Report to La Migra as probation condition?

In my home county of Smith up in Northeast Texas (Tyler is the county seat), judges are requiring probationers they suspect of being illegal immigrants to report to immigration authorities for "voluntary deportation," reports ImmigrationProf blog. Longview attorney Jose Sanchez said probation conditions for two of his clients included the requirement that, "At the end of twelve (12) months from the date probation begins, if you have not obtained legal status from the U.S.I.C.E, for being within Smith County, Texas, you must leave the country and reside in a location where you do have a legally authorized status."

Heavens! Talk about making law from the bench! This activist judicial genuflection to popular sentiment certainly makes a bold gesture, but possibly not a legal one I'm told by a couple of friendly immigration lawyers. The issue is whether and how a state district judge would have authority over a defendant's immigration status in the first place - state judges historically have no jurisdiction to enforce federal statutes. Sanchez said he wants "to investigate as to whether what they are doing is constitutional?"

I'm not an attorney and can't address the legal question, but from a public policy perspective I've argued before that local policing and immigration enforcement don't mix. In this case, it seems to almost guarantee the probationer will abscond - then what is gained? At root, immigration is an economic issue, not a criminal justice concern, or it shouldn't be. Ask anyone who lived through the Great Depression: poor people who migrate looking for jobs just aren't the same as criminals acting with malicious intent. Despite pious rhetoric about respecting the law, using the criminal justice system for immigration enforcement worsens public safety for everyone.

University cops promote web snitching for fun and profit

After the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Chinese government broadcast surveillance camera footage and offered cash rewards for anyone willing to rat out individual protesters.

The University of Colorado at Boulder has taken a page out of the Communists' handbook and published surveillance photos online from a "smoke-in" style anti-drug war protest on April 20, aiming to identify and presumably prosecute the participants.

You get $50 apiece for snitching out your fellow students. Ugh! That's revolting to me, both that the university would do it and that anyone would participate to help identify folks. I've argued before that, while sometimes justified, snitching violates a number of positive, right-thinking values that deserve more respect than the criminal justice system and the drug war often afford them.

I'm sure police believe publishing these photos on the web will serve a shaming function, punishing alleged offenders through public disgrace whether or not they can be convicted of anything (after all, who can prove what was in the depicted hand-rolled cigarettes?). But that's not law enforcement's role - judges and juries decide punishments in this country, not police.

If these aren't actually prosecutable cases, this tactic becomes nothing but thuggish harassment, no better, really, than what these guys are doing. Certainly it's hard to argue that anything about this totalitarian exercise improves public safety.

Surely some people would report anyone they saw smoking pot to authorities; for them, the pay wouldn't change a thing. But if you wouldn't snitch without it, fifty bucks seems a grotesquely small sum for someone to be willing to trade their values, turn on their friends and become a rat.

Thanks to Daniel Bear for pointing me to this case.

Highest paid Houston cop also most punished

Talk about rewarding failure.

Houston's highest paid cop has also been disciplined by the police department more often than just about anyone - 32 times over the course of his career, reported Steve McVicker in the Houston Chronicle ("Highest-paid HPD officer also racks up reprimands," April 30).

Senior Houston Police Officer William Lindsey, Jr. made more than $170,000 last year as a police officer, most of it from overtime clocked with that city's DUI unit. But in the past, HPD's internal affairs unit sustained complaints against Lindsey for "falsifying time sheets to reflect overtime he didn't work," as well as turning off his radio during the workday and failing to turn in marijuana seized from a suspect. Reported McVicker:

Only 13 of HPD's 4,760 officers have been involved in more than 23 complaints resulting in "sustained" allegations, according to department records through 2004.

Internal affairs sustains an allegation after investigating and finding merit in complaints that come from the public and from within the department. The chief then decides discipline.

The complaints against Lindsey include verbally abusing citizens, falsifying time sheets to reflect overtime he didn't work and refusing to report for duty, according to documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle through the Texas Open Records Act. His punishment has ranged from being ordered to undergo counseling to being suspended for 15 days without pay. In nine of the complaints, Lindsey's discipline included unpaid leave.

