FAKE JUSTICE

What You Get When A Fake Panel Investigates Fake Drugs

The Dallas fake-drug "investigation" announced with fanfare last week by
the city attorney is a heavily controlled inside job dominated by city
staff that will produce none of the fundamental justice people are looking
for. Mexican-Americans wronged in fake drugs aren't looking for an outcome
in which somebody calls for better accounting procedures. They want to see
justice with a big J. So does anybody else who understands how terrible
these cases were.

Fake drugs is the scandal in which more than 80 cocaine cases had to be
dismissed and dozens of Mexican immigrants released from jail after it was
revealed someone connected with the Dallas Police Department in 2001 had
been systematically framing people with ground-up billiard chalk. The
announced purpose of the city's fake-drug panel is to look for major
underlying causes.

But a bureaucratic search of policies and procedures will never turn up
anything meaningful, for at least two reasons. First, no fake-drug
"policies" will ever be discovered. It wasn't "policy." There was never a
memo that said, "TO COMMAND STAFF: WHEN FRAMING PEOPLE ON FAKE DRUG
CHARGES, BE SURE TO PICK ON DEFENSELESS IMMIGRANTS." Second, the city's
probe is so secretive and so firmly under the thumb of city employees that
anything really significant will be concealed.

That's already happening.

The justice people need in fake drugs is political and fundamental. What
went wrong in fake drugs is what's wrong at the core of the whole police
department and all of city government in Dallas. We need stern civilian
oversight of local government, especially the police.

That's justice with a capital J. But to get that lesson across, we needed
very public hearings in which city officials, especially police officials,
were compelled to sit in the glare and say in public the kinds of things we
reporters hear from them all the time in the corridors of City Hall. We
needed a probe that was big, messy, loud and brutal.

We needed to search not for a policy on a piece of paper but for a culture
and an attitude that made people think it was OK to pick on defenseless
immigrants. We're not talking about accounting procedures. We're talking
about Dallas-style ethnic cleansing.

But we're not going to get that big brawling public airing of the wound.
Instead, we're getting the typical Dallas deal: a tight-lipped whitewash.
Local authorities agreed two years ago to hold off on their own probes of
fake drugs until after a federal investigation. That agreement expired
November 25 when a federal jury acquitted the only Dallas police detective
indicted by federal authorities. After the acquittal, both the Dallas
County district attorney and the Dallas city attorney unveiled their own
so-called "independent" investigations, with stern vows of no rock
unturned. But even in making the announcements, both the city attorney and
the acting Dallas police chief did everything they could to hide the ball.
Two weeks ago I was reminded by Bill Hill, the district attorney, that the
federal Drug Enforcement Administration had audited Dallas police
procedures relevant to fake drugs more than a year ago at the invitation of
former police Chief Terrell Bolton. Nothing could be more pertinent to the
city's probe. If there is a DEA report in hand addressing the same
questions the city now wants to investigate, then that report should be the
city's starting point.

I started by asking the office of acting police Chief Randy Hampton for the
report. His staff promised to get back to me but never did. I followed up
by filing a Public Information Act demand for the report more than a week
ago, to which I have received no response.

When Hampton and other officials filed out of Mayor Laura Miller's office
on Tuesday, December 2, after a high-level meeting to discuss fake drugs, I
waited in the scrum in the hall. I wanted to give Hampton a decent
opportunity to talk about the report in front of people.

I asked him if he had any official report in hand addressing the origins of
the fake-drug scandal. "Not that I'm aware of," Hampton said.

The problem with that response is that police officials were already
answering questions from city council members about this report by then and
had acted on some recommendations in the report.

An active effort was already under way to conceal portions of the report
from the city council.

I can't tell you how I know that. But I challenge Chief Hampton or the city
attorney to deny it.

I don't know what's in the report.

