Well, this is a pretty horrific story from the LA Times about Tenaha, Texas, that won’t surprise folks who know this sort of thing goes on, but hopefully will shock at least a few readers.
You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana state line 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: 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, Ohio, 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 or convicted of any crime.
[…] Guillory said the court records showed, the police seized cash, jewelry, cellphones 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 that all but one of them were black.
“The whole thing is disproportionately targeted toward minorities, particularly African Americans,” Guillory said. “Every one of these people is pulled over and told they did something, like, ‘You drove too close to the white line.’ That’s not in the penal code, but it sounds plausible. 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.”
Yup. Shaking down the downtrodden when they pass through town is a long law enforcement tradition, lent legal patina through state seizure laws. That it’s still going on so blatantly and with such a racial slant is outrageous. And this particular defense of the practice by the Mayor of Tenaha is a classic.
Tenaha Mayor George Bowers, 80, defended the seizures, saying they allowed a cash-poor city the means to add a second police car in a two-policeman town and help pay for a new police station.
“It’s always helpful to have any kind of income to expand your police force,” Bowers said.
Bowers has been mayor there for 54 years. Sounds like a profitable job.
I heard of a few other Southern towns that do this. They’ll go after any minority but will settle for any out of towner if they can.
It’s a scaled-up “speed trap” kind of thing. The potential cost and risk of fighting it exceeds the price of acquiescing.
Interesting story! Left out some important facts, the officers stopping people are not white officers as the story leads you to believe! They are African American officer one is known as being one of the most honest law enforecement officer in East Texas. The other is a seasoned drug officer. This is a speed trap! These are just officer trying to get the drugs off the road, before your mother, daughter, son, grandchild or husbands locates the drug dealer. When this happens you wuold have one people to drop people from dis-respecting small towns by not slowing down for school children, not observing speed zones in school zones (you respect small town kids also, right) Interesting!
I certainly can’t speak to the race or reputation of the police officers involved. Based on the facts, though, one either has to assume that only blacks passing through town are guilty of money laundering and other crimes. One *might* imagine, if this were actually part of the War on Drugs, that hispanics would be the “guilty” folks, running money and/or drugs to/from Mexico. Based on the story, though, it sounds like it’s just blacks.
Traditionally, the practice and role of a speed trap is not to actually get people to slow down (if so, then ample warning would be applied and other traffic calming devices used), but to boost revenue for the city, by dropping speed limits without adequate signage, or below the levels that a reasonable driver would believe was the case.
A well-marked school zone absolutely should be highly enforced, for the protection of the children involved. Dropping a speed limit from 60 to 25 with a sign only partially visible until you’re passing it — and getting a ticket — is unethical and, honestly, not doing much to protect the kids.
But speed trap was just a weak metaphor. This is, like true speed traps, simple extortion-by-badge. Trump up a charge and then make the potential cost of challenging it too high to pay — even, in these cases, in comparison to confiscation of vehicles, jewelry, and cash. That does not
If there are specifics to the story that are incorrect, I’m more than happy to hear them. But, as presented, the actions of the police officers involved, regardless of their race, seem indefensible.