Reporter
The War on Thugs
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The jump-out boys were not like state police narcs. The DPS has always prided itself on its professionalism. Applicants must pass written, physical, and psychological tests, and officers are relatively well compensated. An assignment to the narcotics division is a highly sought-after promotion and carries a certain prestige. For task force agents, by contrast, the trip from patrol deputy in a one-stoplight town to undercover narc might involve a single two-week training course. As a result, the standards of narcotics enforcement across the state gradually eroded.
“These narcotics task forces are the antithesis of every good law enforcement management technique,” said Representative Keel. “The officers in the narcotics task forces do not have a chain of command that watches them carefully. They are left undercover and loosely supervised in some cases. They have unbridled discretion often on their interdiction decisions, and they deal with large amounts of cash. Now all of that is a formula for disaster.”
Because the task forces often operate in rural areas, far from major media markets, stories of malfeasance tend to stay beneath the radar. Read enough clips from small-town papers, however, and a pattern begins to emerge. Rogue officers, missing drugs, stolen cash, fabricated cases, failed drug tests: Every small town in Texas seems to have a story of corruption involving the jump-out boys. “People don’t understand,” said Barbara Markham, a task-force-narc-turned-whistle-blower, in the wake of the Tulia scandal. “Everybody’s talking about Tom Coleman. Well, there are whole task forces of Tom Colemans out there.”
In April 2001 the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union announced that it had found “another Tulia” in the Central Texas town of Hearne, where dozens of indictments were dismissed after a task force snitch admitted to fabricating cases. Attorneys from the national ACLU’s Drug Policy Litigation Project filed suit, making Hearne, and Byrne grant—funded task forces generally, one of their top priorities. As in Tulia, the defendants in Hearne were almost all black, and the cases were mostly for delivery of cocaine. The informant was a young black man with a history of drug abuse and mental illness. The local district attorney, who was also the head of the task force, was warned by his own polygraph examiner that the man was dishonest. But he pressed ahead with the prosecutions, until the snitch’s poor performance on the stand in the first case resulted in a mistrial. The snitch later claimed that task force officers coerced him into fabricating cases. Before the scandal broke, the district attorney abruptly resigned from the task force; later, the commander and several agents left as well. The eventual settlement of the ACLU suit in Hearne this past May, like the multimillion-dollar settlement in Tulia the year before, set the precedent that all counties and municipalities belonging to a task force would be financially liable for misdeeds perpetrated by task force officers, regardless of where they took place and who actually hired the officer in question. That got the attention of rural commissioner’s courts—and their insurance carriers—across Texas, hastening the statewide exodus from the program.
IN TEXAS, AS IN MANY STATES, the scramble for Byrne money is a competitive, zero-sum game: One task force’s funding increase is another’s loss. The TNCP developed a complex system of rating the relative success of the various outfits, weighing such indicators as number of cases opened, buys made, suspects arrested, drugs confiscated, and assets forfeited. In 1999, for example, thanks in large measure to Coleman’s bust in Tulia, the Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force was the top-ranked task force in the state.
This statistics-driven model of law enforcement has meant a dramatic increase in drug arrests. Not surprisingly, the growth of the task force system in Texas has also coincided with a massive acceleration in prison construction. In what amounted to the largest public-works project in modern Texas history, the state more than tripled its prison capacity—from 40,000 to 150,000 beds—in just ten years. (Texas now has more inmates than California, even though Texas has 40 percent fewer people. Only Louisiana and Mississippi incarcerate a greater percentage of their populations.) There were many factors driving this expansion, including stricter parole guidelines and overcrowding lawsuits, but the task forces were central by any reckoning. According to civil rights advocates like Texas ACLU executive director Will Harrell, the emphasis on statistics has overshadowed more-pressing questions. “Nobody is looking at quality control. We’re simply looking for quantity,” he said. “That’s what the drug war is about: How many people have you arrested and locked up today?”
A focus on street-level buys more often than not means targeting black suspects, which helps explain a couple of striking statistics in Texas. African Americans account for 12 percent of the state’s population but 40 percent of prison inmates. On any given day, roughly one in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is in jail, on probation, or on parole. “It’s just too easy. They never go up the chain,” defense attorney Walter Fontenot, of Liberty, a small town in East Texas, said of the task forces. “If you dig into this stuff, you will find that most people are black, most people are poor, and they just cop out and get probation. A couple of years later the probation is revoked, because they go back to the same thing because that’s all they know,” he said. “It’s all about numbers,” said Anahuac defense attorney Ed Lieck, who has battled his local drug task force for years. “More numbers means more money.”
In 2002 Governor Perry announced that he was assigning supervision of the state’s Byrne grant drug task forces to the DPS. The transition has been a bumpy one. When DPS Narcotics captains made preliminary visits to their new charges, they discovered many of them in disarray. At one outfit in the San Antonio area, for example, evidence was missing from 20 percent of the unit’s case files, forfeiture cash was not properly accounted for, and commanders had “little contact or supervisory control” over some of their agents.
The DPS crafted new rules for the task forces, bringing them more in line with established policy for state police narcs. The use of masks in the serving of arrest warrants was banned, and procedures for control of evidence and use of confidential informants were tightened. Some task forces refused to accept the new command structure and chose to shut down rather than change their ways. A few announced that they would forgo Byrne grant money to avoid DPS oversight. These “renegade” operations subsisted for a couple of years on their own asset forfeiture accounts—some had accumulated huge hoards prior to the takeover—until this summer, when the Legislature finally forced them to comply with DPS supervision or fold altogether.
THE TASK FORCE PROGRAM has been on the ropes before; President Bill Clinton tried unsuccessfully to pare the Byrne grant down in 1994. But this time might be different. It has always been politically easier for Republicans to cut law enforcement programs, and violent crime is now at a thirty-year low. Last February, in testimony before Congress, even national drug czar John Walters said it was time to focus attention higher up the supply chain. “Otherwise, you are chasing primarily small people,” he said, “putting them in jail, year after year, generation after generation.”
For those who have become addicted to the annual grants, however, keeping the Byrne program alive has become an end in itself. Sensing the shift in the prevailing winds in Washington, task force directors have lately begun including “homeland security goals” in their grant applications, struggling to make a connection between combating drug abuse and fighting Al Qaeda. (The Waco-area task force, for its part, announced that it would be providing some unsolicited extra security for the Bush ranch in Crawford.)
“I’ve been doing this for ten years, and law enforcement is about money,” said Lieck, the Anahuac defense attorney. “Anybody who tells you different is lying.” After seventeen years, some veterans of the task force experiment in Texas are not shy about this fact. A former prosecutor affiliated with a Denton-based task force freely admitted that he offered lighter sentences to suspects who agreed not to fight forfeiture of cars, cash, or other items of value confiscated during drug investigations. “If we don’t have enough money by the end of the grant year, we’re all out of a job,” he told the Dallas Morning News in 2003. His candid remarks earned the ire of the task force’s director, Denton County sheriff Weldon Lucas. There’s no need to be embarrassed now, however: Late last year, the task force folded.
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The War on Thugs: Nate Blakeslee, published by PublicAffairs.
