STREET TALK

Speculation is already flying over who will replace city councilman Craig Holcomb, now serving his third and last term. One intriguing potential candidate is an East Dallas inner city legend: police officer Ron Cowart-the man who has almost single-handedly made Little Asia inhabitable for refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia…



The mayor’s multiethnic task force on race relations, Dallas Together, got a chortle at a logistical irony during its April retreat at the Dallas Hilton Inn. As the different ethnic groups prepared to meet separately to grapple with a definition of racism, facilitator Billie Frauman announced that all of the black members of the commission would retire to the “Highland Park” meeting room. More than a few blacks were heard to mutter in jest, “Well, we can’t get a house there… ” Those laments were soon drowned out by guffaws among the white members who were herded to the “Southwest Conference” room. Some were heard to say, “It’s about time we got into the Southwest Conference”…



Here’s some news that seemingly isn’t fit to print, at least not in the Dallas Times Herald: the city of Dallas is suing the paper, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, and Attorney General Jim Mattox for requesting from the Dallas Police Department records documenting all complaints involving police conduct by Dallas cops since 1980. The requests by Price and the Times Herald were made before last year’s congressional hearings into police use of deadly force and its relations with the minority community; Mattox ordered compliance. The city’s lawsuit charges that the action makes it far more likely that anyone could ask for voluminous internal police records and hamper investigations in the future. We polled city council members, and strangely, a majority of them can’t recall being briefed on the lawsuit…



On the Walker Railey front: ever since last July’s appearance by Railey and Lucy Papillon before a Dallas grand jury, assistant district attorney Norm Kinne has been depicted as the principal law enforcement figure in the “Who Strangled Peggy Railey” mystery. But the Dallas office of the FBI has been quietly involved since the outset. FBI jurisdiction stems from the fact that the bizarre death threats sent to Railey at First United Methodist Church were transmitted via U. S. mail. (It was the FBI, remember, that determined that the threats were typed on a typewriter in the church office-the only hard evidence gathered in the case thus far. ) But the FBI has not had any better luck with Railey than the police: he’s not talking, and the feds are still looking. “At this point, we don’t anticipate closing the case, ” says Special Agent Woody Specht…