The Curious Death of Sandra Bland w/Malcolm Gladwell | Joe Rogan

The Sandra Bland case, how does that one fit in? Because that one, that girl was pulled over. The cop was, she, it was failure to signal, right? Yeah, I mean it's a bullshit thing. It's a bullshit thing. And she started lighting a cigarette. He told her to put the cigarette out and it all escalated from that. She said she doesn't have to put the cigarette out. And then he says he's gonna light her up. He's screaming at her. He pulls her out of the car. He arrests her. And then is there controversy about whether or not she committed suicide in jail? There is. I don't get into that. Okay. Because it seemed, that seemed unlikely. That she was killed. That she was supposed to commit suicide. Yes, it seemed likely that she was killed versus that she committed suicide. I didn't think that someone would commit suicide being in jail for three days. Especially one of the things that you highlighted in the book and you actually played in the audio version of it. Her little sort of affirmations, you know, and she sounded very positive and upbeat and calling everybody kings and queens. And it was thanking God and being very thankful and being aware of life and humility and just graciousness and gratitude. It didn't seem, I mean obviously you don't know what kind of dark things can happen to a person when they're incarcerated for three days for a bullshit reason. Maybe that's the straw that broke the camel's back. She did have, you know, she had a complicated emotional history. She had previously tried to commit suicide. And she had, she was emerging from quite a difficult period in her life and went to Texas to start a new leaf. And so there is an interpretation. Like I said, I don't really have strong feelings on this particular part of the story, but there's an interpretation that says, here's a woman who's emerged from a very difficult period in her life, goes, leaves, she was in Illinois. She drives half across the country to start over. And on the first day that she arrives in Texas to start over, she gets pulled over by a cop. And by the way, she had thousands of dollars in outstanding tickets. So she had a history of this bullshit stuff with cops where, you know, the same trap that many poor people in this country get into, which is they get, the police use people as an ATM, right? They like set them off for untrivial things. And when they can't pay the fine, they get another fine. And when, you know, how that goes, she was part of in that trap. So here she is trying to start over after difficult time. The first day she gets to Texas, she gets pulled over again and she, in her mind, it's the same. She's like, oh my God, I tried to start over and I can't. And then she's in jail and she can't make bail. And, you know, there's a scenario where you can see that she just began to despair. Don't they take away your shoelaces and do- Small town, Texas. Yeah. Are they doing things by the book? I mean, I find the whole thing about, I went to that town when I was reporting the book and, you know, it's kind of hard to be, to kill someone and get away with it, requires a level of expertise and forethought that struck me was not present in that little town in Texas. I mean- A serious amount. It's just not, they're not like, they're not thinking, these are not people playing chess, right? I think they just encountered it with this cop and he's not very good at his job. And he gets way over his head and he completely misreads her and he pulls her off to jail, probably deeply regrets the whole incident. And they're all embarrassed and sitting around and hoping it'll just all go away. And meanwhile, she's all alone in a prison cell spiraling deeper and deeper into depression. I mean, I think it's almost more tragic- That she commits suicide? That she commits suicide. It's insane that you can keep someone in jail for three days for failure to signal. It seems like there should have been an initial review of the circumstances that led to her getting pulled out of the car in the first place and the cop should have been fired immediately. You're screaming at her because she lit a cigarette? Yeah. In her own car? Meanwhile, this is fascinating and I feel like, I don't know, you and I are probably the same age. There's this, so the cop's 29. If you grew up with cigarettes, you have a different understanding of the meaning of lighting a cigarette. So what's happening in the encounter is, he pulls her over. What he does is he sees her coming out of this university campus. And while she's still on campus property, she rolls through a stop sign. And then he notices that she's got out of state plates and she's a young black woman and she's driving a Hyundai, like not a Mercedes Benz. And he thinks, huh, I'm gonna check this out. So she pulls onto the road and he drives up behind her aggressively. He speeds up behind her. So what does she do? Well, what any of us would do, she gets out of the way, thinking, oh, he's going to the scene of an accident or something, I better get out of his way. She pulls over to get out of his way and he goes, oh, he didn't use your turning signal. And he pulls her over and pulls him behind her. Now, by the way, whenever I hear a fire department truck or