Grits publishes "Tulia" zine for 25th anniversary: Preorder now!

Until Jeff Frazier and the good folks at Mano Amiga in San Marcos reached out about their event Monday night, I had not realized it was the 25th anniversary of the Tulia drug busts, which occurred in July of 1999. Long-time readers may recall that 46 people, mostly black, were hauled out of their homes, many in their underwear, during 6 a.m. raids the local drug task force held with a local TV news crew in tow; 39 were eventually convicted. My wife and I were deeply involved in the political response, led by ACLU of Texas.

After Jeff reached out, I asked myself, "Do I have anything to say about that episode? So I sat down, began writing, and it turned out the answer was, "Yes." I plan to publish the results of this recollection in a standalone zine called "Tulia+25,"  in a few weeks. I wanted to give Grits readers an opportunity to preorder this limited-run zine, which you can do here. 

I have no plans right now for a followup, so if you're interested, buy a zine! (Even better, buy a bunch: They make great stocking stuffers for all the justice advocates on your list.)

The Tulia busts and the political campaign in response both predated this blog, which launched in 2004. When they happened,  I was publishing what amounted to a proto-blog (sans comments) on a website I hand-coded in html called the "Texas Police Reform Center," launched in 1997 as the "Austin Police Department Hall of Shame."

Even so, long-time readers may recall that Grits was part of a 7-year political campaign organized in response to the Tulia drug busts that resulted in passage of several major pieces of legislation and, eventually, the abolition of all 51 of Texas' drug task forces, which collectively employed more than 700 undercover narcotics officers.

Arguably, it was the most successful "defund the police" campaign in American history, though that term hadn't been coined at the time. And the coup de grace was performed by a GOP governor with bipartisan support.

Nate Blakeslee wrote the definitive book documenting the legal cases. Rev. Alan Bean wrote a book telling the stories of the affected families. This zine fills in never-told history about how this all-too-common story of Drug-War overreach led to a radically uncommon outcome: Abolition of the state's drug-task force system and the rise of the state's 21st century criminal-justice reform movement. Order your copy today.

Two decades after Tulia, corroboration requirement for police in drug cases may finally have its day

Debates around the Texas George Floyd Act have revived discussions of accountability in drug enforcement that first arose two decades ago following the Tulia drug stings. Regular readers know George Floyd was one of scores of Houstonians convicted of drug possession based on the uncorroborated testimony of Houston Police Narcotics Officer Gerald Goines, whose mendacious testimony about fabricated informants resulted in the deadly Harding Street raid.

Goines' case - and the audit of the HPD narcotics unit showing similar practices by other officers were largely unregulated and unsupervised - revived failed efforts following the Tulia episode to require corroboration for police officer testimony in drug cases. This week, HB 834 (Thompson) requiring corroboration for undercover officers in drug cases passed out of committee.

Notably, as if to corroborate the need for corroboration, a couple of days before that bill cleared committee, a similar case arose in the national press. A NYPD narcotics detective responsible for thousands of arrests was found to have falsified testimony in at least 90 cases and likely many more.

Like Gerald Goines and Tom Coleman, NYPD Detective Joseph Franco has caused incalculable harm. As in Houston with Goines' victims:

erasing records can only go so far, public defenders say.

“The damage is done at the point of arrest,” said Tina Luongo, a lawyer who heads the criminal defense practice at the Legal Aid Society. “They likely had bail set on them, spent time at Rikers Island, lost jobs, were separated from their families — no matter what happens, those harms were done.” 

How much of that could have been prevented just by requiring some evidence - any evidence - beyond a police officers' word to secure a conviction?

On the most recent Reasonably Suspicious podcast, Mandy and I interviewed Jeff Blackburn, a civil rights lawyer out of Amarillo (and my old boss at the Innocence Project of Texas) about the Tulia drug stings and pending legislation to require corroboration. Jeff also testified by video at the hearing for HB 834, which is a stand-alone bill including the corroboration provision from the #TexasGeorgeFloydAct. I pulled that podcast segment out as a little seven-minute stand-alone, you can listen to it here:

Grits is excited this Texas legislation appears to have legs this year, but part of me can't help but lament our failure to secure this reform 20 years ago. Back then, the corroboration bill was scaled back to require it only for informants, not police officers, How many false convictions and abuses of power might have been prevented in the ensuing two decades if we'd won this reform back in the day? We will never know. But better late than never, the Texas Legislature has an opportunity to rectify this oversight now.

What does a successful "Defund the Police" campaign actually look like? Reconsidering Texas' abolition of Tulia-style drug task forces in light of 2020's #DefundThePolice frame

In 2020, the phrase "defund the police" captured the public imagination, for good or ill, and became the centerpiece of conservative messaging against Democrats in the fall. But it wasn't that long ago that Texas defunded dozens of regional drug task forces without any of the #DefundThePolice backlash. At their height, those task forces collectively made around 12,000 arrests per year (see FN 26 in this report), but in 2006, Gov. Rick Perry eliminated their funding with the stroke of a pen, the culmination of a years-long campaign launched in the wake of the Tulia drug stings.

What lessons might be drawn from that experience to inform "defund" or other reform campaigns today?

Grits believes there are several, including 1) the target must cooperate by remaining recalcitrant and defiant when misconduct is exposed, and 2) such an outcome requires an all-hands-on-deck approach using every advocacy tool in the book, from litigation to lobbying to public education and every other strategy, tactic and method available. Before the task forces were abolished, many hundreds of people and dozens of organizations were involved in the campaign and played pivotal roles at various points.

This let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach made the movement extremely flexible. In politics, timing and framing are everything. This occurred to me this morning when I ran across this Grits post reviewing the drug-task force saga. Over and over, promising strategies would fail and unlikely approaches taken by others would fill the void.

At the apex of their influence in the late '90s, there were 51 such multi-county agencies in Texas employing more than 700 narcotics officers statewide, all funded through federal grant money. This they supplemented with asset-forfeiture revenue: task forces were encouraged to "eat what they kill."

Their defunding in 2006 was a mixed outcome. Grits was indifferent to modestly appreciative about the drug-court money, opposed to the border-security initiative, but pleased as punch that this network of 700 officers lost its funding (though there weren't nearly that many by the time Perry pulled the plug). Of officers whose positions were eliminated, Grits' recollection is that about 150 or so were repatriated to their old agencies. But many had been hired on contract and just lost their jobs. (A few of those guys were quite mad at me and others involved in the campaign for several years afterward.)

Still, in the wake of how the politics of police accountability has shifted in 2020, with emphasis migrating from oversight and training to "defunding," it's worth recalling this successful "defund" campaign from the past. What did defunding Texas drug-task forces look like in actual, messy, real-world politics?

In a nutshell: Extreme, persistent misconduct by a handful of agencies, coupled with examples of discriminatory enforcement by most of them, resulted first in expanded oversight, then in defunding and abolition when oversight proved ineffective.

The advocacy campaign began with legal observers attending court hearings of drug defendants from the Tulia drug stings in 1999 (shout out to Jeff Frazier and Will Harrell). Reform legislation was passed in 2001 and 2003, then the task forces were placed under DPS control in 2005. Gov. Perry defunded them in 2006, the year before he signed the state's landmark probation reforms. So start to finish, it was a seven-year campaign; defunding the task forces was an overt goal for roughly five of them.

