ONE HOPES THAT IN TULIA, GOOD FOLKS TOOK WORD OF A BAD COP

We can reach only one of two conclusions about the white people of Tulia
and Swisher County in the Texas Panhandle.

Either they were very gullible.

Or they were bigots.

I prefer to hope that they were only gullible, and that's why white law
officers and prosecutors were able to convince them that half their
African-American neighbors were selling powder cocaine.

A year after the 1999 arrests of the "Tulia 46," Swisher County found its
drug kingpin.

He was white. He owned the town cattle auction. And he was busted with
almost 4 ounces of powder coke - more than any of the men and women
railroaded into prison by all-white juries solely on the word of one slimy
white cop, Tom Coleman, now of Waxahachie.

Fortunately, even the stubborn Texas legal system began to note that this
smelled as rancid as a Panhandle cattle feedlot. A special prosecutor and a
visiting state district judge agreed Tuesday that the convictions of 38
defendants need to be thrown out. This, after a weeklong hearing in which
Coleman said he used a racial slur all the time as a "greeting," and where
a convoy of West Texas sheriffs and police said he can't be trusted.

For example, the Fort Stockton police chief called Coleman a "paranoid gun
nut."

Somehow, this all has yet to sink in for many white folks in Tulia. Some
are still telling reporters how Coleman helped the town clean up its drug
problem.

Never mind how Tulia's drug problem seemed peculiarly restricted to powder
cocaine. Coleman rarely accused anyone of selling him crack or marijuana.

Anyone who has ever spent time in rural Texas knows that the No. 1 most
destructive drug is probably Bud Light. In the most recent state survey of
Tulia teen-agers, one in four said they often drink five or more beers.
Compared to teen-agers statewide, Tulia teens are 50 percent more likely to
get snockered, but no more likely than others to snort cocaine.

Yet a town drug crackdown zeroed in solely on the town's African-American
residents as street cocaine dealers.

Remarkably, Coleman claimed he found 46 drug dealers in a town of 5,000
people. Even more remarkably, 39 were African-American residents, about
half the adult African-American population.

More remarkably yet, some of the men and women arrested were miles away
from Tulia the day Coleman supposedly bought drugs from them, and a few no
longer even lived or worked in town.

What amazes me is not only that it took four years to start overturning the
38 convictions in the 46 cases.

What really amazes me - and scares me - is that white folks in Tulia and
Swisher County believed it in the first place. And what scares me more is
that they willfully sent their African-American neighbors - a forklift
driver, a 60-year-old hog farmer, single mothers - off to prison solely on
the word of one vagabond cop who took down his notes on his leg.

Closer to home, folks in Ellis County figured out Tom Coleman a lot faster.

After he left Tulia, he moved to Waxahachie. For 10 months until last
August, he busted dealers in that county before losing his job with a
regional drug task force.

According to the Waxahachie Daily Light, Coleman conceded that he signed a
car insurance application for someone else using his fake "street" name. He
blamed a supervisor.

He also denied accusations of inappropriate sexual overtures, including one
accusation from a drug informant in Dallas County.

Joe Grubbs, a Republican and a former judge, is the district attorney in
Ellis County. He groaned at the mention of Coleman's name.

Yet he also said that he stands by the officer's cases there, and that they
all involved more witnesses and audio or video proof.

Coleman could go to work for another police agency today. But Grubbs said
nobody has ever called asking for a job reference.

And if anyone called now?

"I'd say, 'Yes, he worked here,' " Grubbs said. "That's all."

A defense attorney in Waxahachie, Mark Griffith, said three defendants'
cases were dropped because Coleman was involved.

"It's amazing that he could still work anywhere as a police officer,"
Griffith said.

"It was just a big sigh of relief around here when [the task force] said,
'Cut him loose.' ... I think the judge in the Tulia cases realized that the
system can't be based around this kind of cop."

Coleman and his police work are not Tulia's only problems.

The owner of the Tulia Livestock Auction was indicted on one felony count
of cocaine possession and on two counts of indecency with a 16-year-old.

Four months later, Charles Sturgess shot himself. Some of Coleman's drug
buys involved Sturgess' employees or came at the cattle auction, so we will
never know whether or which cocaine came from Sturgess and which came from
Coleman's imagination.

Then there is Tulia's unsettled resentment over race.

As far back as 1997, a Lubbock defense attorney complained that white
prosecutors in Plainview and Tulia sent an irrationally high percentage of
minority defendants to prison.

"What I said back then was that the district attorney there [Terry
McEachern] is a racist and the judges are part of an evil empire," attorney
Bill Wischkaemper said Tuesday.

"I stand by that. ... I've seen some horror stories come out of Tulia.

"Most of them involved some white people who went along with it. They were
afraid not to. They wanted to be what they thought was 'tough on crime.' "

I hope that is what they wanted.

I want to hope that only fear - and misplaced loyalty - led white Tulia to
turn against its neighbors.

I want to hope.