(Texas) Cop Walks Into a Bar And...Arrests You. For Having a Drink.

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Thu Mar-04-10 12:19 PM
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(Texas) Cop Walks Into a Bar And...Arrests You. For Having a Drink.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/texas-racist-laws-drinking-while-brown

LATE ON A BALMY Saturday night last June, six Fort Worth cops and two officers from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission went looking for trouble. They had just raided two Hispanic bars in an industrial stretch of town and nine detainees now sat in the paddy wagon (pdf), hands bound with plastic ties. The rest of the city's bars would soon shut down. It seemed like the night was over, except for the paperwork. Then Sergeant Richard Morris had an idea. "Hey," he said. "Let's go to the Rainbow Lounge."

A half-dozen police cruisers, an unmarked sedan, and the prisoner van slid to a stop in front of the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth's newest gay club, at about 1:30 a.m. on June 28, 2009—40 years, almost down to the minute, after New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn with billy clubs and bullhorns. Inside the bar, the officers fanned out, grabbing and arresting six patrons for public intoxication. Benjamin Guttery, a 24-year-old Army vet, says an officer told him to put down his drink, then "bulldozed" him through the crowd to the paddy wagon but then let him go. "I'm 6'8", 250 pounds, and I had just finished my second drink," Guttery told a local reporter. "I might have had enough to have a loose tongue, but not a loose walk or anything like that." Another man alleges that he was slammed against a wall, elbowed, and fell on the ground, landing him in intensive care for a week with bleeding in his brain. He was charged with public intoxication and assault.

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For some officers, PI has provided a ready-made reason for detaining minorities. A Houston defense attorney, who asks to be unnamed since he specializes in misdemeanors such as PI, puts it this way: "If you're brown and you're around—you're going down." Nick Novello, a 27-year veteran of the Dallas Police Department, blew the whistle on three colleagues who he claims filled their arrest quotas by picking up people, mostly minorities, for PI. "They were illegally arrested," Novello says. "It's an absolute perversion." (Two were removed from the force.)

According to a recent report by sociology and law professors at the University of California-Berkeley, the Dallas suburb of Irving has used "discretionary" public intoxication arrests to fish for undocumented immigrants. After partnering with federal immigration officials in 2006 to check local prisoners' residency status, Irving police increased the number of Latinos they nicked for PI and other Class C misdemeanors by 150 percent, while arrests of whites and African Americans for those offenses fell. The Mexican consul issued an advisory telling migrants to avoid Irving. "In this city, one has to be extra careful," he told a Spanish-language newspaper. "They were clearly choosing to bring more Hispanics into jail," says Aarti Kohli, coauthor of the Berkeley study. But the feds and local officials hailed the PI sweeps as a victory. Immigration "is expanding this program, saying, 'Isn't this great?'" Kohli says. "But the question they're not asking is: How are these people getting put into jail?"
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Texas is a mean place