wpwx694
Member
Up Close: Controversy, funding troubles may mean end of task forces
10:16 PM CDT on Sunday, May 22, 2005
By Dave Fehling / 11 News
"Freeze mister."
KHOU
"We have taken literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of narcotics off the street," said Harris County Task Force Capt. Roger Clifford.
From neighborhoods to parking lots to urban forests, the Harris County Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force has for years been chasing dope dealers and their cash.
"We have taken literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of narcotics off the street," said task force Capt. Roger Clifford.
Housed discreetly in an eastside office building, the task force is run by the city of Baytown but funded since 1990 by the Federal government, which wanted to give local police more resources to catch drug dealers.
But Harris County's is just one of 50 regional task forces statewide, and a success is hardly how some of them have been described.
Across Texas, some of the task forces themselves have been accused of breaking the law, of despicable tactics to generate enough arrests to justify their own existences.
Just north of College Station is the town of Hearne. It's about as quiet as they come, except for a day in November of 2000.
"They were all in black, they had their helmets," said former Hearne City Council Member Charles Workman.
"They came in like it's the army or something," remembered Hearne resident Regina Kelly.
"You'd think they were hunting terrorists," said Workman.
One of those local task forces had arrested over two dozen residents and charged them with drug dealing.
One of them was Regina Kelly, a waitress and mother of four.
"I've always worked and taken care of my kids," she said. "I've never sold drugs."
But who said she did? Turns out it was an informant known around the neighborhood as "Little D."
Kelly insists it never happened.
"They brought back a tape that we listened to and it didn't even have a female voice on the tape."
The Robertson County district attorney eventually conceded that the informant wasn't the least bit reliable.
"And he failed those polygraph tests," said D.A. John Paschall.
So he dropped charges against all those arrested except seven that had pled guilty.
But now, the task force itself is set to go on trial later this month.
A federal lawsuit alleges discrimination because all but one of those charged in that 2000 sweep were black.
"Easy targets, we were easy targets," said Regina Kelly.
"They come into the black community and show off unlimited power, uncontrolled power," said Workman.
"The Task Force is not attacking blacks. They arrest white people, arrest Hispanics, they are arresting drug dealers," insisted Paschall.
But critics say there has been a pattern.
"What we're seeing is in a few places that there have been incentives to manufacture arrests," said Sandra Guerra Thompson with the University of Houston Law Center.
She says the way the federal government set-up the task forces was flawed: they got funds based on the number of arrests and seizures.
"For the first time, that created a profit incentive for law enforcement," said Thompson.
So instead of going after a few big dealers, some forces went after a lot of small ones.
Which brings us back the Harris County Task Force.
"There was a time when this task force did those sorts of things but in my tenure, we have focused on the large organizations," said Capt. Clifford.
Capt. Clifford says for its part, the Harris County Task Force made good use of federal money.
Nonetheless, the Bush Administration wants to cut funding for drug task forces in favor of fighting terrorism.
The narcotics task forces are also under fire in Austin where the House passed a bill to abolish them.
The Governor had previously ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety to start supervising the task forces which had been operating on-their-own.
So the Harris County Task Force has decided to call it quits and plans to disband by the end of this month.
It may signal the beginning of the end for what a decade ago seemed like an innovative way to fight the War on Drugs.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online at: http://www.khou.com/topstories/stories/khou050522_mh_upclosetaskforce.29df5db20.html