The various stages of this process involved all three branches of government: Courts identified problems through civil litigation and criminal prosecutions of errant police officers, accompanied by a wave of media coverage, including national outlets like 60 Minutes. In 2005, the Legislature placed then-autonomous task forces under DPS in an attempt to reform their practices. The following year, Governor Perry pulled the plug, exercising his authority as distributor of that particular stream of federal grant funds under state and federal law. The actual deed was anti-climactic: Grant funds in the budget were shifted from one line item to a couple of others.

The Tulia legislation in its various iterations established a vote blueprint for passing bipartisan justice reforms at the Texas Legislature that, more or less, advocates still use to this day: Bills can pass if reformers can keep 75% of Dems from bailing while holding onto 40% of Republicans. Reaching that level of support doesn't guarantee success, but dip below either threshold and your bill will likely fail. In the Texas House, especially, those numbers hold up rather reliably; in the Senate, Dan Patrick can and does withhold even bills with popular, bipartisan support, so those formulas don't always apply the way they did under his predecessors. 

In the case of drug-task forces, there were baby steps before defunding finally happened. Agencies began to drop out to avoid civil liability and many of those jurisdictions requested the same funds for other purposes. At ACLUTX, one of our strategies was to distribute grant applications to potential grantees and walk them through the application process to generate competing demands to the governor from city and county officials.

The final outcome in many ways required the task forces' cooperation, at least in terms of their poor behavior. These were conclaves of cops stationed largely in rural areas and their hostile reactions to increased oversight, or even politicians asking questions about what they do, contributed to the perception that they couldn't be reformed. Task forces rebelled against DPS authority, refusing to abide by new rules that de-prioritized drug-possession busts and changed their performance metrics to focus on drug-trafficking organizations. There was a moment when they could have continued to operate if they were willing to professionalize their operations and stop myopically focusing on low-level drug-possession and asset forfeiture. They were not. 

Another big reason defunding happened was that Governor Perry identified political opportunities to use those funds in other ways - some of which reformers may (modestly) approve of, some of which they may not. The campaign against the task forces had generated alternative demands for funds, including for drug courts, which were being touted at the time as among Perry's flagship criminal-justice reforms. And it gave him ready access to funds for grandstanding "border security" operations with Bubba-friendly names like "Operation Linebacker."

It should also be mentioned that the campaign to defund Texas' drug task forces was unimpeachably bipartisan and the major House votes all enjoyed triple-digit majorities. Oddly, in retrospect, former Republican House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee Chairman and later House Parliamentarian Terry Keel was a key figure in forcing regulation of drug task forces and shifting them to DPS control. I say oddly because Keel has recently been promoting legislation to force the Austin Police Department under DPS, just as he did with the task forces.

As an aside: Grits finds it fascinating that moving agencies under DPS is Terry Keel's go to move: Apparently he thinks DPS should run a lot more local agencies than it does! Legislators might remember that when the Austin-bashing bills come up: He could come for your guys next.

Anyway, Texas' defund-the-task-forces campaign required many years of steady, persistent, opportunistic advocacy work, including years-long litigation that launched careers: The main civil case coming out of Tulia was steered by Innocence-Project-of-Texas founder Jeff Blackburn and Vanita Gupta, who went on to lead the Civil Rights Division in Obama's DOJ and now runs the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Nate Blakeslee's first book, Tulia, focuses almost exclusively on their legal effort.

But while litigation set the stage, from there the mechanisms which led to defunding involved a great deal of legislative lobbying, independent primary research to document problems the press was ignoring, and a large-scale, grassroots organizing campaign funded significantly by out-of-state foundations. 

No state official in Texas had seriously considered defunding task forces at the turn of the century, even after the Tulia drug stings made national headlines. State leaders including legislators and Rick Perry first had to get fed up: They only took bold action after they'd personally tried to "reform" task forces, only to watch them buck official direction in much the same way Austin PD Chief Brian Manley ignores his marching orders, slow walking City Council directives and/or naysaying their pronouncements publicly.

Grits' takeaway: Leaders won't take even modest "defund" steps if they think the agency will undertake a reform path. In both the case of drug-task forces and the Austin PD this summer, more radical action was taken in large part because agency officials had been unwilling to embrace less aggressive, earlier reforms. I'm not sure the movement gets to skip the years-long process that gets leaders to those conclusions. It's arguably a pre-requisite.

I've always suspected, though have never seen it mathematically documented, that task-force abolition contributed, perhaps as significantly as the 2007 probation reforms, to flattening what was then Texas' steadily upward incarceration curve. Even if local agencies picked up some of the slack, eliminating entities responsible for 12,000 drug arrests per year had to take pressure off the system.

It's hard to conceive today, at a time in history when criminal-justice reform is more popular, but 15 years ago among Texas advocates, nobody dared dream of "Cut 50." Sure, by that time there were academics in ivory towers debating "prison abolition." But our more immediate goal back then was just to make the upward curve level out, staving off the large, continuous increases in incarceration which began during the Ann Richards era and continued throughout George Bush's governorship and Rick Perry's first term. To the extent the Drug War contributed to rising incarceration rates, slashing even a large fraction of those 12K arrests per year must've had some effect.*

There were folks at the Drug Policy Alliance who hoped Texas' campaign to abolish Byrne-grant-funded drug task forces could be replicated nationally. Many (but not all) other states fund similar task force systems with their Byrne-grant money (or did at the time). But Texas is the only state to ever pull off a complete shut-down.

In retrospect, it's easy to see why: Too many things had to go right. The level of serendipity required to convince Republican state leaders to simply defund law enforcement and spend the money on something else - with litigation, lobbying, and public-education strategies working hand in hand - was never duplicated elsewhere. What's more, advocates failed here in Texas when it came to influencing how the money from defunded agencies was spent. To the extent investment is as or more important than divestment, that part of the project failed to live up to expectations.

When it comes to 2020's "defund" debate, Grits is not a full-blown abolitionist but believes the overall footprint of law enforcement and the justice system should be substantially reduced. That said, I was 100% for abolishing drug task forces, which may signal another significant difference between the two scenarios.

The campaign to abolish task forces wasn't about abolishing police, although it was a conscious effort by activists to scale back law enforcement's footprint. Still, one could criticize drug-task forces without implying one wanted to abolish police in general. In fact, because some agencies used them to offload bad cops they couldn't fire, and because many filled out their rosters with so-called gypsy cops, they'd developed a poor reputation among traditional law enforcement and, when it was their turn in the barrel, they turned out to have surprisingly few defenders. The same can't be said of local police departments, much less those with strong police unions. They've spent decades cultivating public support.

So there are ways drug-task-force abolition is useful as a defund-the-police case study and ways in which it just may not apply. Police abolitionists certainly face a more entrenched foe at local PDs than we did at the task forces. That said, I'm guessing that, if abolitionists ever succeed anywhere, the victors will have engaged in a similar, years-long process of a massive, multi-pronged movement attempting and failing at reform in the face of a recalcitrant agency. To that extent, the process may mirror what the task forces went through.

