The Uvalde Negro Trap

         

           The daughter of a friend of mine was stopped and searched for marijuana on her way to or from Garner State Park, the most popular Lone Star camping site. A short time later another friend also en route to Garner had a scary interaction with a state trooper in Leakey (pronounced “lakey”) in Real County (pronounced “re-al”) that borders Uvalde. Some small communities have mala fama for being speed traps, generating municipal revenue from fines for bogus tickets after bogus stops, including the infamous Mustang Ridge outside Austin. Doesn’t seem a far stretch that speed traps have been replaced by weed traps in which small town cops, recognizing that traffic is coming from our fair capital city—which has a reputation for a liberal attitude towards the sacred herb—might decide to push the limits of probable cause in order to make a bust. Or a seizure.

My first call was to Real County Sheriff Nathan Johnson and he pretty much put an end to that speculation. Sheriff Johnson runs a small shop, himself and four deputies, and he said that his primary concern is protecting life and property and the last time he even charged anyone with possession of pot, the individual was arrested for something else and the weed became an add-on. Looking at Sheriff Johnson's training transcript, on file with the State of Texas, he has a certificate in hypnotism—take that for what it’s worth. He said that the only way to know that a vehicle is not from his county is not by looking at the plate from behind but looking instead at the vehicle head on, and close, to see the inspection sticker, which can be difficult to do at a high closing speed like two cars approaching on a farm to market road. Which was not totally convincing because anyone who has ever lived in a small town knows that local cops know which vehicles they pass on the road belong to locals and which do not because they know the vehicles themselves. Be that as it may.

The sheriff seemed like a decent guy, he had used grant money, he said, to equip his officers with body cameras, something there has been, one presumes, no rush to do in much of small-town Texas. He said that tourism is a big part of Real County’s economy with cabins that rent out along the bucolic Frio River—a body of water that also attracts campers to Garner State Park. Although he has a responsibility to enforce the law, Sheriff Johnson would not be a very popular elected official if he started arresting people coming to relax and spend money. During a pandemic. And this was crucial: he said that his seized asset account, which has made law enforcement a lot of money recently, again, especially in small-town Texas, is only about $6000, unchanged over the last few years. Besides that, Real County is literally an outlier, you might say—if you’re going to Garner State Park. Never having been there myself. Sheriff Johnson’s jurisdiction is on the scenic route to Garner State Park from Austin, along U.S. 83 through Fredricksburg and Johnson City, where LBJ graduated high school, btw, then Junction and south to Leakey and finally Uvalde County. You don’t have to enter the city of Uvalde if you’re going to the park although many visitors do, to buy supplies. Most people going to the park don’t use this long route and, instead, just take I-35 south to San Antonio and U.S. 90 west to Uvalde. Before talking further to the local authorities, about the possibility of a weed trap, it seemed prudent to check police profiling data regarding who is being stopped in that area of the State of Texas.

The Legislature has mandated that reports be submitted every year by sheriffs and police departments. Real County’s numbers were completely uninteresting but the jurisdiction that stopped my friend’s daughter, Uvalde P.D., showed a single incredible statistic. The profiling report released by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which is custodian of the data, showed that in the years 2019 and 2020, Uvalde police stopped over 11,000 African American drivers total, more than whites or Latinos, in a part of South Texas, hard by the banks of the mighty Rio Grande, that is by far and away majority-Latino and where black people are few and far between. 11,188 to be exact. Hmmm. My next call was to Ruben Nolasco, just elected Sheriff of Uvalde, Texas, by 60 votes. First his numbers: Sheriff Nolasco said that his county includes all of Garner State Park and has a population of about 26,000—90 percent are Latino, about 9 percent white and less than 1 percent black. He is especially familiar with the last demographic, he said, because his daughter is married to a black guy and the sheriff himself is Latino in a county where white men have long held sway over their brown brothers and sisters. Although Sheriff Nolasco, who is Republican, did not say that about white men holding sway. Nor did he say that he served as a deputy sheriff before being elected to the top job, but he did—he's from South Texas and he is unaware of any profiling in his jurisdiction and considers it unlikely for a couple of reasons, first being, as mentioned by the Real County sheriff, stopping people who are coming to spend money in your county would not be much liked by local businesspeople. He said that there is a problem on the roads of Uvalde but he described that as “I.A.’s” or illegal aliens who have crossed the border with the help of traffickers.

