What's Wrong With Us???
In
November 2000, a drug task force arrested 28 residents of Hearne,
Texas, almost all of them African-American, and charged them with
distributing crack cocaine. Pressed to plead guilty to the charges by
their public defenders, several of the accused did, but Regina Kelly, a
single mother of four, refused. The American Civil Liberty Union's Drug Law Reform Project
eventually took up the case and filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf
of 15 of the arrestees, accusing the local district attorney and theSouth Central Texas Narcotics Task Force with conducting racially motivated drug sweeps for more than 15 years. "Throughout America, Byrne grants are consistently used to target
very low-level drug dealers for arrest and long-term incarceration,"
said Graham Boyd, lawyer for the Hearne plaintiffs and director of the
ACLU's Drug Law Reform Project. "You have a drug task force whose goal
is to arrest as many people as they can, their funding stream is based
on that, so they rely on confidential informants, and their racial
profiling is staggering." "The block grant is based on population and crime rate," added Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance Network.
"Because it's based on arrests, the incentive is to focus on arrests,
and the more the better. They have an incentive to go after low-level
drug dealers, and it leads to civil rights offenses because they have
quotas to fill, and that might entail cutting corners." Hearne was not the first case, nor the most notorious, involving
drug-task-force abuses. That honor belongs to Tulia, another small
Texas town where, on July 23, 1999, and based on the word of a single
informant, 46 people, 39 of them African-American, were accused of
selling drugs. As recounted in Tulia, Texas, a documentary recently shown as part of PBS' Independent Lens series [available on DVD at www.newsreel.org], the informant, Tom Coleman
— at one point named "Texas Lawman of the Year" - had a checkered law
enforcement career, did not wear a recording device during any of his
alleged drug buys, made numerous evidentiary errors and was accused of
being a racist. Read the rest: http://www.miller-mccune.com/legal_affairs/taking-drug-task-forces-to-task-1074
American Violet,
opening nationwide on April 17th. Starring newcomer Nicole Beharie as
Kelly, as well as Alfre Woodard, Tim Blake Nelson and Charles S.
Dutton, the film is practically a primer on drug-task-force abuses
under what is known as the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Program.