*Texas' prison population did level off in the years following task-force abolition, but there are a number of competing theories for why and it's hard to discern which factor was decisive. Probation/parole reforms passed in 2007 were also aimed in part at reducing incarceration pressures. Around 2012, the parole board began slightly increasing rates of offenders released on parole, which led to a decrease big enough to close several prison units in 2013. Then in 2015, the state adjusted property thresholds upward, making the minimum-felony-theft threshold $2,500, the highest in the nation. This reduced both sentences of incarceration and the number of people on felony probation eligible to be revoked to prison. The election of less regressive DAs in Texas' large cities could be contributing to lower incarceration numbers. Finally, although the state has seen a murder spike in 2020, crime declined significantly for much of the last 15 years and it's possible lower prison totals may be explained by that direct, simple fact. Nobody knows for sure. Regardless, Texas' prison population today has reached levels unseen since the mid-90s, with plenty of room left for even further reductions.

Killing off Texas' drug-task force system: A reminiscence

State Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa called this morning to reminisce about the effort to rein in and, ultimately, de-fund, Texas' system of multi-county drug task forces, a campaign referenced in this post, and he was such an unsung hero in that story, Grits thought it worthwhile to recount his role briefly.

State Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa

The Tulia drug stings arguably mark the beginning of the 21st century Texas #cjreform movement, but by the time they occurred, Chuy Hinojosa was already a veteran legislator in the Texas House and was poised to chair the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee in 2001. From that position, he carried and passed legislation to require corroboration for informants in undercover drug stings which was bitterly opposed by prosecutors and police unions. Then-rookie Sen. Leticia Van de Putte carried it in the Senate, and ended up taking on a bigger fight than she'd bargained for!

The campaign for a corroboration bill took on a life of its own, with local religious activists from Tulia organizing their people to come to Austin, while allies came out of the woodwork, from the right and left alike, in support of a drug-policy reform agenda which previously had no, obvious legislative champions. This was essentially tilling virgin, bipartisan terrain. (Check out a contemporary flyer from that campaign promoting our bill among religious conservatives; here's the "mainstream" version.)

The House floor vote on the Tulia corroboration bill was the first time in living memory that a bipartisan, grassroots, reformist faction outflanked the center-right ruling faction on criminal-justice topics. The media loved the Tulia story and trumpeted the success everywhere, helping bring additional resources and momentum to the nascent #cjreform movement in Texas. Groups like the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition and the Texas Fair Defense Project were created during this period in the early aughts - it was the first time the movement here had institutions as opposed to just a few disparate voices.

Perhaps even more importantly, that floor vote provided a template for passing a flood of reform legislation that followed. In retrospect, it was a pivotal moment.

Hinojosa continued to demand accountability from drug-task forces, and finally the other side pushed too far. In 2005, during session, the senator reminded me today, he was pulled over by a drug task force officer who suspected him of being a drug courier, perhaps because the senator was driving a nice vehicle. The senator believed he was being racially profiled, or worse, targeted for filing reform legislation to force all the task forces under control of the Texas Department of Public Safety. After that happened, the Senate's passage of the put-em-under-DPS bill was a fait accompli.

By this time, most of the Tulia defendants had been exonerated and pardoned, the cop who set them up had pled guilty to perjury, some of the task forces had been targeted via federal civil rights litigation, and your correspondent had spent several years compiling examples of task force abuses in a campaign based out of ACLU of Texas aimed at getting rid of them. In other words, the terms of debate had significantly changed.

The Legislature refused to get rid of drug task forces outright in 2005, but they did pass a compromise bill putting them under control of the Department of Public Safety Narcotics Division, which at that time was run by Patrick O'Burke, a square-jawed, no-nonsense guy who demanded more accountability using better metrics than they were used to.

In  the end, the majority of task forces refused accountability and declined to follow some or all of O'Burke's new rules.

Meanwhile, at ACLU of Texas, we were encouraging every eligible entity in the state that might compete with drug task forces for Byrne grant money to apply to the governor, even sending blank applications and pitch information to various local officials by snail mail and following up with calls encouraging them to apply. Many did, and every time one of them made a compelling case for funding, it simultaneously made an implicit case that the task forces shouldn't receive funds.

At this point, in 2006, then-Governor Rick Perry surprised everyone. Drug-task forces were funded through his office's Criminal Justice Division using federal Byrne grants, and he decided to turn off the spigot. A few task forces tried to keep going until their asset forfeiture money ran out, and others created single-county task forces outside of DPS control (and without state or federal money).

In the end, except for a few that scaled back to a much-reduced single-county footprint, they all just went away. When the Tulia drug stings happened, there were 53 multi-county task forces covering most of the state and employing around 700 narcotics officers who collectively made some 12,000 arrests annually. And then they didn't. Moreover, I dare say, for all the sound and fury surrounding their de-funding, I haven't heard them mentioned (by Texans) in years and as far as I can tell, no one misses them.

However, there's a somewhat dark and unfortunate coda to that story. When Gov. Perry de-funded Texas' drug task forces, he decided to split the pot of federal money to pay for two other priorities: 1) drug courts and other specialty court dockets, and 2) the original "border security" surge along the Rio Grande which presaged the current DPS/National Guard surge (read Melissa del Bosque's story on the border surge if you haven't already; go ahead, I'll wait).

Eventually, federal Byrne funds were replaced with hundreds of millions of general revenue dollars, most of it to pay for the Department of Public Safety to rotate troopers to the border for inefficient, short-term deployments.

So abolition of the Byrne-grant funded drug-task-force system in Texas was a victory for bipartisan justice reform - both liberals and small-government conservatives support scaling back the failed drug war - but it freed up funds for an unnecessary and problematic militarization of the border.

According to Sen. Hinojosa, the border-surge priorities issue goes far beyond just DPS troopers not making DWI arrests in the rest of the state. He cited Parks and Wildlife not having enough personnel for duties in the northern part of his senate district around Kingsville/Corpus Christi because they're all deployed in the Valley.

Grits appreciated the senator calling to reminisce after reading my drug-task force post from the weekend. There aren't that many of us still in the game who remember all of that well enough to tell the stories.

So, a day late after Memorial Day, here's a hearty thank you to a former marine, for his service a lifetime ago in Vietnam, to be sure, but for his yeoman's service on these topics, as well. ¡Gracias, Chuy! 

Remembering Texas' now-defunct drug-task-force system

On Twitter, a reader came up with a blast from the past, asking whatever happened to Texas' multi-jurisdictional drug task forces, which I'd written about in two different public-policy reports back when I worked for the Texas ACLU, along with countless Grits posts in the mid-aughts:

• Too Far Off Task (2002), and
• Flawed Enforcement (2004)

The answer, long-time readers may recall, is that Gov. Rick Perry de-funded all of Texas' task multi-jurisdictional narcotics forces in 2006, shifting half the money to drug courts (and other types of specialty courts) and half to border security (this was the first pot of money spent to bolster border security in Texas on essentially nativist grounds).

This transition was the result of a multi-year campaign which began in the aftermath of the Tulia drug stings in 1999, an episode which in many ways marks the beginning of the modern criminal-justice reform movement in Texas.

The timeline went thusly: In 2005, the Legislature put the task forces under control of the Texas Department of Public Safety, which created rules to regulate them under the same strictures as DPS' own Narcotics Division. But the task forces balked at the new rules, in many cases openly defying the DPS commander in charge of them. And a year or so later, Gov. Perry simply chose to spend federal grant money on other priorities.

To my knowledge, Texas is the only state to get rid of its drug task forces on accountability grounds, and it's worth noting that the sky didn't fall. Indeed, hardly anyone who wasn't a grant recipient seemed to notice or care. Grits has maintained for years that other states should follow Texas' lead.

MORE: Check out a followup post.

