Speaking of rural Alabama cities with asshole law enforcement, let me introduce you to Brookside, Alabama:
Police in this tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’
Months of research and dozens of interviews by AL.com found that Brookside’s finances are rocket-fueled by tickets and aggressive policing. In a two-year period between 2018 and 2020 Brookside revenues from fines and forfeitures soared more than 640 percent and now make up half the city’s total income.
And the police chief has called for more.
The town of 1,253 just north of Birmingham reported just 55 serious crimes to the state in the entire eight year period between 2011 and 2018 – none of them homicide or rape. But in 2018 it began building a police empire, hiring more and more officers to blanket its six miles of roads and mile-and-a-half jurisdiction on Interstate 22.
By 2020 Brookside made more misdemeanor arrests than it has residents. It went from towing 50 vehicles in 2018 to 789 in 2020 – each carrying fines. That’s a 1,478% increase, with 1.7 tows for every household in town.
“It’s my understanding that a guy can go out there and I mean, he can fall into a black hole,” Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr said of drivers getting entangled financially. “You know, we’ve had a lot of issues with Brookside.”
Jefferson County Sheriff Mark Pettway said the same.
“We get calls about Brookside quite regularly because they really go outside their jurisdiction to stop people,” Pettway said. “Most of the time people get stopped, they’re going to get a ticket. And they’re saying they were nowhere near Brookside.”
Police stops soared between 2018 and 2020. Fines and forfeitures – seizures of cars during traffic stops, among other things – doubled from 2018 to 2019. In 2020 they came to $610,000. That’s 49% of the small town’s skyrocketing revenue.
A department of nine officers in a 1,253-person town is far larger than average. Across the country, the average size of a force is one officer for every 588 residents, according to a Governing Magazine study that examined federal statistics.
Last year, based on Jones’ testimony, Brookside had at least one officer for every 144 residents.
In 2018, when the town had one full-time police officer and a few part-timers, it reported no serious crimes to the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center. Brookside Police did patrol the 1.5-mile stretch of Interstate 22 within their jurisdiction and wrote tickets that brought in $82,467 in fines.
By 2020 officers in the sleepy town were undergoing SWAT training and dressing in riot gear, even as the city continued with only a volunteer fire department. It parked a riot control vehicle — townspeople call it a tank — outside the municipal complex and community center. Traffic tickets, and criminalizing those who passed through, became the city’s leading industry.
Total town income more than doubled from 2018 to 2020 – from $582,000 to more than $1.2 million – as fines and forfeitures rose 640%.
If you want your blood to boil, go read the whole article.
It is filled with individual stories of people who were charged with fabricated crimes, multiple felonies, and run through the ringer for thousands in fees and fines.
I think this is the worst part:
Most of the vehicles Brookside Police drive are unmarked, and tinted.
Chief Jones testified under oath that just one of the 10 Brookside vehicles is painted with police striping, but nine others bear no emblems, and seven are tinted all the way around, making it impossible to see inside. Jones testified his officers wear gray uniforms with no Brookside insignias.
Every single aspect of this is criminal.
This is a mayor and a police chief that use their jurisdiction on a six mile stretch of Interstate outside of Birmingham to shakedown citizens.
And a judge let’s them get away with it.
If there ever was a town begging for a fully armed and armored killdozer to set things right, this is it.
That website (AL.com) is a Gannett company, so you know their particular leanings, but they have run close to a dozen stories about that town. It is the absolute textbook picture of a rural, Deep South speed trap town with corruption that would make Boss Hogg go, “Damn boys. That there is a bit much!”
So far the police chief and most of his officers and cronies have resigned (note that they weren’t fired or arrested, unfortunately) and the Jefferson County courts are tossing a lot of the cases out. There’s also 6-7 civil suits.
Running IDF-Spec D9s through that town would be letting those assholes off easy. At best, the town needs to be dissolved and the assets of the town and every member of the administration of that town (the mayor, police chief, the entire police force, the town judge, and the town attorney to start) should be seized to pay restitution to the people they shook down.
Then they we can get into their penance. What I think their penance should be would probably get me arrested for thought crime. But readers can probably fill in the blank spaces.
And this is why I felt so dirty suggesting that deSantis use civil forfeiture to seize Disney assets.
It is theft. Straight up theft.
Any politician that pushes for the abolition of civil forfeiture would get my vote.
😮 😡 How scary.
Bury them in lawsuits….even if some are getting thrown out it just takes a couple to get through with some painful price tags and eventually this crap will stop. The other option is at the voting booth. I don’t know the makeup of the town or surrounding areas, but if the mayor supports these practices, vote his ass out and get someone in who will make some changes.
Radley Balko, formerly of Reason.com wrote about this kind of abuse in WashPo in 2014: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/how-st-louis-county-missouri-profits-from-poverty/
When municipalities solely exist to feed off the peoples, it’s trouble.
This contributed to the riots in Ferguson.
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Prey on the citizens with tickets, fines, more fines for not paying the first fine, missed court dates, and more fines; people will get angry at ALL Police. $500 in tickets is a huge pain for middle class people. For poor people, it is a life changing event. Even if they are frugal and attempting to better themselves, a fine like that will wipe out their savings. For many poor, it is something they ignore because they cannot pay it, and that starts the spiral into more fines, missed deadlines and criminalized jail time.
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As a college student, two speeding tickets in one month on the same stretch of road on the way to work hurt my finances for months. (I also found an alternate route after that.)
A ticket magnet town like Baldwin Florida was a couple decades ago.
The chief was removed from office shortly after the story initially broke. Investigations into the court and mayor are ongoing.
Brookside needs to follow Rome Ohio into oblivion. Rome was a notorious interstate speed trap and under a newly enacted state law limiting municipal revenue from traffic tickets the state of Ohio disincorporated Rome dissolved the police department and may have decertified the officers.
This place needs the same treatment and a pig style built on the sites of the police and city government.
Stuff like this goes to show that government abuse and overreach isn’t restricted to “blue states”.
Killdozer would be pointless.
When they suddenly have 7-8 officer deaths due to their heads or chests suddenly going all SPLATTy, within a couple of months, the message will have been sent. Dollars to donuts nobody will have seen anything, and enthusiasm for tracking down the culprits will run about nil at all other agencies.
“Just following orders” cut no ice in 1946, and it shouldn’t in 2022 either.