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But the trooper has been put on administrative leave for violating unspecified police procedures and the department's courtesy policy, spokesmen said. Judging by the video, the officer looks and sounds less like a seasoned professional and more like Barney "single bullet" Fife from the old "Andy Griffith Show" on a power trip.

Bland didn't help herself by arguing loudly with the officer. The most serious unwritten crime you can commit with some police is "contempt of cop." In the trooper's eyes, she appears to have committed that offense even before he got physical.

But sound professional standards call for a police officer to try to de-escalate such situations, not make them worse.

Even billionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump, who is seldom a model of understatement, told a reporter elsewhere in Texas, "This guy (Trooper Encinia) was overly aggressive. And I'm a huge fan of the police. But this guy was overly aggressive. Terribly aggressive."

At last, Trump has stumbled onto a position on which he and I can agree. You don't have to be a liberal to be upset about seeing a police officer provoke a routine traffic stop into a major civil liberties issue.

The family's suspicions are thoroughly understandable. But as experts have pointed out the larger tragedy of suicides in local jails is how common they are -- 43 per 100,000 in 2011, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, or more than three times the rate of the general population.

Ironically, Radley Balko, author of "The Rise of the Warrior Cop," wrote in the Washington Post blog that white suicide rates are higher than for minorities in prison and outside, but minority suicides tend to get more attention because of racial suspicions. In cases like Sandra Bland, it's easy to see why.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.