Can Washington D.C. help Texas end mass incarceration?

Inimai Chettiar of the Brennan Center will speak at the LBJ School in Austin today and as fate would have it she just co-wrote an essay in The Hill suggesting ways the federal government could create incentives for decarceration in the states. Though Grits had earlier paired suggestions from the Brennan Center and Prof. John Pfaff (whose name always makes me think he should be from Pflugerville), Chettiar framed their positions as oppositional, IMO somewhat needlessly.

Chettiar and her coauthor, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, want to roll back federal incentives for overincarceration, but Texas has more prisoners than any other state and the biggest item named was never adopted here. Speaking of the 1994 federal crime bill, they wrote:

Perhaps most significantly, the bill authorized $12.5 billion for states that adopted “truth-in-sentencing” laws, which stipulate an offender must serve at least 85 percent of their lengthy sentences. After the bill was enacted, 24 states passed such laws. As one example, New York received more than $216 million, and by 2000, the state had added more than 12,000 prison beds, incarcerating 28 percent more of its citizens than a decade before. The law was a turning point for America’s philosophy and practices of punishment.

FWIW, Texas was not one of the states that adopted that 85% rule. And their other main example wasn't a perfect fit, either, for 2016 Texas:

The Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program (JAG) is another example of the federal government’s role in increasing arrests and incarceration. The program provides around $400 million annually to more than 1,000 cities across all 50 states. It is the largest single source of federal criminal justice funds for states and localities.

For years, JAG funding helped incentivize more arrests, prosecutions, and imprisonment in states and cities. When handing out the money, the federal government asked state and local police departments to report numbers of arrests but not changes in crime rates. It tallied the amount of drugs seized, but not whether offenders were sent to drug treatment. If a state wanted money, it had to produce numbers.

Long-time readers of this blog will recall that, for many years Texas spent nearly all its Byrne grant money on regional narcotics task forces, like the one in the infamous Tulia drug stings, which were judged by similar arrest-maximizing metrics to those described above. But after a series of scandals, legislative interventions, an ill-fated DPS takeover of the system, a sustained, five-year advocacy campaign (see a couple of public policy reports I wrote on the topic for ACLU of TX back in the day), and remarkable episodes of defiance, in 2006 Rick Perry defunded dozens of task forces around the state and split the money toward basically two new priorities: drug courts and border security (which was the first government spending presaging the massive $800 million border boondoggle the Lege authorized last session, though that's a story for another day).

I've always wondered if reduced drug possession arrests - at their height the Byrne-funded drug task forces statewide claimed to make 12,000+ drug arrests per year - might have partially contributed to the leveling off of Texas' prison population in the mid-aughts? Some of those arrests would have still been made by those officers' parent agencies (local PDs and Sheriffs contributed officers to the task forces), but I bet there was some non-insignificant front-end decline.

Regardless, while I agree with the Brennan Center about removing federal incentives, Texas' prison population remains quite large without them, so that won't do much here. More interesting to me was their proposal, discussed in the earlier Grits post, to create incentives for states to safely de-incarcerate:

Congress can pass a modern day crime bill that directs federal funds to states that reduce their prison populations, while keeping down crime. (The Brennan Center has proposed such a bill.) Today, $3.8 billion in federal grants run largely on autopilot, on the outdated notion that increasing prison populations brings us wins against crime. The next president can champion such an Act. Even without Congress, the next president has executive authority to redirect much of this money, helping create a major nationwide shift.

Many states did react to money incentives in the way she describes, and many states would surely adjust to the new incentives as well. Maybe even Texas.

In any event, I see nothing mutually exclusive between Chettiar's suggestions and Pfaff's idea, which was that the feds could contribute money to states for purposes of providing an adequate defense. Either would be good, both would be better.

DOJ civil rights chief shaped by landmark TX litigation

In the course of twenty years in Texas' criminal-justice reform movement, Grits has enjoyed the good fortune to work with a bevy of amazing women and, for whatever reason, only a handful of men operating at the same, high levels who for the most part were unable to get out of their (our) own way.

Emblematic of the former, happier, group is Vanita Gupta who took over as acting head of the Civil Rights Division at the US Justice Department in October but, in a past life, was once co-counsel on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the legal tussle following the Tulia drug busts. She went on to run national ACLU's Campaign to End Mass Incarceration before President Obama selected her for the Civil Rights post.

The Tulia episode, which for all intents and purposes inaugurated Texas' 21st century criminal-justice reform movement as we know it today, transformed the political and legal landscape surrounding the drug war and innocence issues in this state. Bail mechanisms put in place to free the Tulia defendants while awaiting the processing of habeas writs were later routinely used to free DNA exonerees. Voting blocks first created to pass reform legislation in the wake of the growing national scandal became templates for future criminal justice legislation, including Texas' much-vaunted 2007 probation reforms. And the abolition of Texas' drug task force system significantly shifted the focus of local law enforcement in ways that we couldn't foresee at the time.

So Grits couldn't avoid a moment of nostalgia when this profile on Gupta - who in the wake of the post-Ferguson police accountability maelstrom became an instant national figure -  prominently featured her years working on the Tulia case as a formative experience:

In 2001, a 26-year-old, fresh out of law school, had just started at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and was looking for a case. When she saw a short documentary about a troubling large-scale drug bust in a tiny Texas town, with facts she thought were "almost too outrageous to believe," as she later put it, Vanita Gupta decided to check things out for herself.

Tulia, Texas, a town of about 5,000 people, was the scene of a large drug bust in 1999 that rounded up more than 10 percent of the city's small black population. A total of 46 people -- mostly black, but a few of them white and in relationships with African-Americans -- were arrested on charges of trafficking cocaine. Local news coverage celebrated the arrests, with one newspaper proclaiming that Tulia's streets had been "cleared of garbage." The defendants were convicted and given extraordinarily lengthy sentences: 300 years. 90 years. 60 years.

The evidence against many of them? Uncorroborated testimony of a single man: a former rodeo cowboy who regularly used racial slurs, whom local police had hired to go undercover and target "street-level" dealers.

After a few days of meetings with family members and a local attorney, Gupta returned to her New York office with so many documents she had to buy an extra suitcase at Walmart. The case would soon grab still more attention. "60 Minutes" deemed the case one of the "worst miscarriages of justice in recent memory." The New York Times described it as a "national symbol of racial injustice." The agent on whose testimony the case rested, who had been named Texas Lawman of the Year in 1999 for his work in Tulia, was called "devious" by a Texas judge, who said he had committed "blatant perjury." The agent was later convicted on aggravated perjury charges. Gov. Rick Perry (R) pardoned most of the Tulia defendants, and Gupta helped the plaintiffs secure a $5 million settlement that required the federally funded drug task force responsible for the arrests to be disbanded.

But Tulia wasn't an isolated incident, Gupta said, it was just the tip of the iceberg. "There is a need for more systemic reform to prevent other Tulias from taking place," she said in a 2004 interview with NYU Law, her alma mater. 

For the record, the Tulia settlement didn't "require" the drug task forces to be disbanded. That happened after a five-year campaign resulting in legislation by Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa to put the drug task forces under control of the Department of Public Safety. Most of them refused to accept oversight or follow the rules, leaving Gov. Rick Perry little choice but to de-fund them in the end.

Still, Vanita played a pivotal role. And though we haven't communicated in a couple of years, I'd like to think those formative experiences 15 years ago which shaped both of us so significantly still connect us in some small way. I'm really quite proud of her.