Maybe it's innocuous bureaucrat-speak. I tend to think there must be
something somebody thinks is sensitive, or the acting chief and city
attorney wouldn't be so eager to hide it. The point is that the instinct of
the cops and the bureaucrats they work for at City Hall is to hide the ball.

The city's fake-drug panel was announced on a Friday. The previous Monday I
attended a meeting of the city council' s Public Safety Committee, chaired
by Dr. Elba Garcia, at which the members believed they were going to talk
about how to proceed on fake drugs.

To their chagrin, they found they could not discuss fake drugs because
someone had removed that item from their agenda without their knowledge.

Who could do that? I tried to find out and wound up with a lot of
finger-pointing between the city manager and the city attorney.

But somebody on the staff took it off the agenda.

I asked City Attorney Madeleine Johnson to tell me who is the boss in terms
of the agenda--the council members or the staff.

Is there anything that sets the pecking order? She said, "No, there isn't."

I'm not a lawyer.

But I say yes, there is. It's called: We fought a war with the British over
this stuff.

The people we elect are the boss. The people who just have jobs are not the
boss.

Look, maybe having a political science debate with me is not everybody's
idea of time well spent.

I just want to make an observation: The culture and day-to-day practices of
Dallas City Hall are such that people, even very smart people who went to
tough colleges and top law schools, believe that hired staff may have the
right and power to tell elected council members what they can or cannot
talk about in meetings.

I'll go back and look, but I don't think the Declaration of Independence
said, "...to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the Dallas city manager." Hey, if it's in
there, my bad.

The way the city's fake-drug panel ultimately got put together amounted to
one of the more humiliating treatments of the city council I have seen at
City Hall in a long time. On Monday after the Public Safety Committee found
out it would not be allowed to discuss fake drugs, members of the committee
made all sorts of brave promises that this investigation was theirs to
manage and they were not giving it up.

Councilman Don Hill warned that no final decisions had better be made at a
meeting scheduled for the following day in the mayor's office: "There will
not be a final decision made in that meeting as to what and how and what
the scope will be, is that correct?"

Chairwoman Garcia assured him no such thing would happen and that she and
her committee were still very much in charge: "Right, you are perfectly
right, because I want this to come back to the Public Safety Committee for
discussion."

The next day--the day Hampton acted like he knew nothing about the DEA
report--Garcia and the rest of them came filing out of Mayor Laura Miller's
office with wobbly-dog grins on their faces, which I now understand: In
that meeting, Miller and Johnson had informed Garcia and the others what
the deal was going to be, who was going to be on the panel and what the
scope would be. The following Friday when Johnson formally introduced the
panel to a specially called meeting of Garcia's Public Safety Committee,
Johnson capped her remarks with an extraordinary edict of secrecy: "There
will not be any discussion with these individuals," she said. "They will
not be answering questions...I would ask that questions not be directed to
them at this point in time." Instead, Johnson directed the council that any
questions they might have for the fake-drug panel should be addressed to
her, and she would pass them on.

Dr. Garcia listened to this speech in polite silence.

Councilman James Fantroy spoke up: "I don't want to be highly critical
here," he said, "because it's very touchy, but, Madam Chair, we will not be
able to ask these individuals any questions during this investigation. That
concerns me." Fantroy went on to point out that the chief investigator
appointed by the city is an ex-FBI agent with deep ties to law enforcement,
and he raised the question whether this type of person will have an eye for
the real issues in this case. Great question.

Fake drugs was a fundamental failure of law enforcement in Dallas. Is
Fantroy the only person to whom it occurs that law enforcement may not be
the proper venue to look to for objective insight?

Or does everybody see it, but Fantroy is the only one with the cojones to
say it out loud? The work product of this panel will be some drab
derivative of what is already in the DEA report that city officials are hiding.

There is no chance that Mexican-Americans will get what they deserve--a
fundamental reform of police governance, which, by the way, is what we all
need to be safe from persecution. If they can come for them in the night,
you better believe they can come for you.