About That Fort Worth Bar Raid

Jim Burroway has an update -- it seems the TABC agents were not following policy. From the Dallas Voice:

The administrator of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said this week that two TABC agents involved in a raid of the Rainbow Lounge on June 28 committed multiple “clear violations” of agency policy.

In an exclusive phone interview with Dallas Voice on Wednesday, July 15, TABC Administrator Alan Steen also said the supervisor directly responsible for the two agents — a sergeant in TABC’s Fort Worth district office — announced his retirement last week in the wake of the raid and amid an ongoing internal investigation. . . .

Steen said he doesn’t think there was sufficient cause for the inspection, which apparently was based on the fact that one person had been arrested for public intoxication at the Rainbow Lounge on Thursday, June 25. Steen also indicated that the eight law enforcement officers and the paddy wagon that were present likely constituted an excessive show of force.

“You can read that policy and you can figure out really quickly, TABC shouldn’t have even been there,” Steen said. “If our guys would have followed the damn policy, we wouldn’t even have been there. … We have these conversations all the time, and we don’t participate in those kinds of inspections when there’s not probable cause or reasonable suspicion or some public safety matter to be inspected.”

A few bad apples? Sounds like it.

And a lesson to those who counsel that we should wait until someone wants to give us what should be ours already: if you don't make noise, you don't get action.

That seems clear enough.

(Follow the link and read the complete article -- Steen seems to be very anxious to set things right, including building some transparency into the process [are you listening, Mr. Obama?], and I think that's a very positive sign.)