Sandra Bland was driving through Waller County on July 10 2015 and was pulled over by then DPS Trooper for making a lane changes without properly signaling.
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“All I can say is today was the first time I heard they had that training, and it seems like to me when we insisted on that as part of the settlement if they had it they would’ve said it”, Rhodes said in an interview after the hearing.
Citing confidentiality restrictions, Rhodes said he couldn’t provide many details about the settlement discussions but he indicated he had reached a deal on the de-escalation training with DPS’ general counsel.
Bland’s family had sued Waller County, where Bland was jailed, and Texas DPS.
The job of all troopers, McCraw said, “is to treat everyone with dignity and respect”. Bland was taken to the Waller County Jail that day and was found dead in her cell on July 13.
Later, McCraw and Coleman exchanged heated words over whether troopers are too quick to use what Coleman called “a command voice” to demonstrate that they are in charge of a given situation.
The decision comes after the newspaper reviewed 14 million DPS records from 2009 to 2015, finding that Hispanic motorists were 33 percent more likely to be searched than white drivers and black motorists were more than twice as likely to be searched than white drivers. During Tuesday’s committee hearing, Baumgartner testified that his analysis showed that the racial disparities in DPS searches were so persistent that they couldn’t be “explained away” by any of the data points that DPS has publicly released or the explanations put forward by the agency for why blacks and Hispanics are searched more often.
Coleman countered that explanation did not “pass muster” because it did nothing to dispel the disparity among black drivers stopped and searched by DPS. “There’s no other agency that holds its people more accountable than the DPS”. “What you’re delving into here really is a national problem, a national issue that concerns all Americans everywhere”.
When pressed by state Rep.
“I can’t answer that”.
“Clearly we focus on, not on racial profiling, but we profile based on behavior”.
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“What evidence would be enough to constitute racial profiling?”