a police car coming and I pull over to get out of the way, I do not use my turning signal. You just get out of the way, it's reflexive. So her immediate thought is what he does is like, oh, this is bullshit and he tricked me. And he knows what he's doing. That's exactly what he wanted. He wanted to get her in a situation because it's all a pretext. He just wants, he thinks, oh, maybe there's something weird with her. So then he, we have this all on tape, of course, because this is one of those incidents that was captured entirely on the dash cam, the officer's dash cam. He goes up to the window and he says, he looks at her and he realizes she's agitated. Why? Because she's pissed off. And he goes, ma'am, is there something wrong? And she's like, well, you know, I want to know why I'm pulled over, blah, blah, blah. And then he goes back to his car and he comes back to her. And he later says in the deposition that when he goes back to his vehicle to check on her license and registration, he begins to develop suspicions that she's up to no good, she's got drugs or guns. And so she comes back and they commence to have this increasingly heated conversation. And she lights the cigarette because she's trying to calm herself down. And this is my point. You and I, who grew up in an era where people smoked all the time, know that one of the principal functions of lighting a cigarette was to calm your nerves. And in her mind, I think, in her mind she's trying to signal to the cop, let's deescalate this. And one of the ways I'm going to show you that I want to deescalate this is I'm going to take a moment and light a cigarette and just take it down a notch. And let's have a real conversation. He doesn't understand the meaning of that gesture. And he thinks, oh, she thinks several things. He thinks, one, she's messing with me. She's defying my authority by lighting a cigarette. She's going to blow smoke in my face or something nefarious. Or she's going to like take the lighted cigarette and put it out on my, he has all these kind of weird, crazy fantasies. This is what he said? In a deposition. Oh yeah. So even on the level, I try and identify in the book all of the different ways. And when I come back to the case at the end of the book, I go through this in more detail, all the different ways in which he completely misunderstands her. And one of them is he doesn't understand the meaning of lighting a cigarette in a moment of tension. And that's still more evidence why you need, if you're a cop or anyone dealing with a stranger, you need to slow down and not jump to any conclusions because there's so much you can miss. What it seemed to me when I listened to it initially and then I listened to it again in your audio book, there's a thing that happens with police officers. I've never been a police officer, but I was a security guard for a brief period of time. And I recognized it in myself. And I recognized it in a lot of people that I work with. Is that you start treating the other people like the other, like it's us and them. It was us, I worked at Great Woods. It's a performance center in Mansfield, Massachusetts, like this. And we would catch a lot of people smuggling booze in, things like that. And there was an attitude that you got, and I was only there for one summer, but there was an attitude of they were the bad people. And you were the good guys. It was us and them. And we stuck together and they weren't us. And cops get that a hundred times worse because there's guns involved and they can get shot at. We've all seen videos of cops pulling people over and he says, can I see your hands please? And the guy pulls out a gun and shoots at them. We've all seen those videos. This is always in the back of the mind of cops. And I think that was just a guy who, as you said, 29 years old, he's a young guy. Not that bright, not good at communication. And he is this attitude that he's a cop and that you have to listen to the cops because he's them and you're you. And that's like when he's telling her to put the cigarette out and she's saying, I don't have to do that. And he's saying, get out of your vehicle. And she's saying, I don't have to do that. And then he's screaming at her. I mean, that's all right there. I mean, that's what it seems like to me. He wants compliance. He wants her to listen. He does. Yeah, he does one. It's funny, what's remarkable about that tape, which I must have seen 50 times, and which has been viewed on YouTube even a couple of million times, is how quickly it escalates. The whole thing is, it's insanely short. You would think, if I was telling you the story of this, you would think, oh, this unfolds over 10 minutes. And it doesn't, it unfolds over a minute and a half. And that, I remember years ago, I wrote my second book, Blink, and I have in that book a chapter about a very famous infamous police shooting in New York, case of Amadou Diallo. I remember that one. I remember that one where you shot like 40 times by cops. And one of the big things I was interested in talking about in that case was, how long does it take, how long did it take for that whole terrible sequence to go down? So from the moment the police develop it, suspicions about Amadou Diallo, to the moment that Amadou Diallo is lying dead on