Drug Money

Federal guidelines allow for 100 percent funding of a task force, but they also encourage in-kind funding by the participating agencies. In 1994 there was a push in the Justice Department to abolish the Byrne grants program, the reason being that the task forces were inefficient, redundant and bad about sharing information. According to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, then the deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Justice Programs, the Byrne grant program "was never intended to be a continual grant to the states." Townsend, daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy and now the lieutenant governor of Maryland, adds that the funds would continue to be available for use by the states, but that the "dollars will be focused on programs that work."

However, the plan to eliminate the program generated a firestorm of criticism from rural lawmakers and law enforcement agencies, and today more federal money than ever is being pumped into antidrug task forces in Texas and around the country via the Byrne Fund. And that trend shows no sign of abatement, even though, beginning with the revelations in Tulia, the last year has not been a good one for the Texas Narcotics Control Program.

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Hearne, Texas, is a long way from Hollywood, California. Situated on State Highway 6 about 120 miles northwest of Houston, Hearne, with a population of just over 5,000, is the largest city in Robertson County. It is an area that is less than vibrant economically. Those who own the gently rolling hills try to eke out a living working the land. Most of the rest are forced to commute to either Waco or the Bryan-College Station area for work.

But despite the sleepy nature of the city, Hearne residents say that last November their town could have been mistaken for an action-adventure movie set when members of the South Central Narcotics Task Force began rounding up alleged drug dealers and users in the community. As police vehicles sped through the streets, task force members even called in a chopper for aerial surveillance.

In all, 28 people were arrested. Most were black, and many were residents of Columbus Village, a federally subsidized low-income housing project located in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in east Hearne, just down the street from an elementary school. Both the school and the housing project are, by law, drug-free zones. That means that penalties for drug-related crimes committed in those areas are automatically enhanced.

At first the arrests were not that alarming to Hearne residents, who had watched passively as the busts occurred every year since the late 1980s, when task forces and the Byrne Fund first came into being. But then the numbers started piling up: From October 1998 to December 2000, according to records obtained by the Houston Press under the Texas Open Records law, the eight-member South Central task force filed 574 charges, although some defendants were charged more than once. The task force's records are poorly kept, but of the suspects who had a race attached to their names, 257 out of 364 were African-Americans. Only 34 of the cases involved more than four grams of cocaine or crack. The task force made three major seizures during this period: 4.16 pounds of cocaine, 90 grams of methamphetamine and 312 pounds of marijuana. South Central's budget for this period was $972,238; if you divide that figure by the number of charges filed, it comes out to $1,694 per charge. At the same time, if you crunch the salary figures, the task force members made an average of nearly $36,000 annually.

"Every year they just round up a bunch of black men and women," says Charles Workman, who is a member of the Hearne City Council as well as president of the area chapter of the NAACP.

"If you've got gold teeth, you're fit to profile," says hospital administrator Helen Boone.

But while the annual raids had reached the point of familiarity to Workman and Boone, last November's police action did catch the attention of both parents, since each had a son arrested during the roundup and charged with delivery of a controlled substance.

"I guess in the past it's been pretty easy for them to get away with this, because blacks are easy prey," says Workman, a slow-talking man who chooses his words carefully. "Automatically, if you arrest a black kid, everybody says he's guilty, and nobody asks any questions. Blacks don't have any money to get lawyers. So it's easy to get them and send them off to prison. No problem. And they've been doing it for about 15 years."

So Workman decided to do something about it. He decided to fight. Rather, he hired someone to fight for him: Brad Wyatt, a Bryan-based attorney who looks like the redheaded, freckle-faced good ol' boy next door. As Wyatt investigated, he began to see similarities in many of the 28 arrests from the November busts. Most were black, most were poor, and most lived at the Columbus Village housing project. Additionally, Wyatt says that although the crimes were alleged to have taken place seven months earlier in April, some of the defendants had solid alibis, including his client, Corvian Workman.