The documentary “Tulia, Texas” has been garnering media coverage across the nation.  This review from the Chicago Tribune is typical.  Charles Kiker and Freddie Brookins, Sr., both founding members of Friends of Justice, are featured in the hour-long piece that aired last night on the PBS program Independent Lens.  Ultimately, it is the war on drugs, not the people of Tulia, that takes the biggest hit.  You can find another good article from the Houston Chronicle here.

If you want to learn more about Tulia, Independent Lens has a good list of sources here.

How the war on drugs went awry in Tulia, Texas

It’s appropriate that the excellent documentary “Tulia, Texas” (10 p.m. Tuesday, WTTW-Ch. 11; three and a half stars) has such a deliberate pace. If the documentary that told the painful story of this town had had a showy or loud style, the result would have been overkill.

As it was, what happened in Tulia was surreal. (For a video preview of the documentary and other information on the film, click here or here.)

In 1999, 46 Tulia residents, most of them African-American, were arrested in a drug raid. Many who were convicted early on were given sentences ranging from 20 to a staggering 90 years, and some of the frightened people who had been picked up in the drug bust pleaded guilty to avoid spending the rest of their lives in jail.

These men and women went to jail on the uncorroborated word of Tom Coleman, an undercover cop whose résumé and methods turned out to be problematic. A judge later called Coleman’s testimony in a Tulia-related case “extremely devious.”

But the most incredible part of the whole affair, which was exposed by a small band of concerned Tulia residents and by a crusading lawyer who spent years picking apart the prosecution’s cases, is that the sheriff who oversaw Coleman still believes in him. Sheriff Larry Stewart told the filmmakers that he thought of Coleman as a “credible” man, even after it emerged that some residents could prove they had been elsewhere when he allegedly bought cocaine from them.

In the middle of Coleman’s undercover activities, a warrant was issued for his arrest relating to crimes he’d been charged with in another county. But according to Stewart’s interview in “Tulia, Texas,” the sheriff determined that the “charges were not true” and he let Coleman keep working as he dealt with his own legal issues.

Filmmakers Cassandra Herrman and Kelly Whalen interviewed Coleman himself, who dismisses the charges that he faced after the Tulia cases began to fall apart as “vindictive.” They also talked to several of the men and women charged in the 1999 raid and to residents who still think those arrested were probably guilty of something. The picture that emerges is of a weary, hard-pressed town still grappling with issues of race and class that the 1999 arrests brought to the fore.

Charles Kiker and Gary Gardner, a retired farmer and a retired minister, respectively, were among the few local residents who were willing to speak out against the Tulia drug arrests and convictions.

“This is my home country,” Kiker told the filmmakers. “I was born here and I’ll be buried here. So I don’t want to put it down, but I want it to be fair.”

The hourlong film connects the events in Tulia to federally funded drug task forces, which have been around for two decades. In the film, Herman and Whalen, as well as Texas journalist Nate Blakeslee, make the case that these task forces are an important source of income, especially for cash-strapped rural police departments.

But in the words of attorney Jeff Blackburn, who helped free the Tulia defendants, “Task forces get money based on numbers” of people arrested.

Texas, the film tells us, has eliminated federally funded drug task forces, but there are still hundreds of them operating around the country. And as the final words of the documentary tell viewers, “There are no laws in the United States requiring corroboration of undercover narcotics agents.”