Abuse of Authority

A year before the videotaped beating of Rodney King at the hands of Los Angeles police officers, Dallas reporters Lorraine Adams and Dan Malone were investigating hundreds of civil rights complaints filed against officers entrusted by Texans to enforce the law.

Using the Texas Open Records Act and the federal Freedom of Information Act, they obtained hundreds of internal affairs files and personnel records of Texas police officers. They examined voluminous court records and tracked down witnesses and victims throughout Texas. Their ten-month series of articles revealed that complaints against the police span the penal code: from unwarranted killings and beatings of unarmed Texans to perjury, cover-up, and destroying official records.

Dallas, Texas — Texas police have been investigated and prosecuted more frequently for beatings, torture, coerced confessions, rapes, and needless deaths than police in any other state. Records obtained by The Dallas Morning News show that Texas officers have been the subject of more than 2,000 such investigations since 1984.

Documents obtained from the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act place Texas — the nation’s third most populous state — far ahead of population leaders California and New York in the number of officers investigated and prosecuted for civil rights violations.

Yet the bulk of the cases were closed without prosecution. Indeed, only about 50 cases, accounting for about 125 officers, were prosecuted in Texas between 1980 and 1989.

“We’re a big state with a violent history, violent toward each other, violent toward the police,” says Ronald DeLord, president of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas. “There have been police officers who have abused their authority.”

The findings came as Attorney General Richard Thornburgh announced that the U.S. Justice Department would review 15,000 civil rights cases for geographic patterns of police brutality. The announcement followed the videotaped beating by Los Angeles officers of Rodney King, which prompted members of Congress and civil rights leaders to push for an investigation into the extent of brutality among the nation’s police officers.

Suzanne Donovan, director of the Texas Civil Liberties Union, says the records obtained by The News demonstrate the need to focus the review on Texas. “I would think, just given the volume, that Thornburgh should turn his attention first to Texas.”

The records were obtained as part of a two-year inquiry into more than 600 Justice Department investigations of Texas police. The News also reviewed over 500 lawsuits, 200 reports filed with the Texas attorney general on people who died in police custody, disciplinary records for the state’s 2,600 police officers, and thousands of documents obtained from more than 500 requests under the Texas Open Records Act.

The documents show that Texas has by far the worst record of any state. On a per-capita basis, however, four smaller states — Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Rhode Island — have a higher rate of investigations into police abuse. Nevada is tied with Texas for the fifth worst per-capita record.

DeLord, president of the statewide police association, says Texas police suffer from inadequate training, education, pay, and background checks. “If you look at the whole state of Texas, we are still not putting the type of money into police to get the type of product you would like,” he says. “I’m a big supporter of training and standards. I wish they were 50 times tougher than they are.”

Bobby Gillham, special agent in charge of the Dallas FBI field office from 1984 to 1989, says that inadequate training is partly responsible for the state’s poor record. “My guess is you had law-enforcement standards and training in a lot of areas in this country before you had it in other areas.”

The News also discovered that few rural police agencies have internal affairs departments or resources to conduct extensive background investigations of applicants. The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education (TCLEOSE), the agency charged with licensing police, is not staffed to investigate complaints against officers. And civil rights complaints to the FBI must vie with priorities that include narcotics and white-collar crime investigations.

Although there is vast room for improvement, DeLord says it would be wrong to conclude that the state’s approximately 50,000 law enforcement officers are out of control. “We’ve got some good, we’ve got some bad,” he says. “We’ve got some movement toward better, and we’re damn sure a long way from what we could be.”

Guns and Macho

Federal records show that in the past decade, the Justice Department charged more than 125 Texas law officers with civil rights violations — nearly 20 percent of all the cases filed nationally. Louisiana ranked a distant second in the number of cases filed against police, with 21 during the last decade — about eight percent of all cases nationally.

The high number of Texas prosecutions stands in stark contrast to the 15 states that had no cases filed against law officers. Nine states had only one case. In California, where national scrutiny has focused since the Los Angeles beating, only nine cases were filed against officers between 1980 and 1989.

Although the number of California investigations is rising, Texas surpassed California. Between 1984 and 1989, 2,015 Texas officers were investigated. By contrast, there were 1,294 investigations of California police and 694 in New York during the same period.

“We have a very violent populace. We have large urban areas,” says DeLord. “Aside from California and New York, we probably have more standard statistical metropolitan areas than anybody in the nation. We have three of the largest cities in America.”

But the Texas figures mesh with a pattern of high numbers of investigations in Southern states, many of them predominantly rural. Such patterns contradict suggestions that police brutality flourishes primarily in high-crime, urban areas. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, all sites of some of the most intense civil rights battles in the nation’s history, also have disproportionately high numbers of police investigated.

Nevertheless, Texas occupies a unique status among Southern states. “I think it’s a tradition of independence, frontier attitude, guns, prevalence of macho,” DeLord says. “We’re one of the few states that shoot people for cutting them off in traffic. What’s the life span of a convenience-store clerk in Dallas?”

Although civil rights complaints are investigated by assistant U.S. attorneys and FBI agents in the field, the decision to prosecute lies with the Justice Department in Washington. Federal officials in Texas currently have at least two ongoing cases against police officers.

