Grits for Breakfast 8/1/2020
At the Houston Chronicle, our pals Eric Dexheimer and St. John Barned Smith (aka, "Sinjin") examine
racial disparities in traffic stops by a drug-interdiction task force in Fort Bend County, finding that they overwhelmingly stopped Latino drivers.
Just under 90 percent of the motorists stopped by Todd Ganey, a Richmond Police Department officer assigned to the team, were Black or Hispanic, according to 2019 records from the Fort Bend Sheriff’s Office, which oversees the task force. Nearly three of every four stops Danny Tondera made last year were of Hispanic drivers.
An analysis of traffic stops made over the past two years by Gillory shows just under 98 percent of the drivers he pulled over were Hispanic. Gillory searched 187 of the vehicles, all but two driven by Hispanics; 94 percent of the time the searches came to nothing.
This was a county drug task force, which was reconstituted after the state's network of 50+ multi-county narcotics task forces was defunded and disbanded by Gov. Rick Perry. This news, combined with recent reports (several of them also by St. John Barned-Smith) about the
Houston PD Narcotics Division audit, reminds Grits how little has changed regarding the methods, patterns and practices of routine drug enforcement since Rick Perry shuttered regional-drug task forces in Texas almost 15 years ago.
More:
https://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2020/08/drug-war-deja-vu-fort-bend-drug.html