The sheriff said for example, during our chat, that a chase of a suspected trafficker had just been called off in Uvalde for fear of endangering the public or the people in the vehicle. His counterpart in Real County also mentioned this dynamic and said that state troopers, from the Texas Department of Public Safety, who are normally assigned to counties across the state, like his own, have been “pushed” to the Rio Grande to deal with the immigrant surge, leaving areas that don’t directly border Mexico understaffed by troopers. Putting pressure on understaffed sheriff offices. Some of Governor Abbott’s complaints about chaos at the border are valid, in other words, although Sheriff Nolasco didn’t say that either, but presumably would have, if asked. “Some people believe,” he told me, without indicating if he is one of some people, “that the I.A.’s are being allowed into Texas to vote for one particular party.” That aside he seemed like a decent guy too, like Sheriff Johnson, and his assertion that there is a lot going on in South Texas right now for law enforcement that does not involve black people seems, you know, credible.

There’s in fact too much going on in South Texas or Southwest Texas, or Proto-West Texas, wherever the fuck Uvalde is, and the idea that law enforcement is taking time out to stop black motorists, by the thousands, on U.S. Highway 90, seems far-fetched but not impossible. This is a Southern state.

Talking to NAACP officials is always helpful for context, if the subject involves Negritude. These guys and girls know the culture and the law, especially policing. Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas NAACP, said that he had not heard of problems for black motorists in the Garner State Park area but he also recalled for me the case of the San Jacinto County Sheriff, in East Texas, back in the not too distant day, who was arrested by the FBI for stopping motorists on U.S. 59 and scamming them or filing false charges. Houston NAACP President James Douglas, who is a law professor, recalled his own experience in an East Texas speed trap where the posted highway speed suddenly changed to a lower residential one and “they give you about thirty yards to slow down.” He had not heard, he said, of any problems in the western part of the state although he noted that I-10, which goes through Houston, parallels U.S. 90 near Uvalde, and is often used by black families going to California to visit relatives. Richard Watkins, a former prison warden from East Texas who also served as president of the NAACP in Huntsville, home of the state prison system, years ago raised a warning about a particular problem in his own Walker County and its pineywoods surroundings that may also be a concern now in the scrubland of Uvalde. The problem, per Warden Watkins, is that a major highway passes through Huntsville, something that speed traps often have in common. A highway is the setting for the crime, not the backwoods cracker-sheriff action you see in movies. He said that in many of the cases of minorities who are illegally pulled over on highways, you never hear about the bad stop because the drivers keep going and do not stay or spend the night to complain in the morning. Cops know that, that's the theory at least. It may be borne out by research as well. “The only hard and fast rule—don’t look at census data as a denominator. The people who drive in an area,” said Professor Geoffrey Alpert, who studies police profiling at the University of South Carolina’s Department of Criminology, “are not the ones who live there, except in small towns.” Which is Uvalde too. A small town.

Richard Watkins, the former prison warden, said that he used to hunt in Uvalde County, near the huge Briscoe Ranch, back in the day, and some of the worst racist rhetoric he has ever heard comes now from that part of the state, from native-born or native-bred Latinos bitching about refugees. The part of bigot was previously played by powerful white men in South Texas and the targets of their abuse were also Latinos. In fact, one of the last great patrónes in Lone Star history was from Uvalde, Dolph Briscoe, among the last Democrats to be governor before the Republican flood, you could call it, nearly half a century ago—except Ann Richards’ brief term in office. Governor Briscoe’s ranch in Uvalde is far far far bigger than Garner State Park, btw. Actually, Uvalde has a pretty piss poor reputation for civil rights, not to be judgmental, due to men like Dolph Briscoe, we won’t go into that here, but mostly due to white oppression & white exploitation. Call it white privilege. 

