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Police in tiny AL town make more arrests than town has residents, tow 1.7 cars per household

Gil Bang

By Gil Bang
in Daily Texan

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 105186

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, Gil Bang said:

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

 

Worth a read, if you want to get ragey. 

You should shutup and back the blue, commie. Why do you hate our heroes?  You're probably a commie who wants to defund our police and make us unsafe and let mexican al qaeda terrorist drug dealers across our border.

Not me, sir.  As for my house, we fly this 24/7:

rs=w:600,h:600

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Pato del Muerto

Pato del Muerto 52540

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

You should shutup and back the blue, commie. Why do you hate our heroes?  You're probably a commie who wants to defund our police and make us unsafe and let gender neutral mexican al qaeda terrorist drug dealers across our border.

Not me, sir.  As for my house, we fly this 24/7:

rs=w:600,h:600

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TexasEd

TexasEd 8067

Posted
Posted

This is one example of the tactics that they use to increase revenue by 600% over a few years

Quote

Sandra Jo Harris, a 52-year-old grandmother, claims in a lawsuit she pulled off I-22 at Cherry Avenue on Jan. 8, 2020, as she often did when she went to visit her daughter. It was nearing dusk, and as she drove into the neighborhood she didn’t think much about the unmarked black SUV with tinted windows on the side of the road. She turned on her lights, according to her lawsuit, because of the approaching darkness.

But when she did, the unmarked SUV pulled into the street, crossed the center line and sped toward her car, blue lights flashing. She was not speeding, or breaking the law, she argued in the suit. She pulled to the side of the road as the SUV pulled behind her, and a wrecker simultaneously parked nearby. It frightened her, and led to more trouble.


Officers, dressed completely in dark, unmarked uniforms approached her, and one accused her of flickering her lights to warn others of their presence, her suit alleges. Unsure what was happening, Harris dialed 911. But an officer grabbed the phone and threw it to the ground, breaking it, the lawsuit says. Police put her in a patrol car and searched her vehicle for drugs.

Harris’ lawyers contend she was taken to the Brookside jail, strip-searched, and told she could be jailed up to two days. She had an asthma attack and a panic attack, but when she knocked on the door to alert a guard, a jailer said if she continued to knock she would be charged with attempting to escape. Eventually she was given an inhaler and treated by paramedics.

Police charged Harris with flickering her lights – or “nuisance of casting lights from motor vehicle on real property at night,” which she argues did not happen and eventually was dropped. She was also charged with resisting arrest. A report quoted in the suit claimed she “tighten (sic) arm muscles from getting handcuff (sic).”


In addition, the police charged her with making a false 911 call, obstructing government operations by refusing to give proper papers, and disorderly conduct for yelling for others to come out of their homes. They let her out of jail at midnight, long after her family had made bond.

Her lawyers argue that the city uses “obscure possible violations” to justify stopping and searching passersby, hoping to add more offenses in a sort of highway lottery to fill the coffers.

“Brookside has operated its police and court system with the primary objective of obtaining revenue from motorists traveling on or near Interstate-22,” Harris’ lawyers wrote in a suit filed last year. “It has had a continued practice of stopping and ticketing scores of vehicles daily, doing so without probable cause or reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.”

One of their dogs is names K9 Cash and then there is this:

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.

They are not cops they are highway robbers.

defendants have faced possession charges for a joint, with paraphernalia charges tacked on for the paper it was rolled in.

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RDCanecutter

RDCanecutter 26458

Posted
Posted

Well hell, I used to scoot through Brookside all the time when I'd go riding around the hills. Has a Russian Orthodox church, believe it or not.

I must have been invisible, because zero cop interactions. Seems this blood-sucking started after my scooter got old and I put it out to pasture. I won't be back. Not that they would know-- there's fuck-all places to spend money if the cops aren't extorting it-- the "Brook" in Brookside rose up and carried off their little downtown a while back.

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crash_davis

crash_davis 23114

Posted
Posted

the police chief seems like a special kind of piece of shit. he survived covid, unfortunately.

10-21n_Mike-Jones.jpg

https://abc3340.com/news/abc-3340-news-iteam/helena-council-president-faces-civil-lawsuits-over-private-businesss-unpaid-bills

Quote

ABC 33/40 tried repeatedly to reach Jones for comment about the unpaid bills. We made visits to his company offices in Pelham. We reached out to him through phone calls and emails. Jones would not agree to an interview.

