Welcome to Texas, Nigger

Which one is the gang member?
When gangs get out of control, an entire city can be terrorized making it so that no innocent citizen can even drive down the street without fear of material harm. Just such a situation has occurred in Tenaha, Texas. When placed in an unbearable vice like this, the good citizens call out for "zero tolerance" and other draconian measures - even taking a blind eye to abuse, if necessary - in order to get things cleaned up. But I wonder if such zeal will be used on the Tehana gang.

The Tenaha thugs, you see, all wear blue uniforms and carry badges - they are otherwise known as the police.

From the Chicago Tribune:

TENAHA, Texas— You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana border if you're African-American, but you might not be able to drive out of it—at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables.

That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: voluntarily sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.

More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from Akron, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with any crime.

The drug laws, of course, are not about stopping drugs, but about giving runaway power to authorities to "make us safe", a.k.a. commit legalized crimes of their own. But in the dark, backward, conservative minds of rural Texans - and trust me, it's almost impossible to use hyperbole to describe these lowbrow cretins - the word "drug" gives law enforcement carte blanche for thuggery, theft and the raping of lives.

Officials in Tenaha, situated along a heavily traveled highway connecting Houston with popular gambling destinations in Louisiana, say they are engaged in a battle against drug trafficking and call the search-and-seizure practice a legitimate use of the state's asset-forfeiture law. That law permits local police agencies to keep drug money and other property used in the commission of a crime and add the proceeds to their budgets.

"We try to enforce the law here," said George Bowers, mayor of the town of 1,046 residents, where boarded-up businesses outnumber open ones and City Hall sports a broken window. "We're not doing this to raise money. That's all I'm going to say at this point."

But civil rights lawyers call Tenaha's practice something else: highway robbery. The attorneys have filed a federal class-action lawsuit to stop what they contend is an unconstitutional perversion of the law's intent, aimed primarily at blacks who have done nothing wrong.

Welcome to hell!
Texas is no stranger to false drug convictions. In a 1999 raid in Tulia, Texas, nearly 10 percent of the town's adult population - mostly blacks - were arrested on drug charges. It took years but all the defendants were ultimately found to have been wrongfully convicted with the governor subsequently pardoning all the Tulia defendants. Why do such a raid in the first place? Always, always, follow the money. The more convictions garnered, the more federal task force money came flowing in. All arrests were done on the word of one paid informant.

David Guillory, an attorney in Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug possession.

But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, police seized cash, jewelry, cell phones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any crime. Of those, Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the motorists directly—and discovered all but one of them were black.

"The whole thing is disproportionately targeted toward minorities, particularly African-Americans," Guillory said. "None of these people have been charged with a crime, none were engaged in anything that looked criminal. The sole factor is that they had something that looked valuable.

L.A. cops got nothin' on us!
Rural District Attorneys have terrorized small time drug users for years, ruining lives and families and laughing all the way to re-election. One such notorious fiend was from my own neck of the woods, giving out ultra harsh sentences and lecturing from on high - until he too was caught and convicted of drug use. How do you like this little nugget: "The prosecution also presented testimony that Roach had surfed child pornography sites and was obsessed with obtaining money from drug seizures." Rural Texas is one scary place!

The property seizures are not just happening in Tenaha. In southern parts of Texas near the Mexican border, for example, Hispanics allege that they are being singled out.

According to a prominent state legislator, police agencies across Texas are wielding the asset-forfeiture law more aggressively to supplement their shrinking operating budgets.

The process apparently is so routine in Tenaha that Guillory discovered pre-signed and pre-notarized police affidavits with blank spaces left for an officer to describe the property being seized.

"If used properly, it's a good law-enforcement tool to see that crime doesn't pay," said state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate's Criminal Justice Committee. "But in this instance, where people are being pulled over and their property is taken with no charges filed and no convictions, I think that's theft."

Two things Texas loves for sure: blacks and justice. Remember the 1998 dragging death of a black man in Jasper, the town with a sign telling blacks not to be there after sundown? And Johnson County - just southeast of Dallas has twice the average rate of probationers as the rest of the state (again, follow the money). And the Dallas County D.A. office for 36 years ruled under the infamous Henry Wade with its incredible 93% conviction rate is now described as: "no other county in America — and almost no state, for that matter — has freed more innocent people from prison in recent years than Dallas County, where Wade was DA from 1951 through 1986". So far 19 convictions have been overturned on DNA evidence, with 250 more waiting in the wings.

Texas, blacks and "justice" - a combustible and lethal combination.
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