But since the Texas attorney general ruled in 2000 that law enforcement agencies do not have to publicly reveal disciplinary action against an officer that resulted only in a written or oral reprimand, the number of sustained allegations against Lindsey could total more than 32.

They almost certainly do - I've not done the research for Houston, but under Austin PDs interpretation of the same civil service rules, information about fuly 2/3 of sustained complaints against officers remain secret. (That's a big reason why I support Prop 1 on Austin's May 13 ballot - it opens up records about the other 2/3 to public scrutiny, just like at hundreds of other Texas law enforcement agencies.) So there's a very good chance Lindsey had more complaints sustained than 32 - perhaps quite a few more.

It was interesting to me that the only law enforcement officers the paper could find who thought 32 sustained complaints was over the top wouldn't speak on the record - that blue wall of silence, it appears, is still working overtime. Reported McVicker:

several law enforcement officials contacted by the paper expressed surprise that a police officer with Lindsey's record was able to keep his job.

"I'm shocked," said the head of an internal affairs division for one Texas law enforcement agency, who asked not to be named out of fear of reprisals by his employer. "If the internal affairs file of an officer has 32 sustained cases, something's wrong with (that department's) system if he's still employed."

Other law enforcement officials who expressed similar sentiments also asked not to be named.

That tells you how strong is the taboo among officers against criticizing one another - why be embarrassed about appearing critical of this guy? Only 13 officers out of nearly 5,000 in Houston have more than 23 sustained complaints - the number of officers conistently causing problems, as in many departments, really is relatively small. The bigger problem is that good cops won't muster the courage to speak out when their compromised brethren misbehave, and police administrators are hamstrung by state law when they go to discipline the worst offenders.

I'd hope somebody from HPD Internal Affairs is triplechecking Officer Lindsey's overtime sheets from last year to ensure they're on the up and up, since he has a confirmed record of fudging them in the past.

Thanks to Bill for the email tip.

Student-Generated Data for Texas Taser Use by Police Online

This kind of experience might almost make going to journalism school in college seem worthwhile ... almost.

The Distributed Reporting Project at the University of North Texas' Mayborn Institute has placed online pdf versions of the results of public information act requests by journalism students from four Texas universities - UT Arlington, TCU, Tarleton State, and UNT - to Texas police and Sheriff's departments regarding their use of Tasers and stun guns. See the results for your jurisdiction here. The article from Fort Worth Weekly referenced in this Grits post used data from these student researchers.

The project is collaborating with the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, a nonprofit supported by many of the the state's daily newspapers. Students from UT Austin and SMU participated in the project during the Spring '06 semester, the website reports. I hope they were researching something cool.

Immigration detention boom in Central Texas

Earlier I discussed the coming detention boom spurred by misguided US immigration policies and how private prisons and some county jails view the situation as a potential, long-term cash cow. As protesters prepare for today's El Dia Sin Los Immigrantes, the feds continue to roll out massive new spending on old, failed approaches. Here's a microcosm of that phenomenon playing out in Central Texas:

A mothballed private prison facility in Taylor, a small town in Williamson County north of Austin, will soon begin housing immigration detainees, News 8 reported this weekend. The facility will house up to 600 immigrant families, according to the report, and employ around 200 people to administer and guard them. I wonder where the guards will come from? The State of Texas already can't find enough people for that job - the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is nearly 3,000 prison guards short and has reached the bottom of the applicant pool.

In any event, do you suppose those 200 employees and their families will be voting for candidates to rationalize immigration policies or for those who want to boost enforcement and thus guarantee their jobs? That's the most frustrating part to me about the current approach. As President Bush points out, it's impossible to deport our way out of the problem. Even so, we're spending a fortune in federal pork to manufacture new constituencies who benefit from current failed policies, not looking for real solutions on immigration.

