In the latest issue of Mother Jones, Adam Weinstein writes about the TABC raid on the now-famous gay club in Fort Worth called the Rainbow Lounge. Says Weinstein:
They say everything’s bigger in Texas, and that includes absurdity in law enforcement. Most states and towns have public intoxication laws that allow peace officers to pick up the drunk and disorderly. But in the Lone Star State, the nation’s broadest PI law lets cops go virtually anywhere and arrest anyone for drunkenness — even if they’re quietly nursing a beer in a bar.
Aside from the “everything’s bigger in Texas” trope, it’s a piece worth reading. Careful readers will also recognize one of Weinstein’s sources: DPD Officer Nick Novello, who was a source for Trey Garrison when he wrote about a story for us in 2007 about a ring of cops who broke the rules to inflate their arrest totals. (Novello was also a defendant when those cops sued D Magazine for libel.)
Update: From a MoJo blog post from Weinstein, I got the impression that he didn’t enjoy his time in Dallas (he worked at DS News, which, oddly enough took over our old space on Oak Lawn when we moved downtown in October). I asked Weinstein if my impression was accurate that he didn’t cotton to Dallas. “You can say that’s true,” Weinstein said. “Dallas didn’t meet my expectations. Which were low to begin with, since the last city I’d lived in before that was Baghdad. (Long story. Check out www.adamweinsteinwriter.com for that.)”
