Audio By Carbonatix
Here’s the thing with the Dallas transit police: It’s not that DART cops are totally insane wacked-out Nazi Robocops. But they do have a way of turning absent-minded missteps by otherwise law-abiding people into high-drama scenes.
Another damn jaywalker eatin’ some sidewalk!
I’m not saying people should jaywalk. But come on! It’s like the case I wrote about last month (“Bus Gestapo,” December 8). A guy walks against the traffic signal. He gets jumped by six cops, pepper-gassed and beat up pretty good in front of his son and winds up in jail for the better part of two weeks.
You have to wonder: Is it because they’re bus cops?
Since that column appeared, I have been gathering string on complaints from other people who say they’ve had bad encounters with the DART police. And I’m really trying to do a service here. As far as I can tell, DART doesn’t have a real internal affairs operation the way most police agencies do in major cities. Instead of an independent staff of investigators assigned to check out complaints against officers, they have a process by which they turn the complaint over to the supervisor of the officer being complained about.
Sort of like asking the squad leaders: “Did you fail to train and supervise your officer properly, and would you say you need to be fired or demoted?”
Guess what the answer is 99 percent of the time? According to documents I acquired through an open records demand, it’s usually some version of: “After the chain of command review, it has been determined that there is no evidence of wrongdoing or policy violation.”
Surprise, surprise. In spite of a remarkably consistent stream of complaints from citizens about rudeness, overzealousness, brutality and sloppy record-keeping, the DART police department comes out pretty close to squeaky clean when it investigates itself. Pretty close. But not 100 percent, which brings us to the interesting case of Terra Deshea Cummings:
Cummings committed the heinous offense of crossing the double white line in her car to get out of an HOV lane so she could exit the freeway on southbound Highway 67 last October.
She did it. She never denied doing it. She is a self-confessed double white line crosser. You’re allowed to exit a High Occupancy Vehicle lane (two or more passengers per car) only at the places where there’s a break in the double white line. She was late spotting her exit from the freeway and pulled out of the HOV lane to make it.
So she winds up with a DART cop yanking open her car door, ordering her out of the vehicle, yelling at her, threatening to slap the cuffs on her and haul her off to jail. And lest you think she did something to provoke all this, let me tell you why her “internal affairs” complaint to DART is so interesting: The cop’s supervisor agreed with Cummings (whom I was not able to reach by telephone).
The finding was that Officer Nick McGregor, Badge 291, did not follow a new policy directive on traffic stops issued by DART police Chief James Spiller on May 24, 2005. The complaint against McGregor was sustained.
More intriguing: After counseling Officer McGregor on the right way to approach a typical double white line crosser, McGregor’s boss sent a memo to his own supervisor in which he said, “I think this about covers the issue. I don’t think this means anything to him and will be surprised if his attitude or actions change at all.”
McGregor’s supervisor, Richard Tear, goes on in the memo to tell his boss that the officer “wanted to argue with me about his interpretation of both the general order and the e-mail [from the chief].
“He seemed to me to take it all lightly and didn’t seem to me to be very concerned about our counseling session at all. After we left the conference room, he turned to me and started to tell me again about what he was going to do.”
Of course, I don’t know all the background for that conversation. But would you agree with me that the impression here is not of a tight ship? They call the guy in and tell him he’s not supposed to yell at double white line crossers and threaten them with jail. And according to his boss, he sort of flips them all off and heads out the door to do it his way anyway.
I can’t tell you what the ultimate outcome was in this case: I was told before the holiday that no one at the DART police agency will have time to chat with me before January 17, 2006, when the chief said he will see if he can squeeze me in for half an hour.
So here’s what I’m trying to do in the meantime: Because of my concern that DART doesn’t have a real internal affairs department, I am committing now personally, as of this moment and out of my interest as a concerned citizen, to operate my own volunteer internal affairs department for DART. I will charge DART nothing for this service, not a penny, and I do not plan to seek a tax deduction for my time and shoe leather.
It’s a donation.
Some 50 of you have already been kind enough to respond to my earlier request for good DART stories, and I have been chatting with many of you on the phone and in person over the last few weeks.
We have, for example, the case of Michael Crane, who came to my office to tell me the story of his encounter with a DART cop who, he says, yelled and motioned at him from across the street: “Come over here!” So Crane crosses the street as he has been ordered, and the cop whips out his ticket book.
Crane told me when he asked what he was being ticketed for, the DART cop informed him he had just crossed the street illegally.
Sucker!
I wouldn’t believe this stuff if it didn’t keep showing up so consistently from different people. A common tale of woe, for example, is the difficulty people encounter when they actually want to take care of a DART ticket.
Kennon Bohannon is another self-confessed double white line crosser, only he did it to get into the HOV lane, not out of it. Got nailed. Wanted to pay. Went to the justice of the peace court named on the ticket. They said they had no record of the ticket.
“I gave the citation to them,” Bohannon told me. “They looked, and they told me that I should come back within two weeks. I came back in two weeks, and the clerk indicated, ‘We still don’t have your name.'”
Bohannon asked what he should do. “They said, ‘Well, we’ll get back to you.’ So I wait and I wait. More than a year passed. And then they sent me a letter stating that, ‘We have a warrant for your arrest if you don’t pay this citation.'”
His fine had more than doubled to $460, he told me, because of the time he had taken to pay it. But rather than argue, he wrote a check.
“I didn’t question them, because the people are unprofessional and unorganized. It’s a circus,” he said.
Is it the JP’s fault? I don’t know. It sure sounds as if DART has trouble getting its paperwork to court on time. Mike Firth got a ticket for crossing the street. He takes things like this seriously. “I have no police tickets,” he told me. “I tend to be a little bit edgy about doing things precisely. I show up for jury duty when I’m called. That kind of thing.”
Firth was issued a ticket for crossing the street. Because it was filled out badly–he says it was altered by the officer after Firth received his copy–he was confused about where and when to appear and how to dispute it. “I’m looking at this thing,” he told me. “I’m calling them. I’m calling them back a week later. ‘Do you have the ticket?'”
No. The court didn’t have any record of his ticket.
“What am I supposed to be doing? I’m being told, ‘Well, it takes a while for the tickets to get out of DART.’ I’m calling DART. ‘Oh, it will get over there.'”
He tells them, “‘Yeah, but I’m supposed to do a court appearance.’ Both the court and the DART police are telling me I’m supposed to just go down there and show up. And I’m saying, ‘They don’t have the ticket. They don’t have any record.'”
Eventually DART did sent the ticket to the court–after Firth’s court date. Some weeks later the clerk to Justice of the Peace Luis Sepulveda sent Firth a letter with good news: “In most cases, the court does not consider dismissal on any case without a not guilty plea, made in person or in writing with the proper ID,” the letter stated. “However, upon receipt of your letters and ID, this case was presented to the Judge. Considering the confusion caused by the way the ticket was marked, the Judge has decided to dismiss the case.”
In other words, the messy way the thing was written and the abysmal record-keeping at DART were enough for the judge to just deep-six the whole affair.
I’ve got dozens and dozens of these, and I get more every day. Maybe it’s just one side. I’ve got to remember to say to the chief when I see him, “So. Tell me. What’s good about DART cops?”
My phone number, by the way, is 214-757-8460. I’m going to change my message, though. I want it to say, “Hello, this is Jim Schutze, DART Internal Affairs volunteer. At the tone, please dish.”
