Residents of a small Alabama city will on Tuesday hold a town hall meeting to discuss claims by community members and activist groups that local police have pursued excessive policing for profit.
Officers in Brookside, a former mining town 20 min outside Birmingham, have been accused of generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in city revenue through ticketing, towing and other traffic-related fines, despite Brookside having no traffic lights and a few two-lane roads, news site AL.com first reported.
With a population of less than 2,000 and a median income of less than $40,000, in 2020 Brookside generated more than $610,000 in fines and forfeitures from drivers, a 640% increase over two years and almost half of city revenue.
Towing ballooned from 50 cars in 2018 to 789 in 2020, with residents reporting that they were required to pay thousands of dollars to get vehicles back.
“Brookside is a poster child for policing for profit,” Carla Crowder, director of the nonprofit Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, told AL.com. “We are not safer because of it.”
Officers have been cited in at least five federal lawsuits for manufacturing reasons for traffic stops, “making up laws”, overcharging fines, using racist language and other misconduct allegations, AL.com said.
“This city is a ticking, ticking timebomb waiting to explode,” Juandalynn Givan, a Democratic state representative, told WVTM, an NBC affiliate in Birmingham.
Givan has called on several officials to resign, including Brookside’s mayor, Mike Bryan, and is holding the town hall so residents can air their concerns.
“It’s the wild, wild west, and they created their own wild, wild west,” she said.
On Saturday, Givan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite reporting only 55 serious crimes from 2011 to 2018, with no reports of homicide or rape, the Brookside police department under chief, Mike Jones, greatly expanded, hiring one officer for every 144 residents. The average size of a force in Alabama is one officer for every 588 people.
Jones resigned on Tuesday.
Brookside officers also received Swat training and riot gear, according to residents who said officers parked a riot control vehicle outside the community center.
Issues with Brookside police have been escalating for years, according to several residents, but many have been hesitant to officially pursue complaints given the cost of doing so and difficulty of contesting fines in courts.
“I saw the same attitude in every officer and every person,” Ramon Perez, who tried to fight several tickets in court but ultimately paid the fines, told AL.com. “That’s why I hesitated to fight it. They were doing the same thing to every person that was there. They own the town.”
Crowder said: “This is shocking. No one can objectively look at this and conclude this is good government that is keeping us safer.”
