Thread: TX: Small police forces can reap big bucks

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Small police forces can reap big bucks

Web Posted: 01/28/2007 01:07 AM CST

Jesse Bogan
Rio Grande Valley Bureau

FALFURRIAS — Police recently responded to a call about a stolen rooster named Harry, but this rural enclave in the South Texas brush country is more like Miami than Mayberry.

Brooks County has only 7,600 residents, but the area pulses with illicit traffic attempting to sneak people and drugs past the nearby Border Patrol checkpoint 70 miles north of the Rio Grande on U.S. 281.

It poses challenges and extra work for local law enforcement, some of it gruesome. But it also creates a gold mine.

By policy, the Border Patrol can't chase vehicles, so a cooperative arrangement has evolved. Local officers respond to calls about immigrants crashing on roadways or dying of exposure and routinely seize northbound drugs and southbound cash.

In a good year — such as last year — the resulting forfeitures of money and vehicles can supplement the Sheriff's Department budget from county taxpayers by as much as two-thirds.

Express-News Multimedia

Jesse Bogan/Express-News
A woman carrying undocumented immigrants is stopped in downtown Falfurrias by local and federal law enforcement officers.
Slide Show: Checkpoint: A night in Falfurrias

Police in Falfurrias, the county seat, employ an "interdiction officer" who stops motorists with whatever probable cause is handy — a burned-out light, a missing sticker.

He seized enough cash in three years to pay for nearly all the department's new equipment — including a money-counting machine — and soon, a batch of new patrol vehicles and a bigger headquarters.

Last year, the take for police was $1.1 million in cash, about half of which will go directly to the department.

Falfurrias Police Chief Eden Garcia said he started the interdiction program when he arrived to find a penny-pinched department in old uniforms.

"Naturally, I want to say because we are fighting the war on drugs, but the bottom line is, it is also helping us," he said. "That money confiscated on the highway and vehicles seized is staying here at our community for better equipment. Cities like Falfurrias, we are not budgeted to have that type of money, to have the latest equipment."

It's a windfall available to local law enforcement agencies throughout the region, something civil libertarians say needs more oversight.

Some counties currently seeking more money to combat border crime — for example, a piece of the $100 million Gov. Rick Perry plans to ask the Legislature to allocate — are loath to mention their forfeiture accounts, some containing hundreds of thousands of dollars, a few containing millions.

It makes for a disconnect between small local governments and the big money their crime-fighters are reaping.

The weekly Falfurrias Facts recently reported on county commissioners alarmed by an unapproved expenditure of $1,500. It ran the article above a photo of a deputy beside a truck carrying 1,050 pounds of pot. Days earlier, deputies nabbed 3,000 pounds of marijuana from a truck that "ran over fences from one ranch to another," the paper reported.

County officials complain about the costs of dealing with illegal immigration. But that crime, too, is a revenue stream in the form of seized vehicles.

A night's work

Five minutes into a recent night shift, the Falfurrias interdiction officer, Emiliano Canales, calmly took a cell phone call from his girlfriend as he eyed a gold Dodge Neon with fogged up windows. Somebody had reported seeing it load up with people.

"What's up, babe?" he said, following the small car at about 40 mph. There was no rear license plate and the paper registration wasn't clearly visible — legally sufficient to pull it over.

"Nothing, probably getting into some pursuit," he continued. "Right now we are behind a vehicle that is probably loaded up with aliens. I have to wait until it gets past Fal."

Waiting is a policy the department learned the hard way — if the driver accelerates, the chase will be away from city traffic, homes and businesses — but it's not always followed.

"All right babe, we'll be careful," Canales said, hanging up to coordinate other officers by radio. They decided to stop the car at the next light.

"It's a female driving, I don't think she is going to take off," Canales said into the radio.

A deputy sped by and got into position in front of the Neon, another deputy pulled to the right, a Border Patrol agent took the left. A white van full of National Guardsmen trailed Canales.

The Neon's driver, about 30, a rosary around her neck, held a child's blanket to her face. Her eyes welled with tears. She said she didn't know the names of the six undocumented immigrants — two young women and four young men — who sat on the highway, one clutching a plastic Gatorade bottle, another picking stickers out of his socks.

It's a common spectacle in a town where police responded to 88 calls involving the transport of undocumented immigrants in 2006. In this case, the officers chatted and took inventory of their catch. The guardsmen never got out of the van.

Somebody had dropped off the immigrants south of the checkpoint hours before and they trekked around it — dozens died trying to do that in 2006, mainly from dehydration.

The Neon picked up the group at a rest stop where immigrants often rendezvous north of the checkpoint. One of them, Mario Alberto Castro Martinez, said he had paid half the $1,800 tab to get from Reynosa, Mexico, to Houston.

Asked about others like him in the brush, the 20-year-old said, "There's a lot more people, a lot."

Border Patrol agents took them away and the car was impounded at a city lot. Scores of vehicles seized here don't get claimed and are auctioned yearly.

Another call came minutes later. Two young women inside a car suspiciously parked in the darkness just north of the checkpoint had unconvincing stories and no driver's licenses. The Border Patrol handed it to Canales because it can't enforce traffic laws.

