Pubdate: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 Source: Amarillo Globe-News (TX) Copyright: 2002 Amarillo Globe-News Contact: http://amarillonet.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/13 Author: Virgil Van Camp and Willim H. Sweewald Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/tulia.htm (Tulia, Texas) POINT-COUNTERPOINT: WAS THE TULIA DRUG BUST RACIST OR INCOMPETENT? Police have botched probe To The Left Small towns usually don't stir up the controversy that Tulia has. I've been there several times over the years. It looks like the quintessential Panhandle town. Bypassed by Interstate 27, get off on the old highway, encounter grain elevators, abandoned service stations, a really good Mexican restaurant, then you're back on the interstate. Drive to a downtown that hasn't changed much since the 1950s. Go southeast to an area of upscale homes. A point of interest there is the home-studio of famous western artist Kenneth Wyatt. Tourists are welcome. It looks like the kind of town where you don't need to lock your home and can leave the keys in your car at night. Why did Swisher County Sheriff Larry Stewart feel the need to turn narc Thomas Rolland Coleman loose on his neighbors? How could he have made such a poor personnel choice? Coleman worked undercover for 18 months making 132 drug buys. On the strength of his word alone, within a 24-hour period, Stewart's deputies arrested 46 people; 39 were black, 16 percent of Tulia's black population. Just one small problem: Coleman was a very troubled individual and not a very good cop. But he managed to fool a lot of folks along the way. Stewart and District Attorney Terry McEachern thought so highly of him that they heaped honors on him, including Texas Narcotics Control Program Lawman of the Year. Coleman got bad job performance reviews in Pecos and Cochran counties. Before coming to Tulia, he had unpaid bills of nearly $7,000 in Morton. He failed a surprise audit of task force funds he spent in Tulia. His next job in Ellis County ended with accusations of sexual harassment. He is now working as a private investigator. So it's not surprising that indictments against 46 Tulia citizens are coming unglued. Amarillo attorney Jeff Blackburn has enlisted the help of some nationally prominent law firms, working pro bono. What has caused national publicity is the race of most of the defendants. Had they all been white, the outcry for justice would be considerably less. The war on drugs is probably rife with similar instances of injustice. Law enforcement has been given broad powers in this area that are probably unconstitutional. Seizure of cash and property without due process is forbidden, yet it happens daily. If you frequent I-40, you see autos stopped, hood and trunk open, surrounded by cops. Reasons given for the stop are usually pretty lame: 67 in a 65 mph zone; changing lanes without signaling; no seat belts. I suspect that stopped citizens fit a profile: black with out-of-state plates. Sheriff and police departments have a vested interest in property seizure. They keep part of the proceeds. It's not surprising that so many counties along major highways are so active in the drug war. Like the late U.S. Sen. George Aiken, R-Vt., said about Vietnam, "Let's just declare victory and go home." We should do the same with the war on drugs. Use some of the money saved for treatment and education and channel our law enforcement into something more useful. The Immigration and Naturalization Service is short-handed and badly run. It could use some good help. Racism is an enduring trait By Willim H. Sweewald To The Left The Tulia drug dragnet of three summers ago has already generated a passel of words and brought outrage from far and wide upon a small Texas town. Just last month, the Texas attorney general, angling to become a U.S. senator, underwent a conversion to the need for state investigation. The circumstances give the unavoidable appearance of unfairness. From there questions range to the excesses of this country's "war on drugs" and the inherently racist cast of drug law enforcement in the United States. There are distressing similarities between the Swisher County roundup and a wave of arrests in Hereford more than 15 years ago. Those arrests, reported in detail in this newspaper, were another instance of an unusually large number of minority people being rounded up, charged and convicted for relatively small amounts of drugs, and then finding themselves recipients of disproportionate, draconian sentences. The fact that 39 of the 46 defendants arrested in Tulia were black places that community firmly in the mainstream of drug enforcement in America. But that leaves all of us open to the charge of racism in how those drug laws are enforced. It's not just Tulia. At least three-fourths of U.S. drug-users are white, but blacks are much more likely to be arrested and to receive longer sentences. A Sentencing Project report analyzed arrest records to find that 13 percent of drug users were black but 35 percent of arrests for drug possession, 55 percent of convictions, and 74 percent of prison sentences targeted African-Americans. The Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force funded and placed the dubious undercover agent in Tulia. If you pay close attention to the words of Lt. Mike Amos (head of that task force) - that is, before the controversy started swirling and he got reluctant to talk - you might think Tom Coleman was just some police informant of questionable past rather than an undercover agent upon whose uncorroborated word lives would be destroyed, families separated and individuals sentenced to prison for hundreds of years. Government policies and practices can have pernicious, discriminatory effects even when there isn't any clear intention to discriminate. Such policy and practices can just as effectively bar minorities from the enjoyment of their fundamental human rights as any system of overt discrimination. The Tulia cases are also flawed by poor judgment. That's a common corollary of agencies determined to maintain the flow of outside money into local police coffers so long as they produce drug convictions - no matter how dubious the circumstances. Racism isn't something people like to be accused of. But the U.S. Constitution once counted black slaves as worth three-fifths of a white person. Today, black per-capita income is roughly three-fifths that of whites. Writer Dorothy Allison observed that "some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal." That's racism at a gut level. It isn't pretty, but it certainly is enduring. - --- MAP posted-by: Josh