Kudos go to my local hometown paper, the Beaumont Enterprise, for joining a lawsuit with the Texas Attorney General’s Office on an open records matter.
The issue at hand are use-of-force reports filed by the local police department which the newspaper asked for but were denied. The paper sought reports during a period in time in which the son of Beaumont Police Chief Frank Coffin, the son also a Beaumont P.D. officer, was accused of assaulting a man.
Beaumont officials maintain releasing such information would open the door to tons of lawsuits over such issues. The Enterprise and the AG, as well as appeals courts, maintain the records are public under the state’s public information law.
Now if we could just get the Enterprise to investigate another matter involving the Beaumont police — the issue of buy-and-bust drug arrests. The issue pops up from time-to-time especially when such police operations end like the one in January in which Beaumont officers shot and killed a man in a Jack-in-the-Box parking lot during an undercover drug arrest.
I have no beef with the officers’ action although one would hope for a great deal of scrutiny in officer-involved shooting situations in which one of the officers happens to be the son of a city council member as was the case in this instance. The officers were cleared because they defended themselves, which is how it should be. I do have, however, doubts as to the effectiveness of the buy-and-bust tactics used to catch drug dealers.
As I noted just after the shooting, there remains some doubters in police circles who say the yield in such operations tend to be mainly low-level drug dealers. Those tactics also are obviously dangerous for both officers and civilians.
I e-mailed a copy of my concerns as listed in my Jan. 24 post to a managing editor of the Enterprise but I suppose she thought I was a crackpot. I am, of course, a crackpot but that’s better than being a crack head, right?