Dallas City Council conveys 'deep remorse' to victims of fake-drug scandal
Wednesday, November 17, 2004 at 05:52PM
TheSpook
Latino Immigrants Falsely Arrested
Dallas City Hall is issuing a formal apology over a fake drug scandal,
nearly three years after it surfaced. What turned out to be pool chalk,
was planted on dozens of Latino immigrants by highly paid informants
working with narcotics detectives. Several informants have been
convicted. Offering an apology to the victims of the 2001 fake-drug
scandal, the Dallas City Council unanimously passed a resolution
expressing "deep remorse" for the false arrests. The measure passed
Wednesday also offered apologies to the victims' families and the
city's residents for breakdowns at the Police Department. "It is very,
very tragic what happened to a great number of people, and I think we
are on the right track now," said Mayor Pro Tem John Loza. The scandal
erupted in late 2001 after more than two dozen people, mostly Hispanic
immigrants, went to jail based on bogus drug evidence planted by
corrupt police informants. The resolution states that those false
arrests - which have led to criminal charges against several former
narcotics officers and the informants - should be "indelibly etched in
our history," so that similar mistakes aren't repeated. Calling it an
"extraordinary step," City Attorney Madeleine Johnson said such a vote
expressing remorse for city failures probably is unprecedented in the
city's history. The two-page resolution asks officials to continue
searching for reasons why the department's "system designed to fight a
war on drugs was subverted so that innocent people became its
casualties." [more] and [more]
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