Tópico: Polícia rouba forasteiros (maioria negros) em algumas cidades texanas

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Driving through Tenaha, Texas, doesn't pay for some



The tiny east Texas town is making money by pulling over black motorists and seizing their cash and property without charging them with any crime.
A lawsuit alleges that the town's police pull over motorists -- especially African Americans -- and extort money and valuables by threatening criminal charges or worse.

By Howard Witt
March 11, 2009



Reporting from Tenaha, Texas -- 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.

... The property seizures are not happening just in Tenaha. In southern parts of Texas near the Mexican border, for example, Latinos allege that they are being singled out.

According to a prominent Texas state legislator, police agencies across the state are wielding the asset-forfeiture law more aggressively to supplement their shrinking operating budgets.

"If used properly, it's a good law-enforcement tool to see that crime doesn't pay," said Democratic state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate's Criminal Justice Committee. "But in this instance, where people are being pulled over and their property is taken with no charges filed and no convictions, I think that's theft."

Money, minorities

... "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."

... Once the motorists were detained, the police and the Shelby County district attorney quickly drew up legal papers presenting them with an option: Waive their rights to their cash and property or face felony charges for crimes such as money laundering -- and the prospect of having to hire a lawyer and return to Shelby County multiple times to contest the charges in court.


Apparently routine

The process apparently is so routine in Tenaha that Guillory discovered pre-signed and pre-notarized police affidavits with blank spaces left for an officer to fill in a description of the property being seized. ...




http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-texas-profiling11-2009mar11,0,507135.story