Reply #5: Have you ever heard of Tulia, Texas? [View All]

[MrCoffee]

"A one-time Texas drug agent...who has worked for small police departments in East Texas"

Have you ever heard of Tulia, Texas?

"More than one hundred people are sent to prison in Texas every day, and one in three is convicted of a drug crime. Until recently, chances were good that the bust was made by a narc from one of the state’s multijurisdictional drug task forces, or DTFs, which handle the lion’s share of drug enforcement in rural and suburban areas. The “jump-out boys,” as they are commonly called, are known for their black tactical uniforms and the masks they sometimes wear during raids. They specialize in “buy busts,” undercover purchases of modest amounts of drugs—usually cocaine or marijuana—from street-level dealers. The money for the task forces comes from a U.S. Department of Justice program known as the Byrne grant, which was hatched in the late eighties, at the height of the drug war. Over a ten-year period, the DTFs grew into Texas’s largest narcotics enforcement effort, accounting for roughly 12,000 arrests every year.

Then came Tulia. In 1999 a Byrne grant—funded narc named Tom Coleman set up dozens of people, most of them black, in the small Panhandle town, allegedly for dealing cocaine. In the four-year legal battle that followed, Coleman was exposed as a liar, and Governor Rick Perry eventually pardoned almost all of his victims. The scandal put the task force program—and the diminished standards of drug enforcement that it had come to represent—in the national spotlight. Coleman had a terrible track record in law enforcement and no previous narcotics experience, yet he was allowed to do undercover work with virtually no controls—no wire, no corroborating officer, no video. But what was most embarrassing about Tulia was how common such irresponsibility and amateurism had become among task forces across the state.

<snip>

Critics of the Byrne program say the cuts are long overdue. In 2002 the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, published a paper on the Byrne grant noting that it had made no discernible impact on drug crime. In the Texas Legislature, the main detractors of the program have been an unlikely pair: Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, a Democrat from the Valley with strong law-and-order credentials, and Representative Terry Keel, a Republican from the Austin suburbs. Keel, a former sheriff who once served on the board of a drug task force, has advocated ending the program in Texas altogether. It has been an uphill fight. “Let me tell you what the political reality is,” he said. “You’ve got a whole bunch of these brother-in-law types out there running around with ninja suits and sunglasses, cars and guns and cash. That is a valued law enforcement lifestyle for those persons, and there are lots of them. And they tend to turn up the political heat on their local elected officials, including legislators, who they lead to believe that the sky is gonna fall if their job is eliminated.”

Texas Monthly, September 2005, "The War on Thugs", http://www.texasmonthly.com/2005-09-01/reporter.php

I don't know anything at all about Barry Cooper, or who he worked for, but if he was involved with the Byrne grant groups (some of which were completely legit), I'd have some serious questions about his background.