Remember the drug suspect roundup in Tulia, TX, that sent 46 to prison on trumped up charges? Some spent considerable time behind bars before being exonerated or pardoned.
Here we go again. Austin blog Grits For Breakfast:
[...]a recent, massive drug bust in Anderson County, TX by the Dogwood Trails task force that netted 72 defendants -- 56 charged in state court and 16 in federal court. Here's the DoJ press release bragging about it. That number dwarfs the 46 arrested in Tulia. It's so many they can't even fit them all in the county jail.
I grew up two counties over from Anderson in Tyler, TX, and can relate to readers that Anderson is quite a rural place. The notion that 72 crack dealers live there simply is absurd -- there's barely enough population density to support seven of them.
That was found via Drug WarRant, where Pete gives us the statistics:
Now, according to the government's national data, approximately .3% of the population uses crack. The number goes up to .4% in the south, but down to .2% in rural counties, so let's use the .3% figure. That means we can expect that there might be 165 crack users in Anderson County. So a 72 person crack cocaine distribution network? Boy, now that's service!
Oh, it gets better! Scott Henson, the Grits For Breakfast blogger, got to see the list of arrested suspects:
First, all 72 defendants are black -- every last mother's son and daughter of them. In Tulia only 39 of the 46 were black. In Palestine, they've made it unanimous. While I wasn't given a complete list, a DA's employee showed me the full list while he was copying by hand the names he would give me. I had enough time to read down the race/gender column on both pages twice, just to make sure -- the list said B/M or B/F on every last one, including the names that weren't checked as releasable to me.
Regular readers here know I'm not the sort to easily blame social problems on racism, in fact I think actual institutional racism is rare in the US. Not quite rare enough, perhaps. The drug war has made arresting people too easy.
Posted by Walter at October 21, 2004 09:14 PM