New Alabama Laws Target Speed Traps

To block some of the state’s worst speed traps, Alabama last month adopted legislation that limits how much revenue cities can generate from traffic tickets, joining a handful of states with similar caps. Under the new law, all municipalities throughout the state can receive no more than 10% of their budgets from traffic fines, with any excess sent to the state’s Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund and Fair Trial Tax Fund. Another newly signed reform will also require municipal courts to track and report key data on fines and fees, including their total collected revenue and expenses.

According to a 2021 investigation by The New York Times
NYT
, nearly 50 towns in Alabama collected at least 10% of their revenue from fines and fees. Only Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas had more towns so dependent on fines and fees.

Though Alabama has dozens of towns that treat drivers like ATMs, the new laws were mainly prompted by a multi-part investigation by AL.com into Brookside, a town with fewer than 1,300 residents that generated a staggering 49% of its revenue from fines and forfeitures in 2020. Under the leadership of Police Chief Mike Jones, who was the town’s only full-time officer in 2018, Brookside drastically expanded its police force and began shaking down drivers. Yet in 2017 and 2018, Brookside reported not a single “serious crime,” a designation that includes assault, burglary, homicide, larceny, motor vehicle theft, rape, and robbery.

Between 2018 and 2020, traffic citations accelerated from 382 to 3,024—an almost-eightfold increase. Yet many of those tickets were wholly unlawful. Brookside issued hundreds of traffic tickets on stretches of Interstate 22 that were outside the town’s jurisdiction and fined drivers for lacking insurance, even when there was paperwork clearly showing the car was insured. Hundreds of drivers were cited for allegedly violating a left-lane driving law, even though that law doesn’t actually allow police to issue citations.

Nor were abuses limited to tickets. Even amid the first waves of the pandemic, police executed fourteen times as many arrests and towed nearly sixteen times as many cars in 2020 as they did in 2018. In fact, police were towing more than two cars every day on average in 2020. For every car towed, Brookside imposed a $175 fee to release the vehicle, while the local towing company charged its own, additional $160 fee, plus daily impound fees.

Fueled by these aggressive tactics, Brookside saw revenue from fines and fees soar from $82,467 in 2018 to $610,307 in 2020—the equivalent of $487 from every resident in town. Almost 90% of that revenue went back to the police department, funding salaries, conferences, even a drug dog named “Cash.” Brookside also doubled the salary for the town’s municipal judge and boosted the salary for Brookside’s lone prosecutor by over $50,000.

“The law we enacted will prevent abuses like those in Brookside from being repeated elsewhere in Alabama,” Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth said in a statement. “It puts all cities, towns, and crossroads on full notice that such behavior is unacceptable. Law-abiding citizens should not fall prey to a renegade police department that is accountable to no one.”

In the months since AL.com’s exposé into Brookside, more than half of the town’s force (including Mike Jones) resigned, were fired, or were arrested, while over a hundred cases have been dismissed. The town’s predatory policing practices are also being challenged in federal court by a class-action lawsuit the Institute for Justice filed last month.

Although the new law will help curb Brookside and other towns’ shakedowns of drivers, there are a few loopholes. As IJ notes in its complaint, “Brookside’s profit-driven policies, practices, and customs have not been abolished” and the town “easily could revive any of those unconstitutional policies, practices, and customs.” Moreover, IJ’s lawsuit seeks to disgorge all towing fees collected over the past four years—abuses unaffected by the state’s new cap on revenue. Nor does the state’s cap apply to Birmingham, though for now, the city obtains roughly 2% of its revenue from tickets.

“To make sure the Brookside horror stories don’t repeat there or anywhere else, the courts need to declare that abusive policing is not only wrong, but unconstitutional,” said Suranjan Sen, an attorney at the Institute for Justice. “Holding Brookside accountable will serve as a warning to local governments nationwide who look to taxation by citation as a way to boost revenue.”