CRACKDOWN TOO LATE ON ROGUE COP

Contrary to popular belief, sometimes late is, in fact, not better
than never. Sometimes late is nowhere near good enough. Sometimes late
is so obviously a case of one being pushed into doing the right thing
not by notions of morality and justice but by public pressure and
political expediency, that late amounts to no more than a display of
poor leadership and an insult to people's intelligence.

Case in point: Texas Attorney General John Cornyn's decision this week
to finally investigate mass arrests three years ago in a Panhandle
town called Tulia.

What happened in Tulia appears to have been an egregious miscarriage
of justice centered around a rogue lawman who worked alone, collected
scant evidence, and set out to lock up as many black people as
possible on bogus drug charges. Now, that could not have been easy in
a 5,000-person town with less than 500 black residents, but give Tom
Coleman credit for being dedicated to his task. The man who conducted
the 18-month narcotics investigation culminating in the July 23, 1999,
drug sting didn't let little things like the fact that individuals he
fingered for crimes had ironclad alibis - such as being out of the
state when the crimes were allegedly committed - interfere with good
police work.

This one-man dragnet netted a catch of 46 town residents, 43 of them
black and the other three - two Anglos and one Hispanic - known to
have close relations with the town's black residents.

OK, maybe it's just me, but if I were a city official in Tulia back in
July 1999, I might have asked myself if those numbers didn't fall
outside the realm of statistical probability. I might have been even
more likely to do so given what many town residents apparently knew
about Tom Coleman, about how this good ol' poster boy for the Old
South had acknowledged, in a television interview, using the "n-word"
in both professional and personal conversation. Coleman had been hired
by Tulia officials as an undercover narcotics officer even though he
had little experience in such work.

Clearly, Coleman should not expect to be named the NAACP's "Man of the
Year" anytime soon. He'll get over it. After all, he already has one
shiny little knick-knack in his trophy case: the 1999 "Narcotics
Officer of the Year" award, presented to him just before the arrests
by none other than Attorney General John Cornyn.

As noted by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert - whose series of
columns may have applied sufficient pressure on Cornyn to help force
the investigation - you won't find a photo of Coleman and Cornyn
hugging jowl-to-jowl in brochures coming out of Cornyn's U.S. Senate
campaign. One reason could be that the Republican - in a twist of fate
that Texas Democrats must hail as a blessing - is facing off against
Democratic nominee Ron Kirk, who happens to be black.

The fact that Cornyn is running against a black opponent in what has
become an increasingly tight race is another plausible explanation for
why he suddenly found religion and ordered the Tulia investigation,
albeit three years after the fact.

Cornyn had previously refused to conduct a state investigation, in
deference to what he said was a federal criminal investigation into
the matter. It turns out that the question of whether that federal
investigation was still open was, for a time, a bigger mystery than
what occurred in Tulia. First it was open, then closed, and then -
after a Herbert column aimed at Attorney General John Ashcroft - open
again.

So where does that leave John Cornyn? In an awkward about-face. But he
was not put there by either politics or media pressure, he insists.
Rather, Cornyn told The Associated Press this week, he decided to open
his own investigation because he had "become concerned things had
gotten bogged down" in Washington. His first hint: When he recently
asked the Justice Department for information about its probe, his
request was refused.

There's a campaign slogan for Cornyn: Send me to Washington, and I'll
un-bog things. Leave me in the Texas attorney general's office, and
I'll just be another regrettable example of a public servant who took
an oath to enforce the law and defend the little guy, and then
couldn't manage to uphold it.

A spokesman for Cornyn said Thursday that the attorney general saw no
reason for the state to intervene before now, and that it was Cornyn's
understanding all along that the feds were looking into the matter.

Maybe Cornyn belongs in the Senate after all. Who knows? He might be
better at making law than he has been in enforcing it.