Is Fort Bend drugs unit racially profiling?
Narcotics cops overwhelmingly stop Hispanic drivers, many from Valley
On a crisp morning last December, Guillermo Sanchez was driving on U.S. 59 through Fort Bend County southwest of Houston when he saw flashing lights in his rear-view mirror. Recently laid off from his job as an electrician, he had found himself with time to drop his cousin off in Houston for his refinery job. Now he was returning to Brownsville.
A construction zone near the Wharton County line dropped the highway speed limit from 65 mph to 55. The Rosenberg police officer informed Sanchez he’d clocked him at 57 — 2 mph over the limit.
The officer, Aaron Gillory, told him to get out of the car. After frisking him, the officer ordered Sanchez to get inside his patrol vehicle. Gillory pointed a small camera at Sanchez and began asking him questions.
Where was he traveling? From where? What was his cousin’s name and where did he work? After about 15 minutes, Sanchez recalled, Gillory told him he wasn’t a regular traffic cop but was looking for drugs and money: Did Sanchez have either in his car?
Sanchez said he didn’t. Gillory asked if he could search it anyway.
Traffic records show Gillory, who is assigned to the Fort Bend County Narcotics Task Force, stopped four other cars for speeding that day, all at the same location, driven by Ricardo Rodriguez, Javier Leal, Cesar
Hernandez and Armondo Segura.
That made it a boilerplate day for the task force’s highway interdiction team. An analysis of traffic stops performed by unit members shows minority drivers are detained and searched in numbers that defy statistical probability.
Just under 90 percent of the motorists stopped by Todd Ganey, a Richmond Police Department officer assigned to the team, were Black or Hispanic, according to 2019 records from the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees the task force. Nearly 3 of every 4 stops Danny Tondera made last year were of Hispanic drivers.
An analysis of traffic stops by Gillory over the past two years shows just under 98 percent of the drivers he pulled over were Hispanic. Gillory searched 187 of the vehicles, all but two driven by Hispanics; 94 percent of the time the searches came to nothing.
At least two local attorneys have alerted prosecutors to the lopsided numbers. But the task force’s traffic enforcement history provides a stark illustration of the obstacles that make it nearly impossible to hold officers accountable, even when their policing appears skewed by racial bias.
Thanks to laws and judicial decisions granting police wide discretion in stopping and searching drivers, “right now the courts make it impossible to prove a case of racial profiling,” said Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina. His analysis of law enforcement agencies across the country has found most departments stop and search minority drivers at higher rates than white people.
Even if statistical evidence points to unusual enforcement disparities by race, vague statutes make it difficult to legally accuse a police department or individual officer of profiling. While police policies ban the practice and Texas law forbids it, both fail to define it in any useful way, meaning as a practical matter it isn’t enforced.
As a result, few departments or officers ever face any accountability. The U.S. Department of Justice can investigate law enforcement agencies for a “pattern and practice” of discriminatory policing but has done so only in a handful of instances — none since President Donald Trump took office.
With no Texas agency monitoring compliance, oversight falls to each of the state’s 2,000 police departments that do traffic enforcement, which must be willing to track and scrutinize their officers’ behavior for signs of racial bias. Most don’t, said Alex del Carmen, a criminal justice professor at Tarleton State University. “And if there’s no analysis, you can’t identify systemic issues.”
Sugar Land attorney Jeff Strange first noticed the task force’s record last year, after a string of Hispanic clients — and their relatives — reported being stopped and searched by Gillory. His request for detailed information on the unit’s stops to the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees the task force, revealed the tilted numbers.
“What’s the good of keeping that information if you’re not going to do anything with it?” he said.
‘It’s unconstitutional’
Last year, fewer than 16 percent of the traffic stops made by Fort Bend County sheriff’s deputies were of Hispanic drivers. By comparison, only 21 of Gillory’s 819 stops in 2018 and 2019 — 2.5 percent — were not Hispanic, the records compiled by Strange show. According to addresses on the citations, most were of out-of-towners; many lived in the Rio Grande Valley region.
In disclosures required under Texas racial profiling laws, officers must report how often they knew the race of a driver prior to a stop. In 2019, the task force interdiction members reported they did in 1 percent of their stops — a figure profiling experts called deeply improbable given their records.
