It's dangerous to be black in Texas

Post Reply New Topic

She checked she had tried to commit suicide before which isn't an admission to being currently depressed unless she told them and it wasn't written down. Still, the reason they ask that is to provide services to those at risk and they didn't provide adequate services.

The speed limits are there for public safety. Exceeding them to catch up to someone who didn't signal a lane change is worse than the initial infraction. I know, Eric, the police are better drivers than the rest of us, but it's just not a judicious choice.

I saw the dash cam video of her changing lanes without the turn signal and he was fairly close by. Makes you wonder why she would drive without her turn signal so close to a trooper. When I saw that video, I wondered why she did that with him right there and it was daylight and everything. Maybe she didn't look in her mirrors?

Are you really suggesting that the police should not be able to try to catch up with motorists who are in violation of traffic laws?

And for what it's worth, the police do have somewhat more training in high speed driving than just about anyone on the highway. I've watched them.

Not only that, their cars are usually set up with better packages to handle problems with high speed driving. For example, they will usually have a much better quality of brakes that won't fade nearly as fast as the brakes on a regular car.

My understanding is that during interviews when taken to jail, the jail employees will go through a list of questions that are there to indicate one's mental stability. Pretty much all they have to go by is what they are told and the behavior they see.

I seriously doubt that having tried to commit suicide at some point in the past, especially when unrelated to jails, would be normally considered reason to put them under the most serious observation. I think I remember seeing that her prior suicide attempt was due to the loss of some kind of her baby.

If she had answered in such a way to indicate a really serous problem, for example if she answered that she was intending to commit suicide, then she might have been taken to a psych ward.

It would be very expensive to send everyone arrested to a full blown psychiatric evaluation. If they did that, then there might easily be a backup of days just to get processed into the sysem. That would be absurd.

What people do around police cars can be very strange.

I used to have occasion to drive a police car on occasion in spite of not being an employee of any police department. At the time I was head of R&D for a company that provided certain high tech services to police departments.

One evening years ago, I was driving on a freeway in Houston in a semi-marked police car (the red and blue lights were hidden and it was black and white but with no decals on the door). After I left the freeway, I needed to change lanes on an access road, but there were cars around me who were driving particularly careful because I was there. Some refused to pass me and drove immediately beside me instead. In a regular car, the traffic would have been spread out and I could easily have changed lanes.

I finally had to slow down to let the cars ahead of me pull away. The ones who refused to pass me slowed down as well. Once there was a gap, I was able to speed up to pull ahead of the ones beside me and change lanes (with my turn signal on, of course).

Another time I was driving down the highway going out of town for a long weekend in my personal car. I noticed that nobody had passed me in a while and there were cars lined up beside me. I finally noticed that the radar unit sitting on the passenger seat was turned on (we had a license to use radar in every US state). When I turned it off, the other cars started to pass me, but one or two refused.

On a third occasion I was riding a motorcycle down a remote highway in Texas and came upon a line of about ten cars with a DPS trooper at the front driving about 10 or 15 mph under the limit. I waited until it was safe and passed them all in one pass and continued on my way. Once the people in the cars saw that I wasn't going to get stopped for passing a police car, it looked like every one of them pulled out to pass the police car at the same time.

A local cop a few years ago said that when he's driving anywhere in a police car, he'll run about 5 to 10 mph faster than the surrounding traffic just to avoid having clumps of cars around him afraid to pass.

That isn't strange, it's learned behavior.

If you have ever been ticketed for speeding while driving with the flow of traffic, or observed someone else being ticketed for the same behavior, you learn to consider police enforcement capricious and arbitrary.

With such experience, not passing them, even at legal speeds, isn't strange--it's rational calculation based in observation.

No modification of behavior can protect a motorist from "DWB," so the adaptive behavior is to carefully follow all laws unless an officer orders otherwise. Even if "everyone else" is doing something else--though you may then get a ticket for impeding traffic or some other convenient excuse.

If the police are regarded as an occupying armed force, bent on keeping darker people in their place, the individual may come out of random encounters with them unscathed. Standing up for your "rights" is a recipe for trouble.

The only DWB in this case was her imagination that she was being singled out for being black.

I really am. It's a cost benefit analysis - it's not worth speeding for a failure to signal a lane change.


For some reason this sentence made me smile. I'm sure they are, but it's still not always necessary.

Once the FBI looks at it we will know if it is edited. They will be able to tell

they wont be able to catch anyone then .... so no enforcement of traffic laws ?

Speeding wasn't mentioned in the charges against Bland. There was no reason for him to speed. He just needed to put his lights on.
By using the term "catch" you presume flight, but this is not in the evidence. Speeding in this case wasn't necessary and indicates his anxious mental state.

And to answer your question, it depends on the infraction. Obviously if someone is speeding, the police would have to as well.

The last time I was stopped, it was for no front plate. The Texas DPS trooper had to go about 1/4 mile past where he saw me to a cross over on a four lane divided highway (Texas Highway 287) and then catch back up to me. By the he got turned around, I was at least half a mile ahead of him. Even though I wasn't speeding, there was no possible way he could catch up to me without speeding. At at that distance ahead of him, if he drove the speed limit that far behind me, I probably would have no idea that I was the one he was trying to stop.

Police are very definitely permitted to speed to catch up with someone they intend to pull over.

Are you white? Because I'm thinking that might have ended badly if you're black.

Precisely why do you make that assumption?

Because you could just have easily been accused of fleeing. If you are black, then it's encouraging that things didn't escalate.