Perot's Anti-Drug War In Texas Troubled Many

DALLAS - When police officers complained a few years ago that they were not properly equipped to fight Dallas' growing drug trade, a prominent local citizen named Ross Perot offered a solution of his own: Bring in helicopters with special infrared detectors that could swoop down over residential neighborhoods and identify houses harboring narcotics.

When the officers questioned whether such tactics would be constitutional, Perot had a quick rejoinder: "He suggested that maybe a civil war needs to be declared," said Monica Smith, president of the Texas Police Association.

Ever since he was first appointed by Gov. Bill Clements to chair the Texas War on Drugs Committee 13 years ago, Perot has been among this state's most outspoken champions of aggressive and sometimes unorthodox law enforcement: He led a campaign to dramatically stiffen the state's laws against drug crimes in the early 1980s, offered to help the U.S. Customs Service by financing private commandos to interdict smugglers, and engineered a 1988 campaign by Dallas' predominantly white police association to weaken a civilian review board set up to investigate complaints of police brutality.

Perot's efforts have won him plaudits from many law-enforcement officers and large segments of the electorate in this law-and-order state. Some anti-drug experts have hailed his crusade against drugs as a model that inspired similar movements in other states as well as Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign.

NO IMPACT SEEN

But Perot's critics say his efforts had virtually no demonstrable impact on the level of drug activity in the state and, in their view, were narrowly focused on imposing draconian prison sentences without any budget increases for either prisons or drug-treatment programs. Some minority leaders and civil-liberties groups are more critical, arguing that in his anti-crime activities, Perot has displayed a penchant for inflammatory rhetoric and simplistic solutions that raise questions about how he would handle crime and drug problems on a national scale.

"From a civil-liberties standpoint, he scares me - he sounds almost fascistic," said Joe Cook, regional Dallas director of the Texas Civil Liberties Union. "His attitude seems to be that constitutional rights are expendable in the name of whatever the objective is at the moment. It is an ends-justifies-the-means mentality."

As Perot has come under increased scrutiny in recent months, he has complained that some remarks on drug and law-enforcement issues that have been attributed to him were misunderstood or fabricated. He has, for example, denied that he ever suggested - as he was widely quoted as saying - that minority neighborhoods should be "cordoned off" so that police SWAT teams could conduct house-to-house searches.

Those comments, purportedly made during a series of off-the-record meetings with Dallas police officers and newspaper editorial boards, provoked a storm of criticism from black and Hispanic leaders here after they were first reported in 1988. Although he did not object to the remarks attributed to him at the time, Perot recently has suggested that Laura Miller, columnist for the now defunct Dallas Times Herald who first reported the comments, had engaged in "flights of fantasy."

Other journalists have said they recall Perot saying the same thing. James Ragland, a former city hall reporter with the Dallas Morning News now with the Washington Post, recalls being at a meeting with Dallas police officers at which Perot suggested the police "ought to just go in there (high-crime neighborhoods), cordon off the whole area, going block by block, looking for guns and drugs."

"When somebody asked, `Doesn't that present a constitutional question?' he said, `Look, I'm sure 95 percent of the people who live there would support this,' " Ragland said.

NOT OUT OF CHARACTER

Perot's critics say such comments are not out of character with other rhetoric, often confusing, that he has employed. In recent interviews, Perot has repeatedly said that cleaning up the nation's drug problems "won't be pretty" without explaining what he had in mind. In an appearance on the "Today" show on Oct. 25, 1989, Perot compared the drug war to "chemical warfare on the streets of our country" and then briefly outlined his proposed solution.

"You can simply declare civil war, and the drug dealer is the enemy," said Perot, elaborating on the idea he had first made to the police officers the year before. "At this point, there ain't no bail. You go to POW camp. You can deal with this problem in straight military terms. . . . We don't have to have military troops do all this, but we can apply the rules of war."

One window into Perot's attitude toward crime opened in pre-trial questioning when he was called for jury duty in 1988 in the capital-murder trial of a 27-year-old black defendant accused of bludgeoning a man to death during a robbery in his home.

Perot expressed his strong support for the death penalty, and said he would not give any weight to psychiatric testimony on the grounds that it is "just close to faith healing, as far as I'm concerned," according to a transcript in Dallas County court records.

Perot also complained that the criminal-justice system spends too much time "looking after the criminals" instead of "law-abiding citizens."

Perot was struck from the jury by defense lawyers.

So far in his unannounced presidential campaign, Perot has offered no specific proposals for attacking crime problems. Tom Luce, chairman of the Perot Petition Committee and chief lawyer for Perot, said he was not aware of Perot's "civil war" analogy and declined to speculate on what measures Perot has in mind.

But Luce dismissed any suggestions that a Perot presidency would not respect civil liberties or constitutional rights. "Ross Perot is a man who . . . knows the terms of the Constitution," said Luce. "I'd look at the man's track record."

Perot's involvement in criminal-justice issues began in 1979, when he was still basking in the publicity surrounding the commando-style rescue of two employees of his company, Electronic Data Systems, who were being held captive in Iran.

Clements, the state's newly elected Republican governor, appointed him to head his 17 member "Texans' War on Drugs" task force and Perot threw himself into the issue. "He basically turned over the business . . . and spent the next year absolutely buried in drug issues," said Rick Salwen, a former lawyer for EDS who served as Perot's chief researcher and legal adviser on the anti-drug effort.

A PERSONAL CRUSADE

According to Salwen and many of his former associates, Perot turned the anti-drug effort into a personal crusade. He spent millions of dollars of his own money to fly in drug-abuse experts, and organized community-action groups to spread the anti-drug message among the state's youth.

Joe Lodge, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was hired by Perot as a consultant, said the Texas campaign is "recognized as one of the most ambitious, successful grass-roots efforts to fight drugs that any state has ever done. . . . He put his checkbook where his mouth was."

But it was also denounced for what some critics charged were excesses that fed an "anti-drug hysteria." Perot focused much of his efforts on stamping out use of marijuana, branding it a "gateway" drug. Pamphlets distributed by the committee urged parents to listen in on their children's telephone conversations and search their rooms for any signs of drugs.

Perot's efforts also produced a sweeping legislative package to toughen the state's drug laws, including mandatory 15-year prison terms for dealing, a forfeiture law to seize the financial assets of dealers, and a prohibition on so-called head shops that sold drug paraphernalia.

Perot and "the war-on-drugs people thought that if you just put the law on the books that will stop it," said Terrel Smith, a former Republican representative from Austin who chaired a special legislative subcommittee set up to handle the package and raised questions about parts of it at the time. "There was no effort to increase the money for prisons, for police, for parole or probation officers."

The upshot, Smith said, has been precisely what he feared at the time: the Texas prison population has grown by 44 percent over the past decade, reaching a record 49,608 last year with an estimated four-fifths of the inmates incarcerated for drugs or drug-related crimes.

Smith said the state has been forced to "let out murderers and rapists" to make room for the drug criminals.