The Notorious Bettie Page

Kathy and I went Friday night to see the newly released biopic, The Notorious Bettie Page, at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar (for you out-of-towners that's a popular spot where you can order drinks and eat dinner with your movie in the theater). I'd never heard of Bettie Page, and we picked the film on the basis of a) we could eat there, and b) it seemed like lighter fare than Thank You For Smoking. Given my mood Friday, I might have chosen an interesting looking cartoon, and this looked like an adult version.

As always, I love the Alamo and the pre-film clips of real-life '50s pinup Bettie Page doing various poses in a variety of ridiculous outfits was as fun as the film itself. If you see the film there, go a half hour early to get a taste of the lady herself in action. Hilarious! (Great stuff, Alamo clipfinders! Your pre-show clips are my favorite part of going there - okay, the availability of food and booze during the movie is cool, too.) While the films were intended to be sexy and many were banned at the time, by comparison to today's average MTV video they're REALLY quite tame .. and funny, in a hokey kind of way. For whatever it's worth, the generation that's grown up with Christina Aguilera will see this film and wonder what all the fuss was about?

Gretchen Mol did a good job with a less than mediocre script that failed to explore the central questions raised by Page's art, such as it was. Consistently the questions raised, it seemed, weren't answered, and the questions answered were pedantic and trite.

Was she really so "Golly, gee whiz" about it all or was the real Page more self aware and self directed, especially when her career was at its height? A gang rape portrayed at the beginning of the movie is left almost a non-sequitir - what were the psychological effects of this or other abusive incidents hinted at, and how did they affect her choices? Those subjects were not explored.

Neither did the movie enlighten viewers on the First Amendment questions that would have driven her self-defense when Page was subpoenaed to testify before Congress (she waited all day, in the film, then was told her testimony was no longer necessary). The whole matter of government reaction to her work was dropped. What happened? What did she think about it? Nary a word informs us in the film - the Congressional hearings were just an incident filmakers felt it necessary to portray, not an event through which they revealed anything about Page or the effect of her work on American culture and society. Her long relationship with an actor and continued efforts to break into "real" acting bespoke an internal conflict over her own perception of whether what she was doing was artistic or worthy, but the film superficially hinted at the theme instead of exploring it more deeply.

In all, I'd give the acting a B+ or A-, the script a D, and considered it overall viewable but disappointing for failing to draw more out of the story. That said, order a bucket of beer when you get there at the Alamo, and then the movie improves as it goes along.

Texas CCA: Consent voluntary even if you don't speak English

No habla Ingles? No problemo. You can still give consent in Texas when a cop asks in English to search your car.

Reversing the Tenth Texas Court of Appeals this week, the Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the appellate court erred in determining a search of Anibal Montanez's vehicle by the Deep East Texas Narcotics Task Force was not "voluntary" because Montanez could not speak English. Instead, declared the CCA majority, appellate judges are obligated to give "almost total deference" to trial judges as finders of fact - in this case, even when interpreting events they can see for themselves captured on videotape. Here's the majority opinion. Three CCA members dissented including Judge Lawrence Meyers, who wrote:

The issue in this case is identical to the issue we unanimously ruled on in Carmouche v. State, 10 S.W.3d 323 (Tex. Crim. App. 2000). The court of appeals did not err by failing to apply a Guzman standard of review because there is no issue of credibility and demeanor of the witnesses in this case. This is not a review of a cold record, rather it is the court of appeals watching the exact same videotape that the trial judge watched and then holding that the trial judge made an incorrect ruling. The trial judge was not in a better position to review the evidence as he would be in a situation of live testimony.

In a situation such as the one before us, when the appellate court has the exact same quality of evidence before it on review that the trial judge had before him in a suppression hearing, it is not necessary to view the evidence in the light most favorable to the trial court, and it is not necessary to give almost total deference to the decision of the trial judge. Satisfying a burden of proof necessarily involves weighing evidence. For a preponderance of the evidence, any evidence that tips the scales is sufficient. For evidence to be clear and convincing, it must be "highly probable or reasonably certain." (3) And, as we all know, the highest burden is beyond a reasonable doubt.

