STUDY THE TASK FORCES

Even Walter Cronkite has had enough of the war on drugs. On the first page
of California Judge James P. Gray's exhaustive study Why Our Drug Laws Have
Failed, America's most venerated journalist declares the drug war a
failure, just as he famously did the Vietnam War in 1968. In recent years,
the decades-old drug war has become the great counter-example for criminal
justice public policy. In an interview in the October 15 New Yorker, for
example, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy explained his reservations about
Attorney General John Ashcroft's new antiterrorism bill, which greatly
expands police powers, with an anecdote about one drug cop's abuse of
power. When he was a district attorney in Burlington in the 1970s, Leahy
discovered that the area's most vaunted narc was planting evidence and
manufacturing cases. In the aftermath, 71 persons were pardoned. It might
have been 72, but one had committed suicide in prison. "I have great
respect for law enforcement," Leahy said. "But there have to be checks and
balances. As they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely."

In Texas, the absence of such checks is the subject of a proposed interim
legislative study of the state's regional drug task forces. Speaker Pete
Laney should authorize the study, requested by State Representative Juan
Hinojosa (D-McAllen). Hinojosa, who authored several reform bills last
session, has distinguished himself as a leader in the effort to reform the
worst abuses of the drug war, and he should be allowed to continue his
work. As Nate Blakeslee's careful examination of one East Texas drug task
force ("The Numbers Game") in this issue demonstrates, things have become
severely unbalanced in the Texas drug war. The Observer has chronicled drug
war abuses before, most notably in the panhandle town of Tulia, where over
ten percent of the black population was rounded up in a single undercover
operation. Only later did the truth about the undercover agent, Tom
Coleman, come to light, including his shady past and suspect undercover
methods. Yet the problem goes beyond individual cops. "People don't
understand-everybody's talking about Tom Coleman," said Barbara Markham, a
narc turned whistle-blower, whose story is told in this issue. "There are
whole task forces of Tom Colemans out there," she said.

The problem is not with personalities, but with a model of law enforcement
that has spread across the state since the late 1980s. Regional drug task
forces, partially self-funding and accountable to no local government,
spend millions every year with little oversight from state or federal
authorities. What began as a crusade has become another level of law
enforcement bureaucracy, with all the attendant imperatives, including the
most important of all: justifying it's own existence. More and more task
force critics are coming from the ranks of those most familiar with the
system, including cops, defense attorneys, judges, and prosecutors, who
have witnessed first-hand how the relentless drive for statistics-hard
evidence of progress- above all else has corrupted the process. Task forces
rack up the numbers, filling our prisons with arrest after arrest of
small-time dealers, while making no dent in the availability, cost, and
purity of drugs on our streets.

Yet these are no ordinary bureaucracies. The drug war tears communities
apart. Lives are turned upside down. People are killed. As we learned in
Vietnam, unwinnable wars don't become less violent, they just get less
honorable. It's time for a change in strategy.