Current Events > Drivers in small Alabama town sucked into "legal black hole"

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https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html

Ramon Perez came to court last month ready to fight the tickets hed been handed by Brookside police, including one for rolling through a stop sign and another for driving 48 mph in a 40 zone.
He swore hed seen the cop from a distance and was careful as he braked.

I saw him and we looked eye to eye, the Chelsea business owner said. Theres no way I was going to run that stop sign.

When he got to court Dec. 2, he saw scores of people just like him lining up to stand before Judge Jim Wooten, complaining of penny-ante crimes and harassment by officers. He saw so many people trying to park in the grassy field outside the municipal building that police had to direct traffic.

He figured there was no point.

I saw the same attitude in every officer and every person, he said. Thats why I hesitated to fight it. They were doing the same thing to every person that was there. They own the town.

Perez, it appears, was right.

Months of research and dozens of interviews by AL.com found that Brooksides 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 citys 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. Thats a 1,478% increase, with 1.7 tows for every household in town.

The growth has come with trouble to match. Brookside officers have been accused in lawsuits of fabricating charges, using racist language and making up laws to stack counts on passersby. Defendants must pay thousands in fines and fees or pay for costly appeals to state court and poorer residents or passersby fall into patterns of debt they cannot easily escape.

Brookside is a poster child for policing for profit, said Carla Crowder, the director of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, a nonprofit devoted to justice and equity. We are not safer because of it.

Brookside now faces at least five lawsuits. Advocates for justice reform, cops in other jurisdictions, even Jefferson Countys top law enforcement officials, have begun to question the towns tactics, and its need for an expanding force.

Its 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, weve 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, theyre going to get a ticket. And theyre 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. Thats 49% of the small towns skyrocketing revenue.

This is shocking, said Crowder. No one can objectively look at this and conclude this is good government that is keeping us safer.

Because people overwhelmed by debt have been shown to turn to crime to pay their fines an argument can be made that this kind of policing creates crime, Crowder said.

Brookside Police Chief Mike Jones, who spearheaded the change and grew the police department tenfold, at least, calls the towns policing a positive story. Mayor Mike Bryan a former councilman who assumed his position last year after the death of the previous mayor sits and nods in agreement.

Jones said crime when he took over was higher than it appeared from numbers the town reported to the state. He said response times were long because Brookside often had to rely on the Jefferson County Sheriffs department for service.

He said hed like to see even more growth in revenue from fines and forfeitures.

I see a 600% increase thats a failure. If you had more officers and more productivity youd have more, Jones said. I think it could be more.

When Jones was hired as chief in 2018, he was the only full-time police officer, he said in sworn testimony for a lawsuit filed against him and the city. By last summer, he said in a deposition, Brookside had hired eight additional full-time officers and several part-timers.

Asked in December how many officers were on staff, he refused to say, citing security concerns, though police staff sizes are reported regularly to the government for public consumption.

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.
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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. That contributed a 14% chunk of the citys total income, a number that would be considered high in much of America.

But Brookside revenues from fines and forfeitures soared after that, and the towns law-enforcement goals and its reputation changed.

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 citys leading industry.

Theyre there to protect and serve you

Legal gang shakes down local town. The mayor, the cops, and the judges are all in on it.

Fuck the police

Some nice synergy between this topic and
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/400-current-events/79860510

Citizens should arm themselves and fight back

With stats like that, you'd figure there'd be state or federal intervention.

I see why my city outlaw quotas decades ago

Evening_Dragon posted...

With stats like that, you'd figure there'd be state or federal intervention.

yeah maybe to give them more officers lmao

Doe posted...

Citizens should arm themselves and fight back

That would get a lot of people killed.

The cops there are literally bandits robbing people.

Duncanwii posted...

That would get a lot of people killed.

Hopefully just the thieves

My high school had almost as many people as that fucking town.

These stories always come out of rural Alabama and Georgia. The things law enforcement, courts, prisons, and the prison industrial complex get away with doing to poor and brown people down there would make your head spin. It's straight up medieval highwayman type shit.

At that scale, fines are effectively a tax on residents (and those passing through, I guess).

my grandfather had such a bad interaction as an outofstater passing through GA that he (and the rest of his family) refused to enter the state again for the rest of his life. i never actually got the details, but he wasn't one to exaggerate or take extra offense.

Duncanwii posted...

That would get a lot of people killed.

That did not stop the Civil Rights movement, despite the constant violence that was set upon them.

The Supreme Court has upheld that police have no obligation to protect us, no matter how many cars say "Protect and Serve"

How does one avoid living in an area like that? Prior to the massive increase in police and ticketing scam, it sounds like it was a nice small town given the level of crime. How would you ever know to avoid a place like that, especially when travelling?

Oh wow that place is only 25 minutes away from me.

driving 48 mph in a 40 zone.

The Justice Department needs to be on that Alabama police department's ass. From the article, it sounds like the chief of police has the mayor in his back pocket.

That's a kleptocracy.