As we stated in Carmouche, "the nature of the evidence presented in the videotape does not pivot 'on an evaluation of credibility and demeanor.' Rather, the videotape presents indisputable visual evidence contradicting essential portions of [the officer's] testimony. In these narrow circumstances, we cannot blind ourselves to the videotape evidence simply because [the officer's] testimony may, by itself, be read to support the. . .holding." 10 S.W.3d at 332.

Well, that's a nice sentiment but apparently we can blind ourselves to the evidence - at least a majority on Texas' highest criminal court could. The Texas Constitution requires the state to demonstrate through "clear and convincing" evidence that consent was voluntary - but that doesn't mean much when judges can be convinced even when the driver doesn't speak English.

The ruling comes at a time of growing public concern over abusive search practices at Texas traffic stops. The Legislature last year passed SB 1195 which would have required police to obtain written or recorded consent to perform searches at traffic stops without probable cause, but Gov. Perry vetoed the measure.

That's one way to boost the tourist trade

According to press accounts, Mexico's Congress voted to decriminalize low-level drug possession on Friday. The New York Times' coverage, though, made the policy change sound less sweeping and more complex, creating new police powers to go after drug dealers:

Supporters of the bill said it was meant to fix major flaws in Mexico's current drug laws. First, it will allow local judges and the police to decide on a case-by-case basis whether people should be prosecuted when caught with small amounts of drugs. Previously, every drug suspect had to be prosecuted, a system that put many addicts in jail while dealers went free after bribing officials.

Second, the state and local police will be empowered to arrest and prosecute street dealers who are carrying more than the minor amounts allowed under the law. Under existing laws, drug crimes were handled only by federal officials. ...

"We are not authorizing the consumption of drugs," said Senator Jorge Zermiño, the bill's sponsor in the Senate. "We are combating it and recognizing that there are addicts that require special treatment. We cannot close our eyes, nor fill our jails with addicts."

So Mexico's goal is to stop arresting low-level addicts and focus limited law enforcement resources on dealers and the cartels. Sounds like a reasonable plan. Now we get to see if the sky really falls.

Perhaps the biggest benefit will be to remove a big source of drug-related police corruption, which I've argued needs to be confronted on the US side of the Rio Grande, too. AP quoted Drug Policy Alliance Director Ethan Nadelmann declaring that Mexico's legislation will "remove 'a huge opportunity for low-level police corruption.' Mexican police often release people detained for minor drug possession, in exchange for bribes," he told AP.

UPDATE: Talk Left linked to the text of the new law for you Spanish speakers.

NUTHER UPDATE: You had to see this coming: President Fox is scuttling the bill, bowing to US pressure.

The Coming Immigration Detention Boom

If the war on illegal immigration hasn't already become a more expensive government boondoggle than the war on drugs, I bet it soon will. Projecting into the future, the incarceration needs for potential immigration violations, given current and proposed policies, could be limitless.

Already, one third of federal prosecutions in the United States are for immigration violations - more, even, than drug crimes. "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recommended the prosecution of 65% more immigration cases in FY 2004 than it did in the previous year," according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, and that number's only increasing. According to TRAC's data, even before the recent raids immigration agents were taking more cases to court than the the FBI, the DEA and the IRS combined. A huge and growing number of these derive from Texas' Southern District (Houston).

Now Johnny Sutton in Texas' Western District (San Antonio) appears to have climbed on the bandwagon - his office has "filed criminal charges against dozens of undocumented immigrants for crimes that have long been handled with simple deportation," according to the Austin American Statesman ("Austin seeing change in immigration prosecutions," April 28). "For undocumented immigrants in the Austin area, the chance of being prosecuted remains small, but the shift means they are more likely to face federal prison time or leave the country with a criminal record if they are caught," reported Steven Kreytak.

In the past, smuggled immigrants have not faced criminal charges for their first illegal entry.

Because of limited resources, Sutton said prosecutors will continue to focus on filing federal charges against the most dangerous immigrants.

