Truth trickling out in Dallas fake drug case

Fallout from the Dallas fake drug scandal keeps coming, providing a rare glimpse of how police corruption can collude with unscrupulous snitches against the interests of justice. The truth is only now trickling out after one of the officers involved "flipped," becoming a cooperating witness in the corruption case against his former partner who was indicted last week for stealing money supposedly paid to confidential informants. Reported the Houston Chronicle ("New charges in fake drug case in Dallas," Dec. 19):

authorities now believe "what you had was two criminal enterprises going on at once, separate from one another but dependent on each other."

Investigators suspect that while the informants concocted the scheme and were motivated by greed, [Dallas police officer Mark] Delapaz let it continue because he was "taxing" the informants and skimming money from informant payments.

That's a sad scenario, but also predictable and unsurprising. By definition, most confidential informants are engaging in criminal activities -- that's how police get their hooks into them. They catch them committing a crime, then convince them to become a snitch rather than arrest them for it. So almost all snitch relationships involve tolerating one criminal enterprise -- that of the snitch. All that differs in the Dallas case is the officers' willingness to cash in, too: A two-fer.

Even with this ex-officer's cooperation, we may never hear the whole story. Eight different cops signed their names to field tests falsely claiming that powdered pool chalk used to set up innocent people was really cocaine or meth. Only two so far have faced indictments -- Delapaz and his former partner -- and it seems unlikely any of the other officers will ever be held accountable.