A wrecker impounded that car, too, and the women were left at the rest stop.

"You all stay out of trouble, don't be doing it," Canales warned them. "Because next time you are going to get caught."

Canales didn't give them a written warning.

"I don't write tickets," he said.

'That's money'

Able to roam the entire county because he's on a task force, Canales was casting for bigger fish. He set up at a highway intersection 25 miles south of Falfurrias in tiny Rachal.

"I am going to look for drugs a little bit, dope or aliens, whatever comes first," he said, watching the oncoming headlights.

And he would look for cash. One by one he stopped vehicles for minor traffic violations — a license plate light out, a car swerving when he pulled up beside it to look inside.

"What you are looking for is any (probable cause) to pull over a vehicle," he said.

The stops didn't result in more arrests or seizures, although Canales considered the targets likely, making comments like, "That's going to be a good one right there — just by the guys driving in there," "That is very low in the back," "There's too many heads in there," and, "That's money."

He's found money in ice chests, doors, an intake manifold and back pockets. His biggest discovery came in April: $960,000 hidden in the ceiling of a tractor-trailer he had pulled over because of a faulty rear light.

But it doesn't always come easily. Canales recently searched a gray Plymouth van with out-of-state-plates for two hours to no avail, taking the dash apart, tapping and poking around with a screwdriver, wire, flashlight and mirror.

He stopped the driver, Mario Vela, 44, of San Juan, for going 48 mph in a 40 mph zone.

"Whatever they need to do," Vela said, waiting patiently in the cold. "I am not nervous because I didn't do nothing bad. I like this job they are doing. They have to stop the bad things. They need to take care of the country."

Handed back his keys, Vela made a statement to the press in a mixture of Spanish and English.

"I respect whatever he needs to do. I respect the laws of the United States," he said.

The gold mine

The hunt for cash shows the "hypocrisy of the drug war," said William Harrell , president of the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Law enforcement, particularly along the border, seems to be more interested in policing the southbound lanes than the northbound lanes," he said.

"It's a well-known fact in the law-enforcement community that profits associated with the drug trade are almost irresistible," Harrell said. "There is no greater need for independent oversight of policing than on the border. ... The potential and the temptation for corruption is so great."

The state's homeland security director, Steve McCraw, said the main objective is to prevent and reduce crime, but forfeitures are good for law enforcement.

"I think every dollar counts, every penny counts," he said.

The resource is especially welcome in small counties without large tax bases, such as here in Brooks.

In fiscal year 2006, Sheriff Balde Lozano landed $432,695 in captured funds and spent $400,471 of it on things like wrecker fees, temporary help, salaries for three deputies, telephone bills and drug prevention programs, records show.

It provided a healthy supplement to the county general fund budget for the Sheriff's Department — about two-thirds that amount.

Lozano still had $207,702 in his forfeiture account to carry over to this year. That's not including the 30 percent cut that goes to the district attorney's office for handling the court paperwork.

"If you look here in the office, the whole office, probably 99 percent of the supplies have been bought with forfeited money and money acquired through the auction of cars," said Joe Frank Garza, the district attorney for Brooks and Jim Wells County, adding that his office "would not function" without it.

"Every county along the border has people on interdictions, probably," he said. "Because they know it's out there."

At the start of the year, the Webb County district attorney's and sheriff's offices in Laredo had available forfeiture balances of $1.67 million and $687,000 respectively, according to the county auditor there. In September, at the start of its fiscal year, the Laredo Police Department had about $2 million in seized assets available.

In Hidalgo County, in the Rio Grande Valley, the balances were $1.14 million at the district attorney's office and $195,571 at the sheriff's office.

That's money awarded by courts, and the balances fluctuate as it arrives and gets spent. County auditors said they have no idea how much cash their sheriff's offices seize until they take it to court.

The bodies

The curse is the corpses.

The Border Patrol checkpoint generates another kind of fallout for local authorities. Sometimes circling buzzards alert landowners.

"From fresh dead bodies to bones, I've seen it all," said Sheriff Lozano. "I am sure there are still bodies out there from this summer that haven't been located yet. There's gotta be."

In 2005, the county spent $73,363 on autopsies and transport fees for 41 immigrants who didn't survive the hike to avoid the checkpoint.

Through November of last year, the tab was $76,218 for 56 dead, not including four sojourners found on Christmas Eve. Dogs found one of them in a barn, a Mexican man who had tried to use empty feed sacks as a blanket against the cold.

Local rancher and veterinarian Mike Vickers said the deaths are so common his dog carried a human skull into his yard.

An outspoken former director of the Texas branch of the Minutemen Civilian Defense Corps, now on the board of the Texas Border Volunteers, a similar group organized to help fight illegal immigration, he has long asked for more deputies to prevent the damage immigrants do to private property.

Told the amount of seized cash his sheriff spent last year, Vickers said he wasn't aware of the level, but said that's not a sure thing.

"You can't gamble on what's coming or what the future holds," he said.

Yet local authorities do just that. The police chief and the interdiction officer, who patrols the highway outside Vickers' office, could not think of anything when asked if they had any unmet needs at the moment.

I believe that this county has the right idea. Catch everyone of them and put the money back into the counties that are paying the price.