Without discussing the recent cases, Sutton said that prosecutors will consider charges under the illegal re- entry law when the person is suspected of other illegal activity, has a significant misdemeanor record or was "combative or disruptive at the time of arrest."

Assistant Federal Public Defender Horatio Aldredge said that if prosecutors continue to seek criminal charges against a wider sample of immigrants, the system may not be able to handle them.

"It seems to me," he said, "that it's not a very good allocation of resources."

Hmmmm. If they're "combative or disruptive at the time of arrest," why not charge them with whatever is the federal version of resisting arrest, I wonder? Why turn the immigration case into a criminal charge? One notes that the threshold of being "suspected of other criminal activity" isn't very high, either. And since we're talking about a prosecutor's decision about what charge to file, that suspicion will never be tested with evidence before a judge.

Forget due process concerns for a minute, though. This is bad public policy. Bottom line: Where will it end? With the jobs of so many prosecutors, border security agents and detention facility personnel on the line, we've created a massive industry that's dependant on the US having a dysfunctional immigration policy. If they ever fixed it - if the number of federal criminal cases dropped by a third overnight and tens of thousands of rented detention beds were no longer needed - many thousands of people would lose their jobs.

We're creating large, powerful constituencies with stakes in a flawed system. The Border Patrol's staff has grown more than 1,200% in the past three decades, during which time illegal immigration skyrocketed. Meanwhile, immigration detainees are the fastest growing part of the US prison population. The Dallas Morning News in February predicted a detention bed "gold rush" in the short term based on current prosecution trends.

Amazing: All that to prevent willing employers from hiring willing workers. A rational immigration policy would put most of those folks out of work. We could increase enforcement spending many times over and still not have as big an impact as would simple economic reforms.

Via Bender's Immigration Bulletin

The Beans of Tulia, Texas

The Harvard Gazette has a nice profile of past-Grits guest blogger Alan Bean and his wife Nancy, who co-founded the group Tulia Friends of Justice in response to the ill-begotten Tulia drug stings. Their daughter is attending school there.

Recidivism

How likely are released Texas inmates to commit new crimes? The vast majority don't.

Of Texans on parole, just 11% of releasees each year are revoked, reported the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in its self-evaluation (pdf, p. 7-8) for the Sunset Advisory Committee. TDCJ's three-year recidivism rate is 28.3%, said the report.

Report: States' role in immigration enforcement

I'd missed this, but the TX House Research Organization published this public policy report (pdf) by Kellie Dworaczyk on the states' role in immigration enforcement in February. More later after I get a chance to look it over.

Hecho en Mexico

Hilarious, in an ironic sort of way: The Google Ad that pops up next to this Grits post suggesting a "green" immigration agenda, a reader emails to remark, points to a website encouraging US business to outsource jobs to Mexico, touting 75% reductions in labor costs.

Mexico Manufacturing

Try manufacturing in Mexico & save up to 75% or more on labor costs!
www.madeinmexicoinc.com

Advertise on this site

That's one reason why it makes a lot of sense to suggest a "Tex-Mex Marshall Plan," as referenced earlier; the economy is like a river - it's a lot easier to steer it in the direction it's already headed. A Marshall-plan-style investment in Mexico coupled with a "green" trade agenda like that described in the above-linked post would do more to reduce illegal immigration in the medium to long run than any new raft of criminal statutes or wall-building boondoggle.

Kids stay with Mom in Nuevo Laredo prison

Grim. Mother Jones reports on life in a Mexican prison for women and their kids ("Born into cellblocks," May/June 2006):

Incarceration, like law, is a bit different in Mexico. Conjugal visits are permitted; small children younger than six can be locked up with their moms; and men and women peddle goods and themselves within the walls in order to survive. Mexican prisons often do not provide grub. I’ve stood in line with family members who toted a week’s supply of food on visiting day, seen women reel out of cells in disarray after their weekly intercourse sessions with their men. Drugs are commonplace inside the walls, as are gangs. Money can buy anything. For years the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has complained about the posh quarters given to major drug players and how they continue to do business without interference while theoretically being under lock and key.