his front porch, how long, how much time elapsed? And the answer is like two seconds. It's boom, boom, boom. It's like, and I had a conversation with, actually here in the Valley with Gavin De Becker. Has he ever been on your show? No. Oh, fascinating guy. He was a security expert, right? Security expert, incredibly interesting guy. He's friends with Sam Harris, I know that. He is, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was talking about this question of time, that when you're a security guard guarding someone famous, a lot of what you're trying to do is to inject time into the scenario. Instead of, you don't want something to unfold in a second and a half, where you have almost no time to react properly. What you wanna do is to unfold in five seconds. If you can add, oh, I'm making this up. I can't remember his exact term, but basically what your job is, is to add seconds into the encounter so that you have a chance to intelligently respond to what's going on. And so he was, he had this great riff about how good Israeli secret service guys are. And one of the things they do is they're either not armed or they don't, they're trained not to go for their weapons in these situations, because his point is, so say you're guarding the president, you're a body man for the president, you're walking through a crowd, somebody comes up to you, like pulls a gun, wants to shoot the president. His point is, if you're the secret security guy, and your first instinct in response to someone pulling a gun is to go for your own gun, you've lost a second and a half. Right? Your hands gotta go down to your, your whole focus is on getting to your own gun. And in the meantime, the other guy whose gun's already out has already shot, you've lost. You need to be someone who forgets about your own gun and just focuses on the man in front of you, right? And protecting the president. But it was all in the context of time is this really crucial variable in these kind of encounters. And everything as a police officer you should be doing is slowing it down. Wait. Analyze what's happening. And that's what he doesn't do. The competence instance speeds it up, right? He goes to DEF CON, she likes a cigarette, and within seconds he's screaming at her. This is a, you know, a parent shouldn't do that. I mean, let alone a police officer by the side of the highway. Right, but the difference is he knows she's not a criminal. I mean, he must know. It's bullshit. He's pulling her over because he's trying to write a ticket. And the way he's communicating with her when she likes a cigarette, it's like she's inferior. Like, this is not someone who's scared. He's not scared of a perpetrator. He's not scared that there's a criminal in the car about to shoot him. He's not scared of that at all. He wants utter total complete compliance and he's talking to her like he's a drill sergeant. But can't both those things be true? How so? Well, so in the deposition he gives, which I took to the end of the book and I got the tape of the deposition. It's totally fascinating. It's like he's sitting down with the investigating officer in looking into the death of Sandra Bland. And he's got, I don't know how long it is, two hours. And he's walking them through what he was thinking that day. And he makes the case that he was terrified, that he was convinced, he says he goes back to his squad car, comes up and there's some evidence to support this. So he pulls her over and he goes to the passenger side window and leans in and says, ma'am, you realize why I pulled you over, blah, blah, blah. And does he okay? Cause he's, she doesn't seem right to him. She gives him her license. He goes back to his squad car. And he says, while he's in the squad car, he looks ahead and he sees her making what he calls furtive movements. So he's like, Furtive movements also. He thinks she's being all kind of jumpy and, you don't know, he doesn't, he just says, I saw her moving around in ways that didn't make me happy. And then when he returns to the car, he returns driver side, which is crucial because if you're a cop, you go driver side only if you think that you might be in danger, right? He doesn't, if you go driver side, you're exposing yourself to the road. The only reason you do that is that when you're driver side, you can see the, it's very, very difficult if someone has a gun to shoot the police officer who's pulled them over if the police officer is on the driver side, right? You have an angle if they're on the passenger side. So why does he go, if he thinks she's harmless, there's no reason to go back driver side. I think this guy, I think these two things are linked. I actually believe him. He constructs this ridiculous fantasy about how she's dangerous. But I think that's just what he was trained to do. He's a paranoid cop. And then why is he so insistent that she be compliant for the same reason? Because he's terrified. He's like, do exactly what I say, because I don't know what's gonna happen here, right? And she's, I don't know. I don't think those two strains of interpretation are mutually exclusive. That's interesting. It didn't sound like he was scared at all. It sounded like he was pissed that she wasn't listening to him. I didn't think he sounded even remotely scared. I