PUTTING LOCAL DRUG TASK FORCES UNDER DPS GET MIXED REVIEWS

The past 12 months have been rough for Travis County Sheriff Margo
Frasier's Capital Area Narcotics Task Force.

A deputy and an unarmed bystander were killed in separate raids, a civil
rights lawsuit involving a mistaken marijuana bust is pending in federal
court, and three of the county's major partners have dropped out of the
force. But the clouds are not isolated over the task force based in Travis
County. There are 48 other federally financed, multicounty narcotics teams
in the state, some of which have garnered a reckless cowboy reputation
among critics and lawmakers.

Aside from arrest and seizure statistics they are required to submit to the
state, the task forces until this month operated with little oversight.
Gov. Rick Perry has offered a solution that's getting mixed reviews. To
rope in the special operation teams, Perry has tucked them under the
blanket of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

With the shift, which took effect Jan. 9, the outfits now report directly
to a state narcotics captain, who makes sure each task force is following
the same policies and using the same tactics.

The Department of Public Safety can hold teams accountable for mistakes by
urging the governor to strip their funding. It also can prevent officers
with checkered pasts from jumping unnoticed from one state task force to
another by keeping work history files on every task force member. The DPS
"will be our eyes and ears," said Jay Kimbrough, the executive director
Perry hired in July to oversee the Texas Narcotics Control Program. "It
will be a quantum leap forward. Task forces have never had the oversight
that they now have."

Longstanding critics such as the American Civil Liberties Union -- which
has pushed legislation and filed one lawsuit and a half-dozen petitions
involving regional task forces -- are keeping a wait-and-see attitude. "I'm
not prepared to say it's not going to work," said Will Harrell, executive
director of the ACLU's Texas chapter. "Only time will tell whether it's a
facade or if it's genuine oversight."

State Rep. Terry Keel, R-Austin, a former Travis County sheriff, is less
hopeful. "DPS is generally a very good agency, and they do have a history
of integrity, but that is a task they are not up for," he said. "I don't
always agree with the ACLU, but they have a good reason to be concerned
about this. I am." 3 incidents, 3 departures A federally financed task
force has existed in Central Texas since the 1980s, but Travis County
hasn't always been part of it. When Keel became sheriff in 1992, he pulled
his office out of the regional effort. "It did some good work, but it had
problems throughout its history," Keel said. Those troubles included poorly
trained and sometimes corrupt officers, Keel said. And because task force
members technically work for a particular county and not the task force
commander, there were serious discipline and oversight problems, he said.

"It is a flawed approach, and it has had poor results, mediocre statistics
at best, and it has been rife with corruption," he said. "In my opinion,
that type of unprofessionalism led to what has occurred recently. (Travis
County) should have never gotten back into that."

The modern version of the Capital Area Narcotics Task Force started in 1998
as a six-county effort that included deputies from Travis, Williamson,
Bastrop, Lee, Fayette and Caldwell counties. Travis County took the helm of
the task force -- and its now $606,300 grant -- from Williamson County in
January 2000.

Frasier said last year's deaths, including the shooting of Deputy Keith
Ruiz during a drug raid, weren't caused by unprofes-sionalism. "It just has
to do with the tough job of enforcing the narcotics laws," Frasier said.
"One of the things that people need to realize is the reason you wind up
going into someone's home for a drug raid is that's where they're
manufacturing and keeping the drugs. If that's where the narcotics are, and
a court has authorized you to go and get them, that's where, unfortunately,
you have to go."

In the past 12 months, Lee, Williamson and Bastrop counties have all left
the task force for various reasons. But their departures have coincided
with several turbulent events: * Ruiz was shot and killed while trying to
break down the door of Edwin Delamora's Del Valle mobile home Feb. 15,
2001. Delamora, 21, said he thought the officers outside were burglars. He
is charged with capital murder in Ruiz's death.

* Task force officers were accused of mistaking ragweed for marijuana in
May when they raided a Spicewood home and held residents at gunpoint as
they ransacked the property and kicked the homeowner's dog, according to a
federal civil rights lawsuit filed Jan. 24. Frasier, who would not discuss
details because of the litigation, said the raid didn't happen the way it's
described in court documents.

* In December, a task force member shot and killed an unarmed 19-year-old,
Tony Martinez, during a raid on a different mobile home in Del Valle.
Martinez was not the target of that raid.

