Clarion-Ledger
May 9, 2008
Federal audit finds no criminal wrongdoing by drug task force
by Chris Joyner
A federal audit of a Mississippi narcotics task force turned up no criminal wrongdoing and only a few paperwork problems.
State officials had alleged mismanagement of federal funds by the North Central Narcotics Task Force.
Now, sheriffs in the Delta region are hoping the audit, conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General's Office, will help resurrect the task force, which disbanded earlier this year for lack of funding.
State Public Safety Commissioner Steve Simpson, who officially started in his post last week, said paperwork problems were "benign." He said he is looking forward to putting to rest the bad blood between the department and the sheriffs who oversee the eight-county task force.
"I'm very high on these regional task forces. I think they do great work," Simpson said, noting his background as a former prosecutor and circuit judge. "I'm going to go to these sheriffs and see what we can do to get this North Central task force back to work."
Holmes County Sheriff Willie March said Simpson is "my kind of man."
"I feel good about the audit, but I knew we ran a professional task force. I knew there wasn't anything wrong with this task force," he said.
The department and sheriffs in the Delta counties have clashed for the past year and a half. DPS officials have fought over funding for North Central and other state drug task forces, a fact they blame on shrinking funding from the federal government.
North Central, the state's oldest and largest task force, was started in 1986 to target street-level drug sales. Over the years, the task force has worked in Coahoma, Claiborne, Grenada, Holmes, Humphreys, Leflore, Tunica and Yazoo counties using video surveillance to catch drug dealers selling narcotics to undercover agents.
The task force had five agents and a commander when it folded earlier this year. According to its last application for funding, task force agents made 605 drug arrests in its last year, about two-thirds of which were for possession of either marijuana or crack cocaine. The task force has 181 convictions during that period, half on charges of selling drugs.
The task force has been a target for the budget ax for the past two years. In January, after a series of meetings that included closed-door sessions with the Delta lawmen to discuss alleged mismanagement of federal funds, DPS officials asked the Justice Department to look into alleged irregularities in the paperwork agents filed to document cash spent on undercover drug buys.
According to the May 2 report, inspectors found "practices for documenting staff assignments and activities were weak" but no money was missing or misspent.
"We were able to trace accountability of confidential funds through other documents such as informant files, agents' disbursement ledgers, evidence logs, receipt books, and sub-grantee reporting worksheets," the inspectors reported.
Sheriffs in the region have blamed former Commissioner George Phillips for the animosity between DPS and the task force.
"Like I said before, it was personal," Claiborne County Sheriff Frank Davis said.
Davis said the ill will with Phillips dates to a 1995 turf battle spawned by a Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics investigation of a Yazoo County sheriff's deputy and a Yazoo City police officer. Davis said he and four other Delta county sheriffs made a personal visit to Phillips about the investigation. Phillips held it against the task force, he said.
Phillips, who now is the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development state office, said the claim is an "absolute, total fabrication."
"I was never after anybody. I did it the fairest way I know how," he said.
Phillips said he named an independent committee made up of local sheriffs, police chiefs and prosecutors to dole out the federal grant money. Beyond that, he stayed out of it.
"I wish all those sheriffs well," he said.
District Attorney James Powell, who prosecutes case in Yazoo, Holmes and Humphreys counties, said he hopes the North Central Narcotics Task Force can be reconstituted.
"Without them there is just not going to be a lot of drug enforcement in my district. The MBN is stretched thin," he said. "It's just going to be wide open."
Since all of the available grant money was allotted to other task forces last December, it is unclear where North Central will find the money to restart its activities. The task force had requested $301,000.
Davis said the committee promised North Central money if the investigation found nothing wrong, and he intends to hold DPS to that.
"As long as this task force is not operational, the drug dealers are winners," he said. "As long as they can keep us fighting, they are winners."