The women may come in clean, but they don’t stay that way. In Nuevo Laredo, they’re high by 10 a.m., then they spruce up and go off to the men’s area to make some money. By afternoon they return, their necks laced with hickeys. Convicts run the prison, and the guards do as they are told by the dominant inmates. People get killed. And all this goes on with toddlers underfoot.

In Nuevo Laredo’s El Penal II, the cells currently hold 71 women. Some get pregnant while inside. At any one time, there are 4 to 10 kids living behind bars. For many, their options are limited: Go to prison with mom, or go to an orphanage. Once the children reach age six, they are tossed out.

Photographer Penny De Los Santos put it this way: “It’s a bad place for kids. These people are in here for murder. Kids have the run of the place, kids are golden, spoiled, but one child might have several caretakers. It’s definitely not safe. Men come and go out of the women’s area all day long.

Time for a Tex-Mex Marshall Plan?

From a pure economic standpoint, this approach to immigration reform makes a lot of sense.

Tidbits

Check out these criminal justice-related items while I hustle to meet several work deadlines:

• Prison conference today: At UT Austin's LBJ School - here's the agenda (pdf).

• The camera never blinks: I was quoted yesterday in this New York Times article on whether surveillance cameras are effective.

• Jail fashion: Clothing for inmates in the Lubbock County Jail was rejected for being the wrong color, so the manufacturer is selling them in New England retail stores.

• I'm in the wrong business: $172,000 pay for a Houston police officer on the DWI task force in one year.

• Hacked: Private info of nearly 200,000 current and former students was stolen from the University of Texas for the second time in three years.

• Keeping cops honest: Detroit PD will start videotaping interrogations for capital crimes. Why? "Number one, it keeps cops honest," Chief Bully-Cummings said. "It's a protection for the citizen that's being interrogated. But from a chief's point of view, I think the greatest benefit is to police because what it does is provide documentation that they didn't coerce."
  

• Should drug use be legal if you're employed? With tongue firmly in cheek, the Onion explores a policy alternative to "narrow the focus of the drug war to the true enemy." The Onion also recently, brilliantly called for greater diversity in police lineups. Now that's funny.
  

A tale of two probationers

All Texas probation sentences aren't created equal, according to an article in today's Dallas Morning News ("Unequal Justice: Two very different men commit two very different crimes. When both violate probation, there are wildly different results: The robber gets life; the killer remains free," April 23) - the rich get plenty of leeway while the poor may be booted off to prison for the smallest infraction.

The Dallas News' Brooks Egerton tells the story of two probationers - one well-off, related by marriage to a Congressman, and a murderer, the other poor and a teenager at the time of his crime, a stickup netting $2. Both men were given ten years probation by the same judge. But the poor robber violated his probation by smoking marijuana and was given a full life sentence, while the wealthy murderer remains at large with minimal supervision despite numerous violations including four urinalyses testing positive for cocaine. Read the article and you tell me: Where's the justice?

Kudos to Egerton for an excellent report providing a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the probation system.

Via Doc Berman

Prison guards arrested at record pace

This doesn't sound good - Texas prison employees were arrested at a record-setting pace in the first two months of 2006, reported the Austin Statesman ("Prison employees arrests continue to climb," April 23):

It might have seemed like a few tough weeks for Texas' prison system.

The system's former gang-enforcement chief pleaded guilty to sexually harassing employees. The personnel chief of the prison school system was arrested after being accused of lewd conduct at a Conroe park. A human resources official was sought as a fugitive after being charged with killing two pedestrians in an alleged drunken driving hit-and-run.

And three guards were arrested separately, one accused of raping a male convict, another of smuggling marijuana into a prison and the third of holding his ex-wife hostage at gunpoint.

Five weeks this spring saw almost two dozen arrests of correctional employees, on an assortment of felony and misdemeanor charges.

But it wasn't just a bad month. It was fairly typical for the state's 38,600-employee prison system, the second-largest in the country.