Corrupt South Texas drug cops sentenced

A team of corrupt Hidalgo County deputies and the son of the former Hidalgo Sheriff were sentenced to federal prison this week, concluding a disgraceful episode in which they protected drug shipments, robbed drug couriers and engaged in other crimes under the color of law enforcement. Here's a notable excerpt from the McAllen Monitor (April 30):

The Panama Unit corruption scandal started and ended with Jonathan Treviño.

On Wednesday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Randy Crane sentenced former Mission police Investigator Jonathan Treviño — the youngest son of Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño, who himself resigned and pleaded guilty to laundering drug money— to 17 years behind bars.

The corruption scandal started with the Panama Unit, an anti-narcotics squad that went rogue, stealing drugs and cash from criminals. Investigators eventually indicted nine Hidalgo County lawmen and three drug traffickers connected with the Panama Unit.

“What you all have done is disgrace us,” Crane said, concluding the nearly five-hour hearing Wednesday on the ninth floor of Bentsen Tower. “And sentencing you to prison isn’t ever going to bring back the damage that has been done to our community, and what people think of the Sheriff’s Office and law enforcement.”

Jonathan Treviño, who turned 30 on Friday, received the harshest sentence. Assistant U.S. Attorney James Sturgis described him as the ringleader, saying he approved all the Panama Unit’s illegal activity and negotiated drug transactions through an intermediary. ...

While technically a partnership between the Mission Police Department and Sheriff’s Office, the only person assigned to the Panama Unit who didn’t ultimately report to Sheriff Treviño was Jonathan Treviño — the sheriff’s son. They gradually went bad, according to court testimony, with small thefts escalating to major narcotics transactions and armed robbery.

Federal agents started making arrests on Dec. 12, 2012, starting with Jonathan Treviño and three other lawmen. The Panama Unit investigation and a related corruption indictment eventually resulted in criminal cases against Sheriff Treviño, the county’s three-term sheriff; Cmdr. Jose Padilla, a top-ranking lawman who helped run the sheriff’s re-election campaigns; and Chief of Staff Pat Medina, the sheriff’s longtime assistant and campaign treasurer.

On Wednesday, the two-day Panama Unit sentencing hearing concluded where the investigation started — with Jonathan Treviño. Along with him, four other disgraced lawmen and a drug trafficker appeared Wednesday in federal court.

Crane handed down prison sentences ranging from 10 to 14 years.

Drug cases dropped from misconduct, and other stories

A few, disparate items that caught my eye:

J. Salvador fiasco impacts first case beyond Galveston
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has granted relief (pdf) for the first time in one of the Jonathon Salvador drug cases originating outside Galveston, where the District Attorney has been facilitating them most quickly. Not only that, in this case out of Harris County, unlike in Galveston, the DA's office attempted to contest the findings on behalf of the defendant but were rebuffed both by the trial court and now the CCA, which used the same boilerplate language they used to grant 18 prior cases. By Grits' count, the 19 cases overturned so far have totaled 151.5 years, for an average of eight years per case. There could easily be thousands of cases overturned based on this one lab analyst's misconduct by the time we're done. UPDATE: See more from the Houston Chronicle.

Deja vu on drug task force misconduct
As many as 75 drug cases may be dismissed in Hidalgo County because of recent misconduct charges against key members of their multi-agency drug task force. Multi-county task forces were put under DPS supervision in 2005 and those have all closed up shop rather than comply with more strict DPS policies than their loosey-goosey, oversight-free status had afforded them. But some counties simply scaled back to multi-agency drug task forces among agencies in the same county - which are not regulated by DPS - and those continue to crop up as sources of corruption and ineptitude.

Understaffing and jail suicides
See a must-read piece by Michael Barajas at the SA Current titled "Dead in Seven Hours: When overdosed meets overworked, Bexar County Jail's fatal flaws come to light."

Texas groups excoriate 5th Circuit judge over recent speech
Judge Edith Jones of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has drawn a formal complaint from a variety of organizations in response to a recent, public exhibition of foot and mouth disease, reported the Austin Chronicle. Read the whole thing, a brief summary can't do it justice. See also more from the Texas Tribune, and a blog post from Paul Kennedy.

Private prison news
Several good, interesting posts over at Texas Prison Bidness if you haven't visited recently.

More media on warrants-for-email
The warrants for email legislation continues to get good coverage. There was a nice item from KVUE in Austin. See others here, here, and here. And prior press roundups. (Whether readers are sick of it or not, I need to keep tabs on the press it gets.)

Youth crime reductions leading recent crime drops
The latest drop in crime nationally is being led by a substantial reduction in youth crime, found the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Justice in New York. Grits readers, of course, are aware of my own favorite theory why that's the case: Young people spend a great deal of time engaged with technology like the internet, video games and cell phones that didn't exist 25 years ago. These activities occupy time of teens and young adults who are the most likely to commit crimes. The kid perfecting his skills at Grand Theft Auto V may not be preparing himself for the job market, but he isn't out stealing my car. There's even some formal research to back up that notion. Obviously, though, there are many factors contributing to 21st century crime reductions.

Elimination of drug task forces a blessing in disguise from sequester cuts

Long-time readers know that Texas eliminated its statewide system of drug task forces - funded through the federal Byrne grant program - in the wake of the Tulia drug scandal and repeated improprieties at other task forces. The Legislature in 2005 put them under control of the Department of Public Safety, which found them unmanageable. Then Governor Perry in 2006 decided to eliminate task force funding and shift that federal grant money to other priorities like specialty courts and border security. Most states, though, still spend all or part of the portion of the Byrne grants distributed as block grants on networks of locally staffed "regional narcotics task forces" which in many cases have operated on the federal dime for more than two decades.

Having already been cut in recent years, the sequester has resulted in plans for Byrne grants to be radically reduced over the next decade. Stateline.org has a story about drug task force systems in other states shutting down as a result. Give it a read. Their account of Texas' decision to eliminate task forces at the end of the story is a bit off on the finer details, but in general it's correct that the Tulia scandal launched a rethinking of the drug task force system by the Legislature and the Governor that resulted in their demise.

The flip side of Stateline's task force story is that, in Texas, the loss of grant funds due to the sequester will affect those specialty court, treatment, training, and border security programs where the Governor's Criminal Justice Division shifted the money. While Grits would hate to see treatment and specialty court dollars go away, I consider most of the border-security pork misspent and in general I don't think it especially proper, under principles of federalism, for the national government to fund local courts or law enforcement. So it won't bother me a lot if Byrne grants become a permanent casualty of the sequester.

The drug task force network was a mess in Texas and I bet other states will find, just like we did, that once they're gone, their absence will solve more problems than it creates.

