re: Any of you baws live in Brookside?

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Grove Hill, Al. Speed trapped me while I was a starving student at UA.
Never forgave them for it.
Had a Cop car stationed at the beginning, the end and middle of town. Highway went right through the town streets.

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If you'd gone, coming from T-town, on #69 and gotten on #43/#69 until you reached Grove Hill, you would have eliminated going through town I believe. From there, I get on #84 which takes me southeast to/over Interstate 65.

How dumb are the mayor and sheriff to actually sit down and talk to John Archibald about this? Hope they get what they deserve.

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Justify this

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Because they aren't towing and arresting residents of the town?

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Folks need to look into the fluctuations of speed limits from. Montgomery until you hit the coast. Those small towns prey on folks that don’t realize they have to slow down

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Robertsdale used to be notorious for this crap before the Baldwin Beach Express.

And they were ruthless. 2mph over the speed limit? frick you, here’s your ticket.

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They were pretty bad then and that was almost 30 years ago.

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I grew up in Forestdale. Brookside had a reputation of being a white trash community 50 years ago, so nothing in either of the two articles surprised me one bit.

is there no one in charge of maintaining a check on corrupt local governments in Alabama? Seems like the Attorney General could be read in... this seems to be a Rico operation right there. We are corrupt and we dont give a shiite, here's ya ticket see you in court... no we did not have PC to stop, but then they said something not nice and I took that as an assault on a POLE LEEAS officer so I arrested them and toad they car

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I'm not sure it's as alarming as the article makes it out to be. They went from 1 police officer to 8. That's an 800% increase. A 640% increase in fines would not be unreasonable in that scenario.

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As is the case with everything he writes, Archibald is incapable of writing a story without using false equivalencies and distortions, but even with those taken into account it looks to be really inappropriate.

I'll start with the things Archibald says that aren't fair comparisons. His consistent use of city population numbers are very likely misleading at best. The police jurisdiction for a municipality the size of Brookside extends 1.5 miles beyond the city limits. If Brookside provides services to that area (and it seems they do), the population of that area would be the correct number to use when comparing officer to citizen ratio. As I said, I was mayor. We had 6 full time (chief included) and a couple of part time officers. Our population was almost exactly the same as Brookside - but it more than doubled when you considered the number of people living in the PJ. Eight officers seems a bit high, but it may not be depending on the size and population of the PJ. The other really false comparison he uses is that of the fire department. They have 8 police officers. Staffing a single engine company - which would be wholly insufficient to handle a structure fire - would require a minimum of 16 full time firefighters.

But, even taking Archibald's unnecessary sensationalism out of the equation, the number of arrests and types of citations absolutely point to a situation that's just plain wrong. The purpose of law enforcement is to provide for public safety and good order. If even a little bit of what the story says is true that's not the case in Brookside. Going back again to the town where I was a mayor, according to the monthly report the PD of the town gives, this December they wrote 37 total tickets (speeding, running traffic signals, etc), made 4 DUI arrests, and 7 arrests on other charges. Those numbers are pretty well in line with what they were doing 15+ years ago when I was mayor. The tickets and DUIs will go up in summer when lake traffic increases but even then a 50 ticket month is an outlier.

The other problem is stacking the charges. The article points out about dividing out the weed and the rolling paper. That's just not the way LE normally operates. Sure, if you encounter a guy that's a real arsehole then maybe he gets an extra charge or two but overall if he's got a joint it's a POM charge.

Same way with tickets. Pull over a guy for speeding. He's not wearing a seat belt, has no proof of insurance and an expired DL. If you write him for the speeding and give warnings on the rest there's at least a chance that he'll pay the ticket and maybe get his license and insurance renewed. On the other hand, write them all and he's looking at:

Speeding: $190
No insurance: $220
Expired DL: $240
No seat belt: $41

That's a total of $691 in fines and court costs - almost the entire week's gross pay for a person making $15/hour. He's going to do one of two things - either pay the money to avoid getting an arrest warrant issued or just fail to appear, get arrested, and owe even more money. What he's NOT going to do is get his DL renewed or get insurance. Even if he completely learned his lesson, he won't do it because he can't afford it. When that happens, the entire mission of protecting the public and ensuring an orderly society has been a failure.

Now, right now you're wanting to say "well I guess we just just let them get away with everything then" and you couldn't be more wrong. If they fail to appear or fail to pay that one ticket, lock them up. If they stack the charges but the judge says "show me a DL and insurance card next month and the tickets go away" and slams them when they don't, then fine. If the judge says "you're picking up trash on the side of the road next Saturday," I'd be pretty OK with that too - but that isn't happening. As the audit shows, half the town's revenue comes from fines (my last year in office at my town it was about 6%). That's textbook policing for profit and it's wrong.

Finally, for those guys calling for the AG to investigate this, they may do it but this type of situation really isn't their specialty. The public corruption investigations they do revolve around state laws covering officials getting rich off their jobs. I'm not even really sure there are applicable state laws. This would be far more effectively dealt with at the federal level through civil rights laws. The old "depravation of rights under the color of law" is perfect.

shite like this is why I'm not outright anti-cop but I'm never going full-on "back the blue" either. Law enforcement are the muscle for the state's monopoly on violence. When the municipality, county, or state they represent is rotten then they're little better than a mobster. Sometimes the state's muscle will be handy for you but most of the time you're just living hoping that their gaze never catches you.

Furthermore, fine-based punishments are just a nuisance for those who have a decent living, not even a problem for those with means, but inevitably end up being the inciting incident that keeps the poor in the criminal justice system one way or another for a long time (if not their entire life). Essentially fine-based punishments means it is only a crime for the poor.

I imagine it takes more than a mile and a half to pass a caravan of slower traffic while not also breaking the speeding law.

So essentially you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

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I don't completely agree with this.
First of all, NO authority wants to lock up offenders. It's an expense, and responsibility. In most cases offenders are given the opportunity to make payments on fines while not being incarcerated. If a person proves to be negligent in paying the fine, and/or doesn't maintain contact with the arresting agency, then there is little that the agency can do other than to issue an arrest warrant.
Look, there have always been financial classes and there will always be, but in America there's the real possibility that one can rise above their station through education, hard work, etc.
You can't make the amount of a fine relative to what a person owns!(imagine all the graft that would perpetuate!)
I'd sincerely like to hear a common sense idea of how this could be worked out.

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My point was less about them being locked up for serious time over fines and more about how if you're poor enough that once you have the first sizable fine it just creates a treadmill of new fines and bench warrants. I don't like the feel of a criminal justice system that seems more like a debt collector that can also happen to create new debts for individuals in the process.

Harvey Updyke stays in trouble with the law because of the fine they levied on him more than anything else. Not to champion his cause but it is a good example of what I'm talking about...