The Texas Lawmakers Who Led The Sandra Bland Act Are Pushing To Reinstate The Police Reforms Stripped From Their Original Bill

By Jolie Mccullough and Cassandra Pollock

After Sandra Bland’s death in a rural Texas jail drew outrage across the nation, two Texas lawmakers filed a comprehensive bill to address racial profiling during traffic stops, ban police from stopping drivers on a traffic violation as a pretext to investigate other potential crimes, limit police searches of vehicles and other jail and policing reforms.

But by the time the Legislature passed it, most of the sweeping provisions related to policing had been stripped out.

Now, on the heels of the death of George Floyd, those lawmakers say they’re determined to try again to push those reforms through when the Legislature reconvenes in January 2021.

State Sen. John Whitmire and state Rep. Garnet Coleman, both Houston Democrats who chair relevant committees in their respective chambers, said in a joint news release Tuesday they would continue to work together on criminal justice reform efforts next year. Whitmire’s chief of staff and Coleman confirmed to The Texas Tribune that they will begin with pushing again for measures they hoped to achieve with the 2017 law — like investigations into racial profiling and officer consequences. Many provisions were removed from the bill after law enforcement opposition.

The announcement comes weeks after Floyd, a black man, died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck up until and long after he had lost consciousness. Floyd’s death sparked demonstrations across the nation, with people taking to the streets in many Texas cities to protest police brutality and racial inequity.

“The recent murder of longtime Houston resident George Floyd by a law enforcement officer in Minneapolis is a painful reminder to us that though we have traveled so far, there is still a long way to go,” Whitmire and Coleman said in the release.

Coleman told the Tribune on Tuesday that he and Whitmire will start with filing legislation that was removed from the Sandra Bland Act in 2017, such as measures to increase the standards by which law enforcement can stop and search a vehicle and ban law enforcement from stopping drivers for minor traffic violations to allow an officer to look into other suspicions. Coleman said they will also look at filing measures related to what constituents are asking for in the wake of Floyd’s death, “specifically getting rid of choke holds” and ensuring that, “if a peace officer is standing around watching their colleague do something wrong, that they must intervene.”

Bland, a 28-year-old black woman, was found dead in 2015 in an apparent suicide at the Waller County Jail three days after she was arrested during a routine traffic stop. Dashboard camera footage disproved the state trooper’s stated reason for arresting her — assault on a public servant — and showed him threatening to drag her out of her car and tase her after she refused to put out a cigarette. Her death and the released footage led to demands for police and jail reforms.

In 2017, the version of the bill that made it into law included jail reforms like diverting inmates with mental health and substance abuse issues into treatment and mandating that independent law enforcement agencies investigate jail deaths.