Lee County Sheriff Joe Goodson said he was forced to drop out early in 2001
because the cities in his county didn't want to participate. The police
chief in every city in a county must sign a cooperative agreement.
Williamson officials, who left in November, said they dropped out to join
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's task force. Bastrop, which left
in January, was the last to go. County Sheriff Richard Hernandez said he
didn't withdraw because of Martinez's death or the other incidents. He said
the task force -- and particularly the two deputies he had committed to the
team -- weren't working enough in his county. "My understanding was that
they were supposed to let these guys work in their counties, instead of
taking them everywhere else," Hernandez said. "We weren't getting nearly
what I wanted for our money's worth." Keel said that problem had surfaced
before.

"Too often, those task forces were just going where the crimes were," he
said. Kimbrough said that's not how the program is supposed to work. Drug
dealers typically don't think about county and city boundaries, he said.
That's why the grants are designed to promote cooperation among the
different jurisdictions, which should share the task force's resources.
"It's not just a task force to augment the sheriff's department or a police
department," Kimbrough said.

In 2000 and 2001, 208 of the 417 Capital Area Narcotics Task Force
investigations took place in Travis County. But Frasier said the federal
government didn't take into account the size of Texas counties -- and the
number of different jurisdictions within those counties -- when it created
the grants.

"When they passed the laws, they were thinking of counties in other states
where if they're 200 square miles, they're huge," Frasier said. "Travis is
over 1,000 square miles."

Regardless, she said, Travis County's drug problems flow into the
surrounding areas.

"The reality of it is that the work that we do is supporting not only the
cities in Travis County, but . . . all the counties that surround Travis
County," she said. "We're the hub of this wheel here." Overcoming images
Federal money to wage local law enforcement's drug war dates back to
President Ronald Reagan.

In Texas and other states, dollars from Washington led to the formation of
task forces, typically made up of at least two counties. Funding has
steadily increased over the past 20 years, and the U.S. Department of
Justice has slated more than $29.5 million in 2002 for Texas. Each task
force must put up a 25 percent match. That money can be paid with assets
seized during drug operations, essentially making the forces
self-sustaining and, in some critics' opinions, self-perpetuating machines.
"The more arrests that these regional narcotics task forces come up with,
the more money they are guaranteed the next year," Harrell said. That's one
image the governor's office wants to shake. "The emphasis on numbers is
going to change dramatically," Kimbrough said. "We're not working by quotas
here; we're working on quality. We will be addressing those past perceptions."

From June 2000 through May 2001, the Capital Area Narcotics Task Force
filed 131 felony charges and seized $2,826,123 in narcotics and $223,497 in
cash assets. The numbers have been lower since last June: 81 felony cases
have yielded $563,584 in seized narcotics and $37,729 in seized assets.
Frasier said numbers and dollar signs aren't her goal. "My view of why you
work narcotics is to try to keep the next generation of children from
winding up in prison because of drugs," she said. "There are certain law
enforcement agencies (where) the forfeiture laws are what drives policy.
That doesn't drive ours."

Whatever drives it, the unchecked methods of the Panhandle Regional
Narcotics Task Force drew the attention of the ACLU in 1999, when the work
of one undercover officer with a questionable past was responsible for the
arrests of 30 percent of the city of Tulia's African American male population.

Since then, the ACLU has found eight other small Texas towns where, Harrell
said, minorities and poorer neighborhoods have been targeted by regional
task forces, including a similar undercover drug operation in the East
Texas town of Hearne in 2000, where 38 blacks and no whites were charged.
The ACLU is encouraged that Perry's office has established some oversight,
but the state has turned the other cheek on past indiscretions, Harrell
said. "Why can't we talk about the past damage that has been done?" he
said. "It can be resolved if we address it."

Keel said any lingering questions about integrity and tactics cast a dark
shadow on all law enforcement.

"And there are legitimate questions about integrity and tactics when it
comes to these task forces, and there have been for many years," Keel said.
Frasier, however, said the cases in Hearne and Tulia were isolated horror
stories. The Capital Area Narcotics Task Force, she said, adheres to the
highest standards, and there are no policies in the Department of Public
Safety guidebook that the group doesn't follow, she said. Kimbrough sees it
this way: "The vast majority of task forces are very sophisticated and do
an excellent job. We just want everybody to be on the same page."