DALLAS (AP) -- Poor supervision and disregard for police department rules contributed to a fake-drug scandal that landed two dozen innocent people in jail, an investigation found.
The report released Wednesday said confidential informants used those lapses to frame people -- mostly poor Mexican immigrants -- with billiards chalk bundled like real drugs.
A narcotics detective and a former officer were charged in April with evidence tampering in the 2001 drug scandal.
The report also blamed the Dallas County district attorney’s office for waiting until trials to test drug evidence, a delay that meant wrongly arrested people languished in jail. That policy has been changed.
“The policy that we had before relied on a trust in the police and what they were telling us and, as this report clearly reflects, the police were not telling us the truth,” said Rachel Horton, spokeswoman for District Attorney Bill Hill. “We regret that it did allow people to stay wrongfully jailed for longer periods of time, but I do want to point out that in no way did our policy cause the fake drug scandal or the wrong jailing of anyone.”
Police Chief David Kunkle said he supports implementing the report’s recommendations, which include improved money-handling procedures, tougher informant oversight and more training.
Kunkle was hired after the city fired Chief Terrell Bolton, who held the job four years but was criticized in the wake of the fake-drug scandal and other department problems.
The report’s authors, two independent attorneys hired by the City Council, lacked the authority to compel police officers to testify and could not impose penalties for the lapses. The findings are being forwarded to the police department for further action.
It’s still unclear why officers reported getting positive test results on substances that later were proven to not be drugs. The investigators said the officers either did the tests incorrectly, lied about the results or never performed the tests.