TX House Committee: End Drug Task Force System!

UPDATE: This bill passed. See Grits' analysis of the final legislation here.

Terrific news! If the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee in the Texas House of Representatives gets its way, the long saga that began with the infamous Tulia drug stings could end next spring with the abolition of the network of Texas drug task forces paid for by the federal "Byrne grant" funding stream.

The just-released Interim Report (pdf, see pp 39-43) of the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee demands an end to Texas' regional narcotics task force system as we know it:

"Continuing to sanction task force operations as stand-alone law enforcement entities - with widespread authority to operate at will across multiple jurisdictional lines - should not continue. The current approach violates practically every sound principle of police oversight and accountability applicable to narcotics interdiction."

Wow! That's strong language condemning Texas' network of drug task forces financed by the federal Byrne grant program. The committee, led by Republican former Travis County Sheriff Chairman Terry Keel, R-Austin, minced few words in its unanimous rebuff of the task force system.

Texas' Byrne grant spending priorities, the committee observed, focus too much on enforcement compared to the national and state drug demand reduction strategies, "which place prevention and treatment programs ahead of enforcement."

Exactly right. Nationally, around 40% of all Byrne grant funds go to pay for drug task forces -- in Texas, that figure was 86% in 2004, the report noted.

What that money has bought the state, though, is a lot of trouble. "The authority of DPS to monitor and enforce [its] policies is questionable," the report finds, and numerous, embarrassing scandals besides the Tulia episode have occurred. "This problem has been exacerbated by a lack of clear accountability for addressing misconduct, with the task force officer often unaccountable to any traditional, local chain of command or accountable elected official."

Reform efforts so far, the report noted, haven't solved the problem.

"Task force operations throughout the state were placed under DPS command [in 2002] in an attempt to instill some professional consistency into task force operations in response to numerous scandals. The Department of Public Safety oversight improved the professionalism of the operations. However, even after the change, scandals continued."

Reading the report, it's easy to see why. "One of the problems has been that participating officers from various agencies are not supervised by their own agency's chain of command, have little or no contact for long periods of time with their superiors, remain in an undercover capacity for periods longer than that recommended for such operations, and thus do not operate under even minimal standards mandated by most law enforcement agencies in the United States for narcotics operations."

In other words, the committee thinks the problems that allowed Tom Coleman to run loose in Tulia have not been resolved.

For all that they're right on their criticisms, the committee's proposed recommendation on task forces strikes me as odd. They want to require that officers operating outside their jurisdiction basically do so operating under the buddy system with local officers, which, the report argues, would effectively end task force operations as they currently exist.

That's well and good, but it doesn't address the failure to spend Byrne grants on prevention and treatment, closer in line with national and state drug demand reduction priorities. The committee said that if the task force system were abolished, Byrne grant money "could" continue to be spent on law enforcement instead of treatment. I wish they'd recommended more strongly that the money be shifted to those other programs.

Overall, though, the committee recommendation represents a tidal shift in thinking at the Texas Legislature regarding drug enforcement. To even contemplate shifting resources from enforcement to prevention and treatment would not have been taken seriously before the Tulia scandals. "Although the Tulia case brought national attention to the issue of task forces," the committee noted, "and prompted the legislature in 2003 to intervene to free the final 13 people who were still behind bars, this case is by no means an isolated incident, a fact which has propelled the debate on the wisdom of continuing to utilize such task forces as a means to enforce drug laws."

It's a testament to how deeply to its core the Tulia case has shaken the Texas criminal justice system, that its reverberations have so transformed public and now legislative opinion.

For more background, see also: Byrne task forces not just a Texas problem; Drug task force support dwindling, Racial Profiling in Palestine, Profile of a Gypsy Cop, and Local officials miss the boat on Byrne grant funding.