ABC 33/40 cameras were also at the past four council meetings dating back to August 27. Jones was a no-show at all the meetings.

Earlier this year, Jones was hired as Police Chief of Brookside, where he's also in charge of condemning property. We asked the Mayor about Jones' business troubles and whether they raised any red flags. "No, he's certified and meets all the credentials. He's done a good job," remarked Mayor Roger McCondichie. He called the civil cases "personal business."

so the mayor knew he is a piece of shit and still hired him. that whole town and area leadership seems crooked as shit. i wonder how much the mayor and the chief are pocketing from this shit?

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deadshank

deadshank 24653

Posted
Posted

Although this is an extreme example with civil forfeiture thrown in as a real crowd pleaser, this small town BS has gone on for a long time.   Highway robbery, indeed. 
 

My uncle passed through a small town in CA back in the 70s.  A small town where the state highway slows  from highway speed to surface street speeds in the 30s as you pass by city hall and the PD headquarters. 

Uncle sees a cop wave at him and motion him over to the other side of the street.  My uncle complies and pulls into the PD lot, rolls down the window and asks the officer what he wants. 
 

The officer replies that he just wanted to give my uncle a ticket for an illegal turn.   Of course, my uncle was not pleased but he took his ticket and paid the fine.  
 

What the local yokel did not count on was my uncle being in charge of the East Bay area of the CHP.  Uncle got some his officers to drive their personal vehicles, just as he did,  through this burg to check if this BS was common place.  Apparently it was and many of them were ticketed for officer-directed traffic violations. 
 

My uncle got even when they busted up this little town’s party and got the BS stopped.  
 

Bama can only hope for similar results. 
 

/csb

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gmr548

gmr548 16590

Posted
Posted
5 hours ago, High Plains Drifter said:

When the police dept is violating civil liberties as a routine practice, yes.

Tell me you're in favor of abolishing all police departments without telling me you're in favor of abolishing all police departments.

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workswithseed

workswithseed 2109

Posted
Posted
6 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

You should shutup and back the blue, commie. Why do you hate our heroes?  You're probably a commie who wants to defund our police and make us unsafe and let mexican al qaeda terrorist drug dealers across our border.

Not me, sir.  As for my house, we fly this 24/7:

rs=w:600,h:600

Exactly, why do I pay for shirt people to do shitty things?

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Trey3216

Trey3216 15350

Posted
Posted

I think If I were in law enforcement in a neighboring town, I’d be scoping out the families of these officers and anytime they were in my town, they of their families, they’d be getting pulled over for the very bullest of shit reasons and getting their shit impounded 

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TexasEd

TexasEd 8067

Posted
Posted
54 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

It's fascism. And I don't use that term lightly. If we had actual representation in Washington, they'd end this shit. But that would hurt their donations...

 

49 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

I'd say it was more closely aligned with the Mafia.

image.jpeg.7a54d9586e2e773820200bdea9c23d52.jpeg

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CooterBrown

CooterBrown 18021

Posted
Posted
the police chief seems like a special kind of piece of shit. he survived covid, unfortunately.
10-21n_Mike-Jones.jpg
https://abc3340.com/news/abc-3340-news-iteam/helena-council-president-faces-civil-lawsuits-over-private-businesss-unpaid-bills

ABC 33/40 tried repeatedly to reach Jones for comment about the unpaid bills. We made visits to his company offices in Pelham. We reached out to him through phone calls and emails. Jones would not agree to an interview.

ABC 33/40 cameras were also at the past four council meetings dating back to August 27. Jones was a no-show at all the meetings.

Earlier this year, Jones was hired as Police Chief of Brookside, where he's also in charge of condemning property. We asked the Mayor about Jones' business troubles and whether they raised any red flags. "No, he's certified and meets all the credentials. He's done a good job," remarked Mayor Roger McCondichie. He called the civil cases "personal business."

so the mayor knew he is a piece of shit and still hired him. that whole town and area leadership seems crooked as shit. i wonder how much the mayor and the chief are pocketing from this shit?

