WANTED: GUILTY OR INNOCENT

• Originally published in Essence, September, 2004

Copyright 2004 Essence Communications, Inc.  

By: BOB HERBERT

Our tax dollars are funding bogus drug busts all over the country, and Blacks are the main targets
The federal government financed the tragic fiasco in Tulia, Texas, and it continues to fund regional antidrug operations that in many cases are incompetent, corrupt and racist. Poor Black or Latino communities are the most frequent targets. Over the past several years extraordinary numbers of innocent people have been swept up, publicly humiliated and imprisoned.

On November 2, 2000, police officers barged into a restaurant in Hearne, Texas, where Regina Kelly was working as a waitress to save money for college. With shocked customers, coworkers and Kelly's employer looking on, the police handcuffed the young woman and took her away. She was charged with felony drug distribution and held in jail for a month.

Kelly had never been in trouble with the law, and she had never been involved with drugs. The arrest was bogus, part of a federally funded operation run by the South Central Texas Narcotics Task Force, which turned out to be as outrageous a scam as the one in Tulia. (There are dozens of these task forces in Texas.) The charges against Kelly were dropped in 2001, but the arrest has made it difficult for her to find work and thwarted her plans to go to college.

More than two dozen innocent people, all of them Black, were seized in the Hearne scam. A particularly cruel arrest was that of Clifford Runoalds, who was stopped and handcuffed by the police as he arrived at a church for the funeral of his 18-month-old daughter. Surrounded by grieving relatives and friends, the distraught father begged to be allowed to stay for the service and the burial of his child. His pleas were ignored. Runoalds was hauled away on the spot. When the scam was uncovered several weeks after his arrest, the charges against him were dropped.

Several national organizations, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union, have been trying to get the government to rein in task forces in Texas and elsewhere that have been showered with federal money (as part of the so-called War on Drugs) and allowed to operate with little or no oversight. The task force agents can be criminal-justice amateurs, Barney Fifes with real bullets. Some have literally gone wild, arresting people willy-nilly, conducting warrantless searches, unjustly seizing property and damaging countless innocent lives.

In the Hearne case, the authorities relied on an informant who suffered from mental illness, was suicidal, and had a drug problem himself. His job was to finger at least 20 people for drug crimes. Regina Kelly and Clifford Runoalds were among those targeted from the beginning. According to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the informant, Derrick Megress, was told that if he didn't come up with the 20 cases, he and a number of his relatives would be sent to prison for many years. He was also told that the authorities would make sure he was placed in a cell with an inmate who would rape him every day.

The circumstances all but guaranteed that innocent people would be arrested. "Because of these threats," said Megress in a sworn affidavit, "I felt I had no choice except to make cases against the people they named."

The scam unraveled in 2001, and the ugly details are still emerging. Megress failed a lie detector test and, according to court papers, officers had supplied him with drugs with which to fabricate evidence. The utter absurdity of the operation became clear when a key task force agent was forced to resign because of his own cocaine use.

The fundamental problem with the task forces is that the federal government funnels huge amounts of money to local law-enforcement agencies and then allows them to run virtually unsupervised. The Justice Department distributes the money, but no one there seems to care how it's used. It was widely known that what was happening in Tulia was an atrocity, but the Justice Department never intervened.

The task forces try to make as many arrests as possible to ensure that the federal money continues to flow. The quality of the arrests doesn't matter. The capture of a real drug kingpin would not necessarily result in additional federal funds. So the task forces often look for easy ways to round up great numbers of people. They tend to focus on poor Black and Latino neighborhoods, casting nets that mostly capture low-level drug dealers, hapless drugs users and people -- like Regina Kelly and Clifford Runoalds -- who are completely innocent.

There will continue to be variations on the tragic themes of Tulia and Hearne as long as the federal government continues its indiscriminate financing of the War on Drugs without demanding true accountability and respect for the law from the agencies receiving the money.