“You don’t even need a statistician for that,” Baumgartner said.
Task force members did not respond to requests for comment. David Marcaurele, chief deputy for the Fort Bend County Sheriff ’s Office, did not dispute the numbers, but he defended the unit’s tactics.
“All highway interdiction stops must be lawful and based on the observation of a violation of law or probable cause to believe that some law has been or is being violated,” he wrote in response to questions.
He added that for a unit seeking cartel narcotics and drug money, it is to be expected that many suspects would be Hispanic.
“The main supplier of drugs traveling the I-69 corridor is Mexican national drug organizations,” Marcaurele wrote. “While we do not target ethnicity it is only logical that if you are performing drug interdiction duties looking for legitimate indicators of potential drug traffickers you would expect that the resultant ethnicity would correlate with whatever ethnicity the drug organizations are using to do this trafficking.”
Del Carmen, who teaches racial profiling law to police executives, said that explanation approached the definition of the term: “The use of race or ethnicity as a sole predictor of criminal behavior constitutes the essence of racial profiling.”
There’s little dispute the corridor is a popular drug smuggling route from Mexico, and police may consider stopping and searching only Hispanics an effective interdiction strategy, said David Guillory, a Nacogdoches attorney who successfully sued the Tenaha Police Department for its forfeiture program that disproportionately affected minority drivers along U.S. 59.
“But,” he added, “it’s unconstitutional.”
Lots of warnings
Traffic records, court affidavits and interviews show that Gillory’s investigative method appears to be identical in many cases. Most of his 2018 and 2019 traffic stops occurred on the same stretch of road in Fort Bend County, where long-running construction work lowers the speed limit.
Some drivers were traveling well above it, but many were not: 126 were driving under 60 mph when stopped. Others were pulled over for minor non-moving vehicle infractions such as darkened glass, objects hanging from the rear-view mirror or missing lights.
Eron Otero said he saw Gillory from “a mile away” last summer while driving north through the construction zone, so he set his cruise control to just below the speed limit. After stopping him, Gillory said Otero was driving at 57 mph, records show.
When Otero argued he’d been using cruise control, he recalled, Gillory suggested his tires were the wrong size and said his window tinting was illegal.
“Just search my vehicle,” he recalled responding. “I’m kind of in a rush.” Two hours later, Otero estimated, Gillory released him with a warning after finding nothing.
In 99 percent of their stops, the records show, task force highway interdiction members issued warnings instead of tickets — even to those traveling well in excess of the speed limit. “Our main goal is education and in many first-time stops for these violations we routinely issue warnings,” Marcaurele said.
But as a 25-year Texas prosecutor who oversaw a county narcotics task force, Strange said the pattern indicated the Fort Bend unit was uninterested in enforcing traffic laws. “Rather than doing police work, they’re just stopping as many Hispanics as they can,” he said. “They’re making racebased stops thinking they’re going to find narcotics. It’s like cold calling.”
After informing drivers they would receive only a warning, task force members often instructed them to exit their cars and get into the patrol vehicle “for safety” while they completed paperwork. There, the officers pointed a camera at them and engaged in “casual conversation” or “conversation about his travels,” police reports said.
While some states and cities have limited the scope of their officers’ questioning during traffic stops — often in response to racial profiling investigations — Texas has not. Interviews and documents indicate task force members’ conversation could be anything but casual, with drivers being peppered with detailed questions about their vehicles, travel and work histories.
In court records, officers said they were alert to a person’s contradictory statements or subtle body clues such as pulsing veins, rapid breathing and “deceptive” or “pacifying” behaviors. If their suspicions were aroused, they asked for the driver’s permission to search the vehicle.
Cesar Cruz was on the final leg of a trip back from Michoacán, Mexico, when Gillory pulled him over for speeding. Cruz, who was born in the U.S., said he goes to Mexico a couple of times a year to see relatives.
Gillory asked him to sit in his police SUV, turned on the camera and began asking him more questions: How much had his truck cost? How much money did he have on him?
“Why do you want to know all this?” Cruz recalled thinking. “It’s a traffic stop.”
Gillory said he smelled marijuana in the car and asked to search the vehicle, Cruz recalled. He hadn’t smoked any, he said, but he granted permission for the search.
