Taking Drug Task Forces To Task

Arianna Huffington, AlterNet

April 16, 2002

Ever heard of Tulia? It's a little town in Texas that was the scene of one of the most shameful miscarriages of justice in modern American history -- a highly questionable undercover drug sting that in the summer of 1999 led to the arrest of one out of every six African-Americans.

But the dismissal of charges last week against Tonya White, one of the final two Tulia defendants, has finally kicked open the door on the dubious nature of the entire Tulia operation and exposed one of the many shadowy corners of the drug war: the power and abuses of drug task forces.

White, whose sister and two brothers were sentenced to a combined 97 years in jail after being caught up in the Tulia drug sweep, avoided a similar fate only after her lawyers uncovered a bank deposit slip that proved she was in Oklahoma City, 300 miles away from Tulia, at the time she was alleged to have sold cocaine to Tom Coleman, the controversial undercover cop whose uncorroborated testimony was the sole basis for the Tulia round-up.

Since the bust, Coleman's credibility has come under withering fire. Branded a "compulsive liar" by former coworkers and unfit for law enforcement work by a sheriff he once served under, Coleman was even arrested for theft in the middle of the Tulia operation, but, amazingly, was still allowed to continue his undercover work. And the prosecution continued to trust him and rely on his word even after it was proven that he had perjured himself on the stand.

But this story is about more than one small town and one bad cop, it's about drug task forces allowed to run wild.

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