State records show at least 761 arrests of Texas Department of Criminal Justice employees in 2005. Another 148 arrests have been logged during the first two months of 2006 — a number that, if the trend continues, could set a record.

The number of employee arrests has steadily climbed during the past decade to a record 781 in 2003, the agency's statistics show, even as officials say the number of employees has remained about the same.

"Maybe it's bad luck, and maybe it's because we pay too little. Because we're 2,500 correctional officers short all the time, I guess we can't be too choosy about who we hire," said state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, which monitors Texas' corrections system. "Maybe the problem is where we built all these prisons. Maybe there isn't anything else to do out there but get in trouble."

The Truth About False Confessions

Wonderful! An entire blog devoted to the subject by Williams College law prof Alan Hirsch. A lot more people confess to crimes they didn't commit than you'd ever think from watching Law & Order reruns. If, like me, you find it hard to wrap your brain around why, you'll want to look at his FAQ, his proposed reforms, and keep checking back as Prof. Hirsch expands his blog ouevre. TTAFC so far explores false confessions by Guantanamo Bay detainees and immature youth, among other topics.

Great idea for a niche blog. Welcome to the blogosphere, Prof. Hirsch. Via CrimProf blog.

UPDATE: Prof Hirsch had an op ed on the subject in the Los Angeles Times ("Why the innocent confess," April 25).

Border Corruption Runs Amok: New cash for border cops should go to Internal Affairs

The pattern is obvious to anyone paying attention, but I seldom hear public officials discuss it. Police corruption has cropped up along the Texas-Mexico border at a head-spinning pace in recent months. Here are a few cases on the US side that caught Grits' attention:

• McAllen, October 2005: Immigration Customs Enforcement inspector arrested for allegedly taking bribes to let drug shipments through his lane at a border checkpoint.
• McAllen, October 2005: Three Rio Grande Valley City cops arrested for allegedly taking bribes to escort drug runners through their jurisdiction.
• Brownsville, December 2005: Cameron County Sheriff convicted of accepting bribes and using deputies to escort drug runners through the county.
• Laredo, March 2006: Senior Border Patrol Agent and his brother sentenced to 20 and 17-1/2 years respectively for accepting bribes to allow drugs through a border checkpoint.
• Harlingen, March 2006: A state corrections officer (prison guard) was caught at a border patrol checkpoint with 21 pounds of marijuana in his spare tire.
• El Paso, March 2006: US authorities announced they will extradite rather than prosecute an informant who murdered 12 people in Juarez while working for Immigration Customs Enforcement.
• Zapata County, April 2006: Deputy commander of the Laredo Multi-Agency Narcotics Task force was indicted for allegedly directing agents away from trafficking routes, helping smugglers store drugs, and giving out confidential police information.
• El Paso, April 2006: Former Special Agent in Charge of the entire El Paso FBI division (2001-2003) indicted for allegedly taking bribes from a cartel-affiliated Juarez racetrack owner who was his informant.
• Edinburg, April 2006: Five brothers including one current Edinburg police officer and a former McAllen police officer arrested on drug trafficking charges.

On the Mexican side, 1/3 of the Nuevo Laredo Police Department was fired last year for corruption, and the NL police chief (the last one was assassinated), just quit his job after eight months citing high stress. No kidding! They've had more than 70 murders already in Nuevo Laredo this year, including cops. Elements of state and local Mexican police and even the military have fallen under control of the Mexican drug cartels, who are openly feuding over control of the prime distribution routes.

On both sides of the border, drug traffickers have corrupted law enforcement officials from small-town cops all the way up to the head of an FBI division. Maybe this much corruption always existed and authorities are only now investigating it - one hopes things are getting better. But on the assumption there's more where that came from, it's safe to say from these examples that drug traffickers have successfully purchased influence at every level of US law enforcement on the Texas-Mexico border.

So how will throwing more money at those same agencies help the problem? Until police corruption is under control, new spending on border law enforcement agencies like Operation Linebacker should start with money for Internal Affairs units, not foolhardy immigration raids.