felt like he had, I mean, we're reading into it, right? I have no idea. But from my interpretation was, he had decided that she wasn't listening to him and he was gonna make her listen to him. That's what I got out of it. I didn't get any fear. And I thought that version of it that he described just sounds like horseshit. It sounds like what you would say after the fact to strengthen your case. Well, so there's another element here that I get into, which is I got his record as a police officer. So he'd been on the forest for, I forgot, nine, 10 months. And we have a record of every traffic stop he ever made. And when you look at his list of traffic stops, you realize that what happened that day with Sandra Bland was not an anomaly, that he's one of those guys who pulls over everyone for bullshit reasons all day long. So I think I've forgotten the exact number, but in the hour before he pulled over Sandra Bland, he pulled over four people, four other people, for equally ridiculous reasons. He's that cop. And he's that cop because he's been trained that way. That's kind of- They have quotas. Strain of modern policing, which says, go beyond the ticket, pull someone over if anything looks a little bit weird because you might find something else. Now, if you look at his history as a cop, he almost never found anything else. His history is a cop. In fact, I went through this, I forget how many hundreds of traffic stops he had in nine months. If you go through them, he has like, once he found some marijuana on a kid, and by the way, the town in which he was working is a college town, so, I mean, how hard is that? I think he found a gun once, misdemeanor gun. But everything else was like pulling over people for, you know, the light above their license plate was out. That's the level of stuff he was using. He did this all day long, every day. So, he's like, to him, it's second nature. Yeah, pull her over. Like, who knows what's going on? She's out of state, she's a young black woman. Was this comparable to the way the rest of the cops in the force and his division did it? Well, I looked at, I didn't look at the rest of the cops on his force. What I looked at were state numbers to the, wherever they're, several American states give us, like North Carolina, for example, will give us precise, complete statistics on the number of traffic stops done by their police officers and the reasons for those stops. So, when you look at that, so, I look at the North Carolina numbers, for example, and the North Carolina Highway Patrol, it's the same thing. They're pulling over unbelievable numbers of people and finding nothing. Like, you know, 1%, less than 1% hit rates in some cases, of being hit by being, finding something of interest. So, like, they're pulling over 99 people for no reason in order to find one person who's got, you know, a bag of dope or something in the car. You cannot conduct policing in a civil society like that and expect to have decent relationships between law enforcement and the civilian population. Yeah, no question. But doesn't that sort of support the idea that he's full of shit, that he was really concerned that she had something? He'd never encountered anything. Well, or, or. This was the one. The fantasy in his head is so, so the question is why does he keep doing it if, this is a guy who day in, day out pulls over people for no reason and finds nothing and continues to do it. Now, there's two explanations. One is he's totally cynical and thinks this is the way to be an effective police officer. Explanation number two is, this is a guy who has a powerful fantasy in his head that one day, I'm gonna hit the jackpot, I'm gonna open the trunk and there's gonna be 15 pounds of heroin and I'm gonna be the biggest star who ever lived. I think there's also a rush of just being able to get people to pull over, the compliance thing, which is another reason why he was so furious that she wasn't listening to him and she kept a cigarette lit. Yeah, or she was listening but not complying. Yes. What are the laws? I mean, are you allowed to smoke a cigarette in your car when a cop pulls you over? How does it work like that? Yeah, I mean, of course, yeah, they can't stop you from engaging in a legal issue. They can't tell you to put out your cigarette. There's no law. No, he could have said, I mean, no, there's no law. I mean, the car, though, two things. The courts historically give enormous leeway to the police officers in a traffic stop as opposed to a person to person stop. But no, I mean, this is about what he should have said is, he could have said, ma'am, do you mind I would prefer if you put out the cigarette while we're talking or I'm allergic to smoke or whatever. I mean, he has a million ways for him to do it nicely. Yeah, but he's not gonna do it. He's a jackass about it. But he's, I mean, he's basically doing the job like a jackass. He's doing a jackass version of being a cop. Well, so this is one of a really, really crucial point in the argument of the book, which is, I think the real lesson of that case is not that he's a bad cop, he's in fact doing precisely as he was trained and instructed to do. He's the ideal cop. And the problem is with the particular philosophy of law enforcement that has emerged over the