It’s pretty convenient there’s no city budget and no accounting of where money was spent.
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Nice Guy Eddie

Nice Guy Eddie 13515

Posted
Posted

The story is presented like the entire town is against their leaders and police force but something doesn't add up. I assume that there is some level of support by the  "law-abiding" citizens, who most like are the majority of voters.  Perhaps other citizens are discouraged from voting. Maybe by tow zones outside polling locations or the voting registration office that opens every 4 years on Feb 29th as long as that date doesn't fall on a weekend.

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RDCanecutter

RDCanecutter 26458

Posted
Posted

Jefferson County, where this hamlet exists, actually has a pretty good record of people calling artillery down on their own positions in the form of inviting in the Feds. When I first moved back here 15+ years ago, you would not have to drive way out in the woods like Brookside to find a juicy story. The Birmingham News was an interesting source of crime and slime reading for events taking place everywhere. Those bastards were on the take, and for cheap. Hell, at one point I was unemployed, and with my broke-dick credit card limit I could have bought at least two county commissioners, just take em shoe-shopping.

A lot of people went to prison, or if they didn't, they went from being power-brokers to busboys, I mean like literal busboys at their friend's restaurant that used to be down the street from my house.

At the time I thought the problem would be cleaned up if the Feds arrested 3 generations of pols in a row. They have gone through 2 as far as I can tell. Maybe this is the start of Clean-Out #3, with Al.com filling in for the bought-out-and-gutted Bham News. They are scooping up the muck from metro-fringe communities this time, Pelham (used to be next-to-last-stop before the peach orchards to the south, now it's kind of Atlanta-residential-blob) and this forgotten mining village of Brookside, which I wager not 1 in 10 people in Birmingham have ever heard of. (CSB: it's next to Cardiff, which a local jobs search program confused with Cardiff Wales while posting all sorts of industrial seaport opportunities./CSB)

Cmon down, Feds. Let the enema continue.

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TexasEd

TexasEd 8067

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, RDCanecutter said:

Jefferson County, where this hamlet exists, actually has a pretty good record of people calling artillery down on their own positions in the form of inviting in the Feds. When I first moved back here 15+ years ago, you would not have to drive way out in the woods like Brookside to find a juicy story. The Birmingham News was an interesting source of crime and slime reading for events taking place everywhere. Those bastards were on the take, and for cheap. Hell, at one point I was unemployed, and with my broke-dick credit card limit I could have bought at least two county commissioners, just take em shoe-shopping.

A lot of people went to prison, or if they didn't, they went from being power-brokers to busboys, I mean like literal busboys at their friend's restaurant that used to be down the street from my house.

At the time I thought the problem would be cleaned up if the Feds arrested 3 generations of pols in a row. They have gone through 2 as far as I can tell. Maybe this is the start of Clean-Out #3, with Al.com filling in for the bought-out-and-gutted Bham News. They are scooping up the muck from metro-fringe communities this time, Pelham (used to be next-to-last-stop before the peach orchards to the south, now it's kind of Atlanta-residential-blob) and this forgotten mining village of Brookside, which I wager not 1 in 10 people in Birmingham have ever heard of. (CSB: it's next to Cardiff, which a local jobs search program confused with Cardiff Wales while posting all sorts of industrial seaport opportunities./CSB)

Cmon down, Feds. Let the enema continue.

Makes it sound like Boss Hogg was based on real life characters :)

 

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89763

Posted
Posted
46 minutes ago, TexasEd said:

Makes it sound like Boss Hogg was based on real life characters :)

Boss Hogg sounds very tame compared to how Brookside is run.

Imagine Dukes of Hazzard being about a podunk town that is acting like Brookside is, only Roscoe P. Coltrain and Ennis are some young raided-out guys with a fucking MRAP sitting at City Hall.

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huge

huge 3795

Posted
Posted
19 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Boss Hogg sounds very tame compared to how Brookside is run.

Imagine Dukes of Hazzard being about a podunk town that is acting like Brookside is, only Roscoe P. Coltrain and Ennis are some young raided-out guys with a fucking MRAP sitting at City Hall.

* Coltrane

* Enos

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Cheeseweasel

Cheeseweasel 26438

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, NeverMarryAStripper said:

I like how it has rescue stenciled on it like its purpose is to drive into burning buildings or something.  Also surprised they didn't round up a .50 cal to put in that mount on the roof

How else are you going to stop people who are trying to evade tickets?

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