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.