See a sampling of the many past Grits posts on Byrne grants and drug task forces

• Hyping Harm: Media should welcome, not decry Byrne grant cuts
• Texas' Tulia Lesson: Dems should join GOP in abandoning failed drug task force strategy
• Byrne task forces account for huge percentage of drug arrests in other states
• Revisionism begins in effort to restore drug task force pork
• 'Operation Byrne Blitz' makes explicit arrests-for-dollars link
• Byrne task force funds mainly financing low-grade enforcement
• Left and right join to bash Byrne grants in D.C.
• Hug a drug task force officer, he's having a bad day
• Era of Tulia-style task forces coming to an end in Texas
• More problems than Tulia caused drug task forces to close
• Why drug task forces must go 101 

Reforming state jails, prosecution as grant management, and other stories

Just a few odds and ends that didn't make it into their own, individual posts:

Narcotics task force cops robbed drug dealers instead of arrest them
Reported the McAllen Monitor, "Two Mission narcotics investigators have been arrested alongside other local law enforcement officers in a federal corruption probe focusing on drug loads stolen from the criminals they had been tasked with taking down." The alleged perpetrators were part of "a joint drug task force made up of Hidalgo County and Mission officers." Long-time readers may recall that multi-county task forces were placed under jurisdiction of the Department of Public Safety back in 2005, with most of them going under within a year, either because they refused DPS supervision or, the rest of them, when Gov. Perry pulled the plug on their funding. But some multi-agency task forces soon formed among agencies all within the same county, as in this example, and clearly some of the same problems still arise. See more on the latest episode from Texas Watchdog.

Conservative plan for reforming state jails
The Texas Public Policy Foundation's Jeanette Moll argued in an Austin Statesman editorial that Texas hamstrung the state jail system "before the first state jail even opened its doors" by implementing direct sentencing instead of using them as a short-term probation sanction. She suggested that, "With hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year on state jails, and outcomes worse than prison, state jails are in dire need of reform." (See related Grits coverage on Ms. Moll's proposals.)

'Texas DPS marks 10,000th match in open cases'
So reported the Texas Tribune. The looming question: Will the Legislature spend money to expand DNA testing capacity at Texas crime labs, not to mention DWI blood testing and other areas where crime labs have backlogs.

Just say "No" to sobriety checkpoints
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram asks "Should Texas have sobriety checkpoints?" For reasons previously stated, Grits votes no.

Strong probation for meth-head driver who hit cyclist
A round of apology letters, an 18-month ban on coaching youth sports teams, and $8,000 in restitution are among "unique" probation conditions for a meth-using driver who struck a stopped motorcycllist from behind in Weatherford.

His only apology is for apologizing
The Waco Tribune interviewed former county tax assessor Buddy Skeen who's currently in jail for misuse of public funds and regrets agreeing to apologize for his actions in open court as a condition of his plea. "I wasn’t punished for my crime. I was punished for my political affiliation."

School discipline roundup

The Texas Education Report has updates on the controversy over RFID use in two San Antonio schools (see related Grits coverage), a report on the hundreds of millions spent by large school districts on disciplinary systems, and another report on a pilot program at Waco ISD aiming to reduce disciplinary referrals, a subject that's lately received national attention. See a related, recent report from the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition titled, "Community Solutions for Youth in Trouble."

Girls' experience in the juvenile justice system
See the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition's recent report.

Prosecution as grant management?
Is there seemingly no failure in public life which cannot be criminally prosecuted?

Peach state criminal justice reform?
Watch what Georgia does on scaling back criminal justice spending. If it can pass in the Peach State, it's got a chance in the Texas Lege.

Private Prison Exec a Grade A Creep
Thomas Weirdsma, the senior vice president of project development at private prison company GEO Group, in my book is a Grad A creep. He's been taking heat lately for a video deposition in which he said that giving false testimony to government agencies "happens all the time." But the real scandal comes from evicting his immigrant daughter in law and allegedly threatening to use his immigration agency connections to have her deported if she pressed charges against his son after she endured "multiple drunken beatings, a near drowning in a bathtub, and an attempted suffocation with a pillow," the Boulder Daily Camera reported earlier this year. Ick! Awarding the daughter-in-law a $1.2 million verdict, jurors found that the Weirdesmas, father and son, each engaged in "outrageous conduct" during the episode, which sounds to me like an understatement.

Huge fine for HSBC money laundering
Finally, a serious punishment for an international bank for money laundering. I'd come to think banks and businesses had been declared effectively exempt from money laundering enforcement, so this is a good sign. A $1.9 billion fine will serve as an actual deterrent for a big company, as opposed to the relatively penny ante "deferred prosecution" cases we've seen in the past. Some despair, though, that no executives are ever personally prosecuted in money laundering cases; particularly at banks like HSBC they're considered "too big to jail." MORE: From Paul Kennedy and Scott Greenfield.

Harsh CIA interrogations ineffective
So concluded the most extensive-ever analysis on the topic, though it's a conclusion I once thought professional interrogators had reached many decades ago following the Wickersham Commission.

Special prosecutor needed after murder of Hearne civil rights activist

Photo via The Texas Observer.

Charles Workman, a Baptist minister, former city council member, and civil rights advocate in Hearne, Texas, was mysteriously murdered last week. According to news reports he was shot in the head and his car was found set on fire. Among local legal observers, fears have arisen that the Robertson County District Attorney, John Paschall, won't aggressively pursue the case because Workman had become an influential nemesis of the long-time DA in the aftermath of the infamous Hearne drug stings, which contributed to the ultimate de-funding of Texas system of narcotics task forces statewide, including one led by Paschall. (At the time the episode occurred, Paschall had "final authority for the policies, practices and/or customs of the Task Force," according to the lawsuit [pdf] filed by the ACLU Drug Policy Litigation project, which the county eventually settled.)

The drug sting in Hearne made national headlines, contributed to passage of multiple pieces of state legislation, and was depicted in a feature film, American Violet, directed by Tim Disney. Workman was among the most active Hearne family members fighting both to free those accused by confidential informant Derrick Megress and to get the state to regulate (and eventually abolish) Texas' network of regional narcotics task forces. A 2005 Texas Observer story recounted that, "Charles Workman understands the dynamic of Hearne-style justice as well as anyone. Paschall has a vendetta against his family, he believes, as his stepson and nephew were both arrested in the sting." Paschall tried, and failed, to prosecute Workman on voter-fraud charges soon after the Hearne case ended.

Making matters even more worrisome, Paschall has been accused by a former Hearne police sergeant of interfering with local law enforcement in another murder - that of a man named Hank Johnson, in which Paschall's brother in law was a key suspect. See local TV coverage of that case, including a recording made by the detective in charge accusing Paschall of interfering with the investigation, to which Paschall responded by threatening him.

I haven't seen Charles since 2005 - when we worked together to pass a statute regulating Texas' regional narcotics task forces - and certainly have no knowledge of the circumstances surrounding his death  But I don't trust John Paschall to disinterestedly prosecute, nor to avoid interfering with the investigation. Grits would feel much more comfortable if a special prosecutor were appointed in any criminal proceedings that arise from Workman's death and Paschall stayed completely out of the matter.

Charles Workman's funeral was on Saturday and regrettably I couldn't attend, but Grits extends sincere condolences to his family and friends. From our interactions over about a five year span following the sting in Hearne, I always found him to be a good and honorable man. May he rest in peace.

Last multi-county narcotics task force in Texas closing its doors

Long-time readers may recall that this blog's first couple of years devoted extensive coverage to the downfall of Texas system of regional narcotics task forces, which were first regulated by the state and later de-funded by the Governor after a series of scandals in Tulia, Hearne, and elsewhere. As of June 30, the last of those entities will officially no longer exist.

At their height, Texas had 53 multi-county drug task forces which employed more than 700 officers, but after the Governor shifted their money to border security and other priorities, only one was able to keep going: The West Central Texas Interlocal Crime Task Force, which had a large sum of money in the bank from a massive 1999 currency bust on I-20. Thanks to that $9.9 million stash, the task force "remained operational long after others were shuttered."

