I’m Giving you a Lawful Order: Dialogic Legitimacy in the Sandra Bland Traffic Stop

• In Event: Racism in Policing - Discourses of the State and Discourses of Resistance

Abstract

On July 15th, 2015 Sandra Bland, a twenty-eight year old African American woman, was pulled over by State Trooper Officer Brian Encinia for failing to signal a lane change. The traffic stop that followed devolved into shouting, a physical confrontation, and Bland’s arrest. What began as a routine traffic stop resulted in Bland’s jailing and eventual suicide at the Waller County Jail. Unlike many cases of police-citizen confrontations discussed in the media, Bland’s traffic stop was recorded by the officer’s dash camera, allowing an analysis of the interactional details of this encounter. Sandra Bland’s traffic stop raises several questions with important implication for policing. This paper focuses on police legitimacy: how it is claimed by Officer Encinia, resisted by Bland, and the role it plays in the escalation of the encounter. As a framework we adopt Bottoms and Tankebe’s (2012) dialogic approach to legitimacy, which centers on the idea that claims and responses to authorities’ right to hold power over citizens evolve sequentially over time. We use discourse analysis to highlight Sandra Bland’s and Officer Encinia’s use of questions, requests, commands, repetition, and jargon in exploring how legitimacy is claimed and contested in this interaction.

Authors

• Grace Sullivan, Georgetown University

• Belen V. Lowrey, American University