The depressing news came in late Monday night that a grand jury in Texas has declined to find anyone culpable for the death of Sandra Bland, who was allegedly found hanged by a garbage bag in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas, in July.

No one, the grand jury thinks, is responsible for Bland’s death except for, well, Sandra Bland.

Not Brian Encinia, the police officer who needlessly arrested Bland for failing to signal a lane change and who screamed “I will light you up!” at the top of his lungs, threatened her with a Taser, and caused Bland to scream in terror, “You just slammed my head into the ground!” according to dashcam footage.

Not the jail that so failed in taking care of Bland’s well-being while it was charged with control of her body that she wound up dead.

Not whomever in the system who was responsible for leaving a garbage bag in her cell.

The special prosecutor has said that the case as “still open”, though no one has been indicted. But when the grand jury reconvenes next year it should issue a wide-ranging indictment – and it should be sent to all of us in the United States. Because we have all failed Sandra Bland: the state of Texas, and the United States and even those of us who believe that Black Lives Matter.

We haven’t done enough to stop the systematic killing of black women before, during and after her death. We have tolerated a society where the system can determine that an alleged suicide is the sole fault of the victim. We have have not taken the mental health of black women seriously.

Until Bland’s needless death occurred, most of us didn’t know that about once a day, someone takes their own life in an American jail cell, and that is the leading cause of death in those facilities. That we now know this and have still failed to acknowledge that anyone is responsible for Bland’s death shows how shamefully we keep allowing citizens to be subject to a de facto death sentence without due process when merely accused of crimes.

We did not say her name enough – Sandra Bland. All year long, from the young girl at the McKinney pool in Texas to the student in that South Carolina school, we have tolerated the pornographic abuse of black girls and women at the hands of armed white men, even when captured graphically on video. The lack of indictment in Bland’s death perpetuates how using up black women is just business as usual.

Sandra Bland was harmed when a plastic bag was left in her cell in the first place, and abandoned again now that whoever left it has not been punished. It is outrageous that this practice has not been stopped in US jails altogether: two prisoners escaped from an upstate New York prison about a month after Bland died last summer. The New York Times reported that as other inmates were interrogated by guards about how the prison break happened, they claimed they were threatened ... with plastic bags.

One prisoner said an “officer pointed to a plastic bag hanging on some pipes, asked if he knew what it was for and said, “You know what waterboarding is?” before the officer “put the bag over his head and started beating him”. Another prisoner claimed that an officer “tied a garbage bag around his neck, ‘using the plastic bag as a hanging noose’,” but the inmate didn’t “know how long he hung me up like that because I passed out”.

This is how the system works. In accepting this without enough public outcry, our society has let Bland die in vain. And the distraction of the holiday shopping season may curtail the protests she deserves.

A year ago, I did a round of interviews on a Monday after reporting on a raucous weekend of violence in New York. The previous Friday, I took a photo that went viral of pro-police brutality demonstrators wearing sweatshirts which read, “I Can Breathe”, cruelly taunting Black Lives Matter activists by twisting Eric Garner’s final words. On Saturday, two NYPD police officers were shot and killed. On Sunday, I published a Christmas column in a state of depression about the cycle of American violence continuing without end.

And a year later, on the shortest and darkest day of the year, nothing has changed. More than 1,100 more people have been killed by American police.The racialized violence continues apace.

“All of this for a traffic signal!” Sandra Bland says to the cops near the end of the arrest video. “Thank you for recording.” But the recording did nothing – nothing to save her, or even to make sure the system would punish those who triggered events which led to her death.

Sadly, if anything, the dashcam video has emboldened those who abuse black women and told them they can get away with it.