Several other task forces had hoped to stay open through an "eat what you kill" strategy, living off asset forfeiture income like privateers plundering enemy vessels on the high seas. But that revenue turned out to be unreliable at best and this task force was the only one with enough forfeiture money already banked to seriously make a go of it.

According to the Abilene Reporter News (June 21), "In 2011, with seizures down, the decision was made not to keep the task force, and its $750,000 annual operating budget, afloat." As of last week, "Agency equipment and vehicles already have been auctioned, and the final piece of business was to return evidence in pending cases to their home jurisdictions."

Eastland County Sheriff Wayne Bradford told the Reporter-News that:

instead of sting operations, the county was focusing on traffic stops.

"Working traffic is our best option right now, using intelligence gathered from stops. We catch people with drugs, ask where they got it, and if they saw drugs there within 72 hours, we can get a search warrant and go in there and try to make an arrest," he said.

Budget reduction for Cali drug task forces not comparable to Texas cuts

Long-time readers will recall that in Grits' earliest days ('04-06), this blog focused a great deal on the flaws and fallacies underlying Texas' now-defunct network of regional, multi-county drug task forces financed by the federal Byrne grant program, at least until Governor Rick Perry took away their funding and shifted it toward drug courts, diversion programs, and border security. Indeed, I've suggested in the past that other states should follow Perry's lead. So I was fascinated to learn (via Drug War Rant) that California will soon eliminate state funds for their comparable drug task force network because they can't afford the 25% state match for the grant. Reports the Eureka (CA) Times Standard:

The California Attorney General's Office issued notice to most of the state's 52 drug task forces -- including Humboldt County's -- that it will be pulling its agents and fiscal support effective Jan. 1 due to sharp state budget cuts to the office's Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement.

In an effort to bridge a then-$26 billion state budget gap, the Legislature approved a $71 million reduction to the bureau's $77 million budget next year -- a cut that will trigger the loss of an additional $40 million in matching funds. As a result, the Department of Justice is expected to lay off more than 200 agents before Jan. 1. Humboldt County Drug Task Force Cmdr. Dan Harward expects to be among them.

”Personally, I'm operating under that assumption,” said Harward, who moved his family to the area from Southern California last fall to head the task force.

According to reports, "In a Wednesday statement, Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro (D-Arcata) said the DOJ cuts won't result in the layoffs of any local law enforcement officers, but 'may result in a reduction of coordination between the Attorney General's Office and local law enforcement programs.'" So unlike here, the task forces aren't just going away.

At their height, Texas boasted 53 regional narcotics task forces employing around 700 officers. Counties and local agencies came up with all the matching funds themselves - mostly in the form of employee salaries and asset forfeiture income - while in Cali there seems to be more state infrastructure, which is what's being cut. California Governor Jerry Brown hasn't proposed nearly as radical a fix as that enacted under Rick Perry, who redirected all the federal Byrne grant money to other areas. They're only eliminating the state's portion of the matching funds, leaving the task forces to operate on their own. By comparison, Gov. Perry first signed legislation to increase supervision by the state of drug task forces, only eliminating their funding when they proved  essentially ungovernable.

So rather than following in Texas' footsteps, in a way California is now devolving to what Texas was doing in the pre-Tulia era, when regional task forces operated with no practical state supervision. With Cali already facing an overincarceration crisis replete with federal court orders to reduce the nonviolent prison population, Governor Brown would do well to follow Rick Perry's lead, shifting Byrne money entirely from low-level drug enforcement to fund treatment, diversion and alternative sentencing instead of just reducing task forces' accountability.

A bipartisan consensus favoring criminal justice pork

A frequent theme on this blog is that support for Big Government solutions in the criminal justice arena is usually bipartisan, and here are two recent datapoints supporting that claim:

• Democrats created the Edward Byrne Justice Assistance grant program in the '80s and defending this state-level pork is one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement in an otherwise sharply divided US Congress.
• The Justice Policy Institute just issued a report titled "Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote Ineffective Incarceration Policies," documenting cross-partisan giving by the two largest private prison firms - Geo Group and Corrections Corporation of America - generally giving to successfully reelected incumbents on key committees. Party mattered less than position when analyzing who received private prison donations, according to this study.

Both those trends reinforce how important it is to avoid partisan labels when analyzing criminal justice politics. In both instances, the issues simply don't break along party lines: Elected officials from both parties support law-enforcement pork, just as both parties' candidates receive significant donations from corporate-prison interests. A recent post at Texas Prison Bidness reinforces the sense that these companies are seeking to buy political influence, or at least that's what I'd infer from news that former Bush-era Bureau of Prisons chief Harvey Lappin recently left the BOP to take an executive job at Corrections Corporation of America. That's pretty overtly "gaming the system," to use JPI's lingo: Hiring the guy who runs the federal prison system you've been seeking contracts from for years. That's gotta be helpful when preparing CCA's next bid.

See related Grits posts:

• Obama shouldn't spend stimulus money on Byrne grants 
• Byrne grants: The anti-stimulus
• Purchasing access: Examining the Geo Group's political expenditures
• Lege sends savings from closed prison to private prisons instead of diversion programming
• Privatizing Harris County Jail would save money by cutting guard pay, benefits
  
• Private prison bubble bursting? Empty speculative jails in Texas
• Texas dominates immigration detention
  
• Orwellian-named immigration policy massively subsidizes private prisons in Texas
• Geo Group's purchase of Houston private prison company leaves it highly leveraged

Counting criminal justice cuts from the federal budget deal

Looking at the fine print of the new federal budget deal, several criminal justice items jumped out:

• $415 million for state and local law enforcement grants (probably the Byrne grant program administered by the Governor)
• $148 million cut from juvenile justice program grants
• $296 million cut from the COPS program that pays for local agencies to hire officers without paying for them for the first three years.
• $133 million in construction projects by the FBI.
• $120 million cut from "Justice Information Sharing Technology"*
• $106 million cut for "Tactical Law Enforcement Wireless Communication"
• $15 million cut from the Washington, D.C. Forensics Lab
• $10 million cut from the National Drug Intelligence Center

*All figures represent reductions from FY 2010 levels except spending for "Justice Information Sharing Technology," most of which was scheduled to be spent in FY 2011.

These are cuts in the current fiscal year, meaning grants and other federal law enforcement funds previously thought to be available may now be thrown into question. Presumably all these cuts came from the Republican side of the aisle, since they were the ones pushing for reductions. Ever since Texas abolished its system of Tulia-style drug task forces, Byrne grants through the Goveror's office have made up a significant portion of Texas' extra border security funds over the years, and the juvenile justice and COPS reductions will also affect Texas locals in the jurisdictions where cities or counties have received those grants. Also, though it's a relatively small cut, given all the craziness involving Mexican drug cartels it surprises me to see $10 million slashed from the National Drug Intelligence Center. Interesting list.

Tulia-style mass drug bust in Wichita Falls perpetuates cycle instead of breaking it

Whenever I see reports of large drug stings like the one described this week in the Wichita Falls Times-Record News ("Sheriff expects more arrests," March 25), where 44 people so far have been arrested in a roundup following a long-term undercover operation, I always think of the infamous drug busts in Tulia and Hearne, where innocent people were caught up in similar drug stings netting dozens of convictions based on testimony from a lying cop and a coerced, mentally ill informant, respectively. Rather than track drug sources up the ladder looking for kingpins and cartel connections, in these sorts of "sweep" operations, agencies seek to maximize the number of penny-ante arrests by making small-time buy-busts using informants or undercover narcs, typically without ever disrupting the availability of drugs in the least. (Bail on the most serious offender was $175,000; we're not talking about Pablo Escobar here.)

