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The war on thugs: they were the jump-out boys--masked, black-clad narcs who busted dealers and jailed junkies all over rural Texas. Then came Tulia. Now the state's drug task forces are fighting for their own survival. And that's a good thing.

Article Excerpt
At the annual convention of Texas narcotics officers, held this year in El Paso in August, narcs in search of continuing education were offered seminars with titles like 'Hidden Compartments," "Body Language," "Risk Management," and--new for this year--"Narcotraffickers and the Spiritual World" in which a retired El Paso cop explained how to identify the image of Jesus Malverde, the patron saint of drug dealers, during traffic stops. Next year, conference organizers may have to add another seminar: "How to Find a New Career." Over the past four years, close to a quarter of all narcs in Texas have been laid off, victims of a severe contraction in the state's biggest anti-drug bureaucracy. Even more cuts may be on the way, depending on the outcome of a budget fight currently going on in Washington, D.C. The writing on the wall is easy to read: After almost two decades of lavish funding, the drug war is no longer a growth industry in 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 drugwar. 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...

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