On the tape there’s the sound of a slap, and then a cry from Bland, as if she’s been hit.
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 [To dispatch]: 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! [Draws stun gun and points it at Bland.]
Bland: Wow. Wow. [Bland exits car.]
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: [Cries.] 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.
2.
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