more tickets for a license infraction and having an open container of alcohol in his vehicle.
8:29 p.m. He stops a man for “no/improper ID lamp” and “no/improper clearance lamp.”
It goes on. Ten minutes later, 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