Newly Released Arrest Video Recorded By Sandra Bland Emerges

AUSTIN, TX — New cell phone footage recorded by Sandra Bland — whose violent police arrest galvanized the black community in calling for police accountability after she was died in jail —has prompted new calls to reopen the investigation.

Four years after Bland's death at the age of 28, cell phone video she personally recorded during her July 2015 arrest over a minor traffic infraction emerged on Monday. Few knew that Bland had recorded her arrest as an officer shouted commands at her to exit the vehicle — including, reportedly, her own family members who are now calling for the case in which she played a tragic, central role be reopened.

Showing the arrest from her own perspective, the video sheds new light into the incident while casting further doubt on the now-ex officer's claims he feared for his life when he threatened Bland with a stun gun at close range before she complied with his commands to exit the vehicle. “Get out of the car!” former state trooper Brian Encinia snarled at Bland as seen on widely seen police dashcam footage that did emerge in the more immediate aftermath of the incident. "I will light you up!" he shouted at Bland, who calmly reminded him of her right to videotape him.

Related story: Texas Senate Passes Stripped-Down 'Sandra Bland Act' Setting Police Detention Guidelines

Bland, who had traveled to Texas to start a job at Texas A&M University, would be found dead in her jail cell three days after being arrested, police categorizing her death as self-inflicted asphyxiation. She was 28 years old.

Photo of Sandra Bland via GoFundMe, a Patch promotional partner.

The release of Bland's video this week lends more nuance to the incident, while casting doubt on the official account of the woman's arrest. And as Columbia Journalism Review reports, the case-bending footage has come to light in what began as a simple formal request of law enforcement officials for its release by an Austin-based reporter.

Brian Collister was an investigative reporter for Austin NBC affiliate KXAN in June 2017 when he started to cover the Bland case, as CJR reports. After each open case surrounding the incident had wrapped up, he filed an open records request with the Austin-headquartered Texas Department of Public Safety for the cell phone footage, according to the report.

“When a huge story happens like this, you can’t get records usually until all civil and legal cases are closed,” Collister told CJR. “So, mark your calendar with monthly reminders to check status. When all is closed, fire off open records requests for everything and you may get a great scoop.”

Despite the explosive nature of Bland's video, his employer at the time inexplicably didn't air the footage: “I showed it to my news director at the time at KXAN and he didn’t think it was newsworthy at the time,” the journalist told CJR. He would end up leaving KXAN shortly afterwards, but not before filing a second request for the video while leaving the first copy with his former employer.

Collister, now running a non-profit news organization called the Investigative Network — a startup he has dubbed "the ProPublica of video that licenses its investigative journalism to news organizations — released the cell phone video this week to WFAA in Dallas. At last check, it's garnered some 1.2 million views on YouTube.

“Literally if you’ve seen that clip you feel like you’re looking at this guy through her own eyeball,” Collister told CJR of the 39-second clip he secured in the normal course of a journalist's work.

The emergence of Bland's phone footage has already sparked reaction from the various parties involved, according to numerous reports — from DPS denials the cell phone footage was kept secret to KXAN's questioning their former reporter's recollection of events into the news value they placed on the material he secured:

• In a statement to the AP, the DPS claimed the footage was provided in a hard drive to Bland's family members. What's more, officials told CJR, the video was released to a television station in 2017, although they declined to say whether the recipient was KXAN.
• As for KXAN, officials there dispute Collister's account into how the news station handled acquisition of the video. “We directed Brian to work toward a story with the video, but it did not come to fruition before his employment ended in January 2018,” KXAN Vice President and General Manager Eric Lassberg wrote CJR in a prepared statement. “The station does not have possession of the video.”

CJR noted that KXAN joined in on covering the story of Bland's video — as numerous media outlets have since done since its emergence — without once mentioning the central role Collister played in securing it.

Encinia, the former state trooper who arrested Bland, has since been fired, a charge of perjury against him dropped under the condition he never work in law enforcement again. Bland's still-grieving family members continue to have lingering questions surrounding her death four years later, longing for answers into what really happened in the course of those three searing days of a July Texas summer four years ago. The uprising of protests throughout the country sparked from Bland's arrest and death have long since been quelled, and multiple court cases surrounding Bland's case have long concluded.

But in many ways, the case has now been effectively reopened given the emergence of Bland's video. And it took a simple request from a journalist to re-frame the grim narrative through Bland's own eyes.

From an HBO documentary titled "Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland."

>>> Read the full story at Columbia Journalism Review