One of those investigations focuses on law enforcement officers in Wise County in North Texas. A federal grand jury is examining allegations that officers in Sheriff Leroy Burch’s department violated the civil rights of men arrested at a roadside park on questionable sex charges.

In East Texas, U.S. Attorney Bob Wortham continues to present evidence to a federal grand jury on the 1987 beating death of a black man in Hemphill, a case that attracted national attention. Three former officers were convicted of murder last year in state district court in the beating of Loyal Garner Jr. Those convictions are on appeal before the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Under federal law, all three former officers could still be tried on charges of civil rights violations.

Proof Not Enough

In such civil rights cases, The News found, proof of wrongdoing by a police officer is sometimes not sufficient to take away his license. Most complaints against officers are “sustained” only when witnesses, medical reports, or polygraph tests confirm allegations by victims. Such standards are also required for criminal prosecution, but very few sustained complaints are referred to prosecutors for criminal action.

Criminal conviction for serious crimes is the primary way to revoke an officer’s license. But in cases in which an officer is fired for violating civil rights, he remains licensed as a peace officer.

“There’s a very good possibility that he’s going to work at another law enforcement agency, especially in smaller agencies,” says Amarillo Police Chief Jerry Neal. “I would personally like to see TCLEOSE require the investigation be submitted to them on any officer that’s been terminated for civil rights violations, such as use of unnecessary force. Maybe TCLEOSE should set out guidelines pertaining to the events. Under certain conditions, individuals would have their license suspended or revoked.”

That system does not exist today. The commission’s main regulatory function has been “enforcing minimum entry standards, which include educational and training requirements and the provision that no person who has ever been convicted of a felony, or who has recently been convicted of driving while intoxicated may serve as a law enforcement officer or jailer.”

It is up to local agencies to perform the second half of the regulatory function: setting standards of conduct, investigating complaints against officers, and conducting disciplinary actions.

In rural Texas, however, most small departments lack internal affairs departments and systems for filing citizen complaints. Officers are often underpaid and undersupervised. By default, policing the police in rural areas frequently becomes the responsibility of federal prosecutors.

“Hit and Miss”

The U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of Texas, the most active in prosecuting civil rights cases, is the only one of four in the state with a designated civil rights division. But that division, which five years ago had three attorneys, now has one. And that attorney has been pulled from trying civil rights cases exclusively to assisting in narcotics trials.

“The U.S. attorney’s office in Houston has 45 counties in it,” says former federal civil rights prosecutor Mary Sinderson. “There is no way that even 10 attorneys could possibly investigate each and every claim of civil rights violations to the hilt. You can’t do it. It takes an enormous amount of manpower.”

Along with the lack of resources, there is sometimes a lack of will. “It takes someone who really believes in the citizen’s rights,” says Sinderson. “You have to really believe what the police officer’s job is — that he is not an executioner, that justice on the scene is not his role. You have to firmly believe in the Constitution of the United States. Those are hard things to adhere to when emotion is so prevalent in certain types of cases.”

Few rural district attorneys in the last decade have brought civil rights charges against officers in their county, according to court records. “We know sometimes they would like to, but politically they can’t,” says Wortham, the federal prosecutor for East Texas. “Most of the DAs are country boys. They don’t have a civil rights division.”

In those counties, standards can be lax or non-existent. Some have no written policies regarding deadly force. Some employ officers with misdemeanor convictions for assault and other crimes. Paperwork on arrests can be sketchy and record-keeping a nuisance.

“Little towns, that’s the big question,” says Brigid Sheridan, former assistant district attorney in Bexar County. “It’s hit and miss. The FBI won’t look at them. That’s reality. They will review them, but they won’t share any information with us.”

Some federal prosecutors agree. “If we had the resources and availability of investigators and if the FBI really did the investigations and fleshed those out, we would probably be able to come up with a lot of cases that could be prosecuted and brought to trial,” says Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Porto in Houston. “But we have a lot of trouble with the agencies cooperating, and they know the FBI doesn’t really want to do it.”

FBI agents say civil rights investigations are a priority. “These are very sensitive investigations,” says Ron Butler, an FBI spokesman in El Paso. “They’re dealing with allegations of misconduct against officers — significant allegations. So be it good news or bad news, we want to get it resolved as quickly as possible.”

Some prosecutors praise the FBI investigations, but others identify weaknesses in the system. An FBI agent who receives a complaint from a citizen has five days to notify Washington. The agent then has 21 working days to complete an investigation and file a report with headquarters. Agents in Texas say they receive about one to three complaints a week that merit investigation. “Part of what drives the agents crazy is they wind up doing a paper trail to justify non-action,” says former federal prosecutor Fred Lawrence.

“What’s heartbreaking,” says former federal prosecutor Mary Milloy of the Houston office, “is having so few cases that you can actually bring to a grand jury because they’re so poorly investigated or because the cloak of silence is so heavy, or because of citizen reaction being so sympathetic to the police.”

“We have a very poor track record with convictions,” says Wortham, the East Texas federal prosecutor. “It’s not because we don’t go after them with full vigor and conviction.”