The park itself is named after Cactus Jack Garner, who started his political career as Uvalde County Judge and rose to be Vice President of the United States under FDR. Cactus Jack was a previous generation's Big Daddy in South Texas, like Dolph Briscoe. The incumbent Big Daddy appears to be a white guy named Bill Mitchell who is Uvalde County Judge and who has held the position since 1987, almost four decades, and just announced his plans to run for reelection in 2022. You couldn't make it up. This time, with Uvalde P.D., it would be Latinos trying to take advantage of the noble black man and noble black woman, however. Which would be hurtful if true. My feeling, knowing the police as only an African American male can, studying them from my earliest days of grade school cognition, during both wanted and unwanted interactions—cops, especially small town cops? Stopping black people systematically seems too much like work. Especially for Latinos which is a description of most of Uvalde P.D. Again not to stereotype or anything. Black cops might do the same thing but only if the money was really really really good.

White cops, no, you couldn’t say that because police work can be an extension of white privilege, not to go all Critical Theory on you or anything.

 Latinos—except when dealing with other Latinos, for example people coming across the Rio Grande without papers—are not into brown privilege or whatever, generically-speaking. Usually. Unless there’s something in it for the police department or for the individual officer, like a shakedown of some kind, which is not beyond the realm of possibility in Uvalde or anywhere else. There’s another reason to be careful about accepting the accuracy of a high number of black stops. Dr. Gregory Hudspeth, president of the San Antonio chapter of the NAACP said that it’s prudent first to review the Uvalde data for the possibility of software/data entry errors. He also said that I-10, on which many families—many African American as well as every other kind of family—journey to or from California, as mentioned by the Houston NAACP president, and which also passes through other heavily black communities like New Orleans and Tallahassee: Dr. Hudspeth said, well, “I just take I-10.”

Because taking U.S. 90 out of San Antonio instead of I-10, choosing in other words to pass through Uvalde, it’s a scenic route too, whether you’re going to Cali or to Houston, and not much used by black people. This is going to sound totally racist but actually has grounding in other stats. Not the police profiling kind. According to figures from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which operates Garner State Park, blacks are the least likely ethnic group to use the campsites, at Garner apparently or anywhere else. You may say, well, U.S. 90 is still a more scenic way to go west, to Cali, but the problem with that theory is that 90 leads to Marfa where, having been there and not seen another black face—and Big Bend National Park which is just as unlikely to be popular with black people as Garner State Park—it’s just not a big attraction to the black peeps, you feel me? The scenic route as defined by white people.

Black people don't drive to Marfa to see the Marfa lights. Black families don't just suddenly wake up on Saturday morning and decide to go camping either, it's a decision that would have to be discussed and voted upon in family councils months if not years in advance. Not the way white or Latino families apparently do, not to stereotype or anything. 

My doubt about Uvalde’s profiling numbers is therefore fundamental—not just doubting that Uvalde P.D. stopped 11,000 black motorists in the last two years but also questioning whether there have even been 11,000 black motorists passing through Uvalde to stop, on their way to or from Marfa or Garner State Park or Big Bend. My view—and, again this may sound totally racist, but only to the uninitiated. My view is that given our history of agricultural labor out-of-doors, and in the heat of day, back in the day, today the average black Texan would much prefer to spend his or her leisure time inside with the AC on. And if we’re going to Cali by car, we’re on I-10 because it’s faster and fuck Marfa and fuck the Marfa Lights. That means, coincidentally, giving Uvalde a miss too. My friend whose daughter was searched for weed is white, btw, and you know that because if she were black her daughter wouldn't be going camping at Garner. “I can guarantee you that it’s a data entry error,” said Mike Hernandez, who is former Uvalde P.D., presently a school cop and was the Democrat who lost to Ruben Nolasco for Uvalde County Sheriff by those 60 votes. Lieutenant Hernandez said there’s a lot of other police action going on in South Texas right now that does not involve stopping black motorists. But it’s hard to ignore the numbers, especially since the Uvalde puercos, given opportunities to disavow the stats, did not.