Just as in Tulia and Hearne, the local media is already participating in the demonization of these defendants, including posting all their mug shots, helping sour the jury pool in a way that's actually not allowed in Britain and some other western countries. What's the journalistic value of publishing photos like this one in small-time drug possession cases?

A spokesperson from the Wichita DA's office said she "hoped the local law enforcement efforts would help break what she called a perpetual cycle of drug abuse and sales." But given the thousands upon thousands of low-level drug arrests over the past four decades, how can anyone think these 44 arrests will now, magically "break ... a perpetual cycle"? It's hard to believe people still say that sort of thing with a straight face.

There's a growing criticism among reformers that even drug courts and various criminal justice-driven treatment programs, while well intentioned, are doomed to fail by funneling treatment support through the justice system instead of treating addiction as a public health problem. When I've got more time, I have much more to say about those provocative critiques, whose insights are important and IMO partially correct, but too narrow and dismissive of evidence-based successes. Certainly, though, I agree that arresting low-level drug offenders en masse is among the least cost-effective ways to approach the problem. These type of throw-back tactics to the bad old days of Tulia-style drug task forces arguably combat drugs in the most expensive, least effective fashion, reducing neither drug addiction nor the availability of drugs in any meaningful way.

Making the same old mistakes on asset forfeiture: Profit motive has no place in law enforcement strategy

Back during the fight to shut down Texas' network of Tulia-style drug task forces, one of the key revelations that discredited those now-defunct pseudo-agencies, and which prompted a new rule at the Department of Public Safety narcotics division, was that many were focusing their traffic interdiction efforts almost exclusively on southbound lanes, ignoring drugs going north in hopes of snagging more cash, of which they'd get to keep a portion under asset forfeiture laws.

At the time that tactic was seen as discrediting the task forces, and DPS created a rule requiring task forces to spend equal time in the north and southbound lanes, a stipulation that caused many of them not to accept DPS supervision and ultimately led to Governor Perry's decision to de-fund the lot of them, shifting federal grants that used to pay for them to other priorities from drug courts to border security.

Now, though, pretty much that exact same strategy is being suggested as a statewide revenue generating scheme. The Statesman's Mike Ward reported ("Senators, DPS eye millions in seized drug money," Feb. 22):

DPS Director Steve McCraw had just testified that federal officials now estimate that as much as $28 billion a year in cash goes from the United States across the border into Mexico.

Two-thirds of that goes through Texas, he estimated.

"That's the Medicaid budget," Ogden responded after hearing the $28 billion figure.

Since 2006, McCraw said, $140 million in drug cash has been seized along the Texas border, most from trucks and other vehicles headed into Mexico.

With additional officers and checkpoints to examine Mexico-bound vehicles, he said, Texas seizures could increase by as much as 12 percent.

Currently, a percentage of the seized money goes to prosecutors, and McCraw said another percentage — perhaps all the remaining amount — goes into state coffers, depending on whether federal police agencies are involved in the bust.

But Monday's discussion was the first time that additional enforcement has been tied to its success in seizing additional cash, a connection that other states have been discussing to address their budget crises in recent months.

Ogden questioned whether, if the state earmarks additional money to target drug cash seizures, the cost might come out equal to the state's share of what was seized.

"If we're going to spend $50 million we ought to get some credit for this in the budget," he said.

He instructed representatives from the state comptroller's office to investigate how much the state might legally lay claim to in a two-year period, so it could be used in creating a budget.

Other members of the committee indicated an interest in using a share of the forfeited cash, as well — even though Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston , echoed other sentiments when he said the suggestion was not to put DPS "on a sales commission" by funding it based on how much drug cash it seized.

Many of the Tulia-style drug task forces had essentially become complicit with drug traffickers, driven by the same motives on display at this Senate hearing. As a matter of macro-level strategy, they de-emphasized enforcement on northbound drugs so they could take a bigger cut of the southbound cash, or as Grits once put it, "living off asset-forfeiture income from traffic interdiction like pirates living off the spoils from plundered ships." (BTW, do you know the difference between a pirate and a "privateer"?)

So instead of having a vested interest in reducing drug trafficking, the larger concern for some task forces was securing their share of the profits, which in many cases was used as local matching funds for re-upping their federal grants. (See a public policy report I wrote on drug-task force highway interdiction back in 2004.) This amounted to tacit (and occasionally explicit) complicity with the drug traffickers, and the task forces' failure to comply with DPS rules on that score was a big reason why the Governor de-funded them in 2006. But these are lessons, apparently, that Texans must learn over and over again: The aims of law enforcement become corrupted when government's priority is maximizing revenue. (Speaking of which, one of the USDOJ budget cutting strategies suggested by the Obama Administration was "Sharing less of the proceeds from property confiscated from criminals with state and local authorities.")

Ironically, on Tuesday the Senate Criminal Justice Committee will hear legislation by Chairman John Whitmire aimed at restricting the ability of local District Attorneys to manipulate their prosecutorial functions to maximize asset forfeiture income. (See related Grits posts rounded up here.) But the state is considering building southbound border checkpoints (as opposed to the northbound ones aimed at illegal immigrants and drugs) for the exact same reasons - to skew law enforcement priorities toward activities that maximize revenue instead of reduce drug trafficking. I don't see how it's much different, or more defensible, than what the drug task forces were doing.

Tulia documentary nominated for Emmy

Following news that the "Tulia law" requiring corroboration for informants in undercover drug stings is still working as intended to prevent drug convictions without adequate evidence, I'm pleased to learn from Rev. Alan Bean at Friends of Justice (a group founded in 1999 to fight the Tulia raids) that the documentary film "Tulia, Texas" has been nominated for an Emmy. He writes:

Kelly Whalen and Cassandra Herrman invested years of their lives making “Tulia, Texas” and their dedication is being recognized.  The piece they created for the PBS program Independent Lens was recently nominated for an Emmy.

According to the folks at Independent Lens, “TULIA, TEXAS shows how America’s war on drugs and its over-zealous law enforcement, combined with racial divisions, have exposed deep-seated animosities and even starker injustices.”

But Whalen and Herrman dealt with a painful subject in a compassionate and understated way.   The Independent Lens website now features a “Tulia talks back” section with comments from folks on both sides of the drug sting controversy.  The program comes in for some criticism from those who didn’t like seeing their community branded as uniquely racist; but the comments are generally appreciative, even laudatory.

Page Lacey Heisser, a woman who grew up in Tulia, left this comment.  “One of the strengths of the film is its plain explanation of how rural economics, politics and small town justice converge to influence decent citizens of a town towards making such bad decisions. I think Tulia—like other small towns—is made up of women and men who are focused on their families, their jobs, local sports, church events and keeping their heads above water.”

Page wishes “Tulia, Texas” was a mandatory part of the school curriculum in her home town.

I was pleased to meet and dine with Whalen and Herrman after their film premiered at SXSW, and I join Alan in wishing them luck on their Emmy quest. It's amazing how reverberations from that episode more than a decade later continue to influence drug policy debates and, increasingly, American culture.