‘Can I search your car?’
So-called consent searches are controversial because drivers often don’t know they can refuse. The Supreme Court has said police don’t have to advise people of their right to decline the request.
“A traffic stop is not a voluntary encounter,” said Sarah Seo, a Columbia Law School professor and author of “Policing the Open Road,” which traces the history of vehicles and the Fourth Amendment. “So in a situation where a person is not free to leave, and then is asked, ‘Can I search your car?’ how do people know they’re able to say no?”
In 2005, Texas legislators passed a law requiring police to obtain written permission before searching a driver’s car, which can dramatically decrease motorist consent. Gov. Rick Perry vetoed it, writing “there is insufficient information available at this time to determine whether signed or taped consent requirements place too onerous a burden on law enforcement or provide additional protections to the public.”
Cruz said Gillory spent about 30 minutes rummaging through his vehicle. Finding nothing, the officer released him with a warning.
Traffic records show that over the past two years Gillory searched 23 percent of his recorded stops. By comparison, in 2019 Fort Bend sheriff’s deputies searched 3 percent of the vehicles they stopped. The Texas Department of Public Safety, the state’s busiest traffic enforcement agency, conducted searches in 5 percent of its 2.8 million traffic stops.
Marcaurele said his count showed Gillory conducted searches in only 17 percent of stops. He added it was unfair to compare the search rate of the task force — seeking drugs and their proceeds — to agencies merely doing traffic enforcement.
Fort Bend County court records show criminal charges or civil forfeiture cases were brought in 11 of Gillory’s traffic stops. A handful delivered large amounts of drugs or money. After stopping a pickup in December 2018 for drifting onto the shoulder line and speeding at 57 mph, his search turned up 67 pounds of marijuana. Last August, he seized $15,000 from a woman driving on U.S. 59.
Overwhelmingly, however, the searches came to nothing. Patrick O’Burke, a former deputy commander at the Texas Department of Public Safety who oversaw drug law enforcement, said low hit rates were common among task forces doing highway interdiction.
Stop enough people and “eventually they’re going to find drugs, because there are drugs out there,” he said. “But it’s all the other people, who had to go through (getting stopped) who were innocent — that’s inappropriate.”
In addition to inconveniencing and humiliating people, baseless stops and searches can erode a community’s trust in the police, Baumgartner added. “You could stop 10,000 people and find two drug kingpins and declare yourself a hero,” he said. “But we don’t give any weight or value in policing or the court system to those who did nothing wrong. We don’t count the people who were inconvenienced in the equation.”
A lawyer’s complaint
Strange sent his findings to Fort Bend County District Attorney Brian Middleton on June 15. His immediate goal was to have evidence from the searches performed on his clients tossed, but he said he also hoped the task force would cease using race as a basis for roadside investigations: “I just want them to stop doing this.”
Contacted by the Chronicle five weeks later, a spokesman for the district attorney said there was no record of a complaint. Provided details of the correspondence, the spokesman, Wesley Wittig, said the matter was being referred to the agency’s public integrity unit. Citing that investigation, Middleton declined additional comment.
It wasn’t the first time the prosecutors heard the claim. In an August 2019 suppression motion, Pablo Perez Jr.’s attorney noted that of the stops Tondera made from June 2017 to June 2018, more than 70 percent were of Hispanic drivers.
“They see Hispanic drivers, and if their license comes back to a Rio Grande Valley address, they find some reason to stop them,” said his attorney, Juan Luis Guerra Jr. “People need to know about this. It’s rampant, and it’s bad.”
Carlos Maltos, 71, said when Gillory stopped him for driving 57 mph in a 55 zone it was a familiar experience. “No matter how I leave the Valley, every road I come back, they stop me,” he said.
When Gillory asked him to sit in his car, turned on his camera and began asking questions, Maltos asked if he was under arrest. Gillory said they were waiting for a K-9 officer. An hour and a half later, after the search turned up nothing, Maltos was released.
“He wants to do his job, but he’s not doing it the right way,” Maltos said. “He probably thinks only Mexicans deal drugs.”
“They see Hispanic drivers, and if their license comes back to a Rio Grande Valley address, they find some reason to stop them.” Attorney Juan Luis Guerra Jr.