- 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.