LONE ARREST IN FAKE DRUG SCANDAL ISN'T JUSTICE

The good news is that after nearly 20 months of probing by local and
federal officials, there finally has been an indictment in the Dallas
Police Department's notorious "fake drug" scandal. The bad news is that,
indictment or not, the public isn't any closer to knowing exactly who is
blame for what was a hideous miscarriage of justice.

It became a national story when enterprising informants were accused of
duping some of Dallas' finest into thinking that a powdery substance was
cocaine when it wasn't, that innocent people - mostly Mexican immigrants -
were guilty when they weren't and that a slew of busts came from
crackerjack police work when they didn't. The snitches had something
working in their favor - namely, that the department's top brass wanted to
believe the yarn the informants were spinning. Anxious to score political
points with a public with no stomach for drug dealers, police supervisors
were eager to believe that their narcotics squad was racking up tons of
arrests and confiscating mountains of cocaine, which they then were only
too happy to use as props at news conferences, with the ultimate goal being
to snag airtime on the evening news.

When it became obvious that the cases involved bogus drugs that had been
planted and that police, prosecutors, judges and juries had made a colossal
blunder by convicting individuals who may have been innocent, prosecutors
dismissed what grew to be 86 drug cases.

That piqued the interest of the FBI, which began its own inquiry - one that
last week produced the first criminal charges in the case. The only person
charged thus far is Senior Cpl. Mark Delapaz, who was indicted by a federal
grand jury on charges of depriving individuals of their civil rights and
providing false information to a federal agent.

That's it? If that is all the FBI has to show for a 15-month investigation,
taxpayers should ask for a refund.

The bureau says that its investigation continues and that more indictments
may follow. Don't hold your breath.

It is possible this could be the only criminal indictment we see. I suspect
the theory that this is all about one bad actor would sit well with Police
Chief Terrell Bolton, who called a news conference the day the indictment
was unsealed to say he had fired Mr. Delapaz. Chief Bolton also said the
department had put in place safeguards to prevent further scandals.

Left unanswered in either the federal indictment or the lackluster response
of local officials to this scandal is the big question: Was there, as some
have suggested, a culture at the Dallas Police Department that made the
scandal possible by encouraging officers to make high-profile arrests,
authorizing corruptively large payoffs to informants and providing very
little supervision?

That's what Mr. Delapaz claims to have happened. Now facing up to 10 years
in prison if convicted, the former officer insists he just carried out
policies instituted by his supervisors.

"It was all blessed," Mr. Delapaz told me in a phone conversation. "These
weren't my procedures. I just requested the money."

Mr. Delapaz also insisted that the fact officers were handing over large
payouts to informants - as much as $50,000 at one time - was no secret to
his supervisor, Deputy Police Chief John Martinez, whom Mr. Delapaz claims
signed off on many of the requests.

When I called Mr. Martinez for comment, he declined. Citing pending civil
litigation stemming from the case, he referred all questions to a Police
Department spokeswoman.

Mr. Delapaz also said that supervisors routinely would ask to be kept
informed of looming drug busts so they could alert the media and that no
one seemed to care when enough suspicions were raised about their most
productive informant that officers gave him a polygraph test. All that
mattered, it seems, was that the informant was good at what he did.

"It was all about greed," Mr. Delapaz said. "It was about making the cases
and getting the glory. I didn't care about any of that."

Maybe Mr. Delapaz was telling the truth when he said in court filings that
he didn't know the drugs were fake. Or maybe he did commit serious ethical
breaches and maybe even criminal offenses for which - if convicted - he
deserves to be punished.

Either way, we are talking about dozens of cases, hundreds of pounds of
fake drugs and months of delay in bringing the cases to light. Are
reasonable people expected to believe that one man - a senior corporal at
that - single-handedly orchestrated a scandal of such magnitude?

If you are gullible enough to believe that, well, you are in luck. There is
an opening at the narcotics division of the Dallas Police Department.