last 10 years in this country, which has incentivized and encouraged police officers to engage in these incredibly low reward activities, like pulling over 100 people in order to find one person who's got something wrong. That has become enshrined in the strategy of many police forces around the country. They tell them to do this. I have a whole section of the book where I go through in detail one of the most important police training manuals, which is required reading for somebody coming up, and which they just walk you through this. Like, it is your job to pull over lots and lots and lots and lots of people, even if you only find something in a small percentage of cases. Why that's what being a proactive police officer is all about, right? So they are trained, that phrase, go beyond the ticket, is a term of art in police training. Like, you gotta be thinking, you sure you pull them over for having a taillight that's out, but you're thinking beyond that. Is there something else in the car that's problematic? That's what you're trying to find. So there, he was being a dutiful police officer, and the answer is to re-examine our philosophies of law enforcement, not to, I mean, you can't dismiss this thing by saying, oh, that's just a particularly bad cop. I mean, it's not great, but I don't know if he's any worse than, you know, he's just doing what he was trained to do. That's the issue. He should be trained to do something different. Right, that is the issue, right? The issue is they're, this is standard practice, to treat citizens that are doing nothing wrong as if they're criminals, and pull them over and give them extreme paranoia and freak them out. Yeah. I hope you find something. I was home, I'm Canadian, and I was home in Canada, small-time Canada, a couple weeks ago, and I saw on the back, you know, how police cars always have their, often have their slogan on the side of the car, the back of the car. So in my little hometown in southwest Ontario, sleepy, you know, farm country, the slogan on the back of the police cars is people helping people. So Canadian, right? It is so Canadian. It is so awesome. And like, the next, now, understand that this is a country with very, very low levels of gun ownership, which means that a police officer does not enter into an encounter with a civilian with the same degree of fear or paranoia that the civilian has a handgun, right? Which is a big part of this. Regardless of how one feels about gun laws in this country, the fact that there are lots of guns makes the job of a police officer a lot harder, and every police officer will tell you that. In Canada, you don't have that fear. But it's also Canada, and it's small town Canada. And so when you encounter a police officer in my little town, he's like, he's people helping people. He's like, he's like driving like a Camry, and he's, you know, he's like this genial person who- Was it really a Camry? I mean, I forgotten exactly what they're driving. They're not driving- They're not driving- Cock cars. Yeah, explorers painted black with like big bull bars at the front. And then you go, you know, I mean, even in LA, you know, like the cars are painted black and white. They look, so they look ferocious. I mean, the whole thing- Is that what it is? They look ferocious? Do I- They just look, they identify as police. To a Canadian looks, to me it looks a little, why do they have to paint them black for that? It's not the Oakland Raiders. I mean, it's like- What do you think they should paint them? Something mild and- Like bright yellow. Something lovely, something warm. Lovely. Like a nice, can you imagine it like a teal or a lime green? Well, that would be, yeah, because there's a lot of black cars, a lot of white cars, not a lot of teal cars. Let's go with teal. So it would, yeah, it would stand out like, oh, it's a cop, it's a pink car. But you know, this kind of symbolism matters. Right. You're projecting an image. Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who makes all of his prisoners wear pink, yeah. Yeah, that's kind of the thing. Well, I mean, against his point though, how many women shoot cops? Isn't that an insanely low number? Yeah. I mean, insanely low. I mean, what are the numbers? I mean, it's probably almost non-existent. Yeah. When guys pull over women, I don't think they're worried about being shot. I really don't. I think it's horseshit. I think it's all after the fact. Yeah. He was trying to concoct some sort of an excuse. Something's gonna excuse for- Is he still on the force? No, he's either, he's kicked off for, I've forgotten the precise language they use, but for basically being impolite to a civilian. But yeah, I don't think there's a lot of, but I don't know whether, I mean, I still think we're saying the same thing, which is the thing that's driving him, his motivation is not rational, right? And if you were a rational actor, you would never engage in an activity where 99.9% of your police stops resulted in nothing. Right. He is off in some weird kind of fantasy land for a reason, which is that's what, in certain jurisdictions in this country, that's what law enforcement has come to look at, look like. And that's problematic. It's a huge problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.