Brookside, Alabama seems like a nice place (1 Viewer)

[Rich Conway]

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

The mayor and police chief should both be thrown in jail.

 

[joffer]

imagine how many other towns are similar.

 

[Juxtatarot]

Defund the police?

 

[Sinn Fein]

Town of 1,253:

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.

 

[BladeRunner]

Yeah, not cool at all.

 

[Zow]

imagine how many other towns are similar.

I've personally encountered and, to the significant extent I could, had to battle a particular municipality's clear budget plan to pay for law enforcement/courts by assessing jail fees. What I mean by that is that the city was charging people a per/day rate of jail costs (~$80/day) in addition to other court fines and fees. While the law permitted a judge to consider a person's financial resources in assessing the fee, the court was directed to blanket propose the maximum cost (which, after I spent hours at the county's admin building digging through the various agreements with the municipalities, I learned that this particular municipality was actually charging more than the maximum*).  Then, if a defendant failed to pay the fees, they were found in contempt and, you guessed it, ordered to serve more jail time with the additional per day rates. The municipality did what they could to collect because, wisely or unwisely and fairly or unfairly, they banked on this revenue to pay for the cost of running the system. Before a new mayor and a new magistrate came on board and changed a lot of these policies, there were defendants who were literally homeless with no money to their names who owed the court six figures in jail fees and whose primary day to day go was to avoid the bench warrant out for their arrest for not paying the fees for their jail time. 

*I was a brand new public defender in the jurisdiction when this happened and this just shocked my conscience because it was a far cry from how things were done in the jurisdiction where I had been a student practitioner. So, after I filed a motion to reconsider in a particular case and meticulously pointed out how the fees were unlawfully beyond the maximum (I didn't even yet raise the due process argument that the court was blanket imposing as much as it could in every case), the then judge granted my motion behind the scenes and, for probably the next year or so, my cases on the docket were always called last so that other lawyers and defendants didn't hear the "lower" rate assessed to my clients and the unlawful higher amount would be assessed to those others not represented by me. Fun times!

 

[Zow]

Town of 1,253:

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.

Somewhere Sheriff Joe is smiling and nodding in approval. 

 

[Rich Conway]

imagine how many other towns are similar.

Lots and lots, I'm sure.  What's truly frightening is that this is all perfectly legal and there's virtually nothing those targeted by this scheme can do about it.

 

[Sand]

I live 15 minutes away and had no idea this is going on.  I have to drive through that part of interstate next week and will definitely be on the lookout.  

Interesting that this popped up here - I read it yesterday and didn't know that it would blow up (or maybe Rich is really good at finding stuff like this).  Like everyone else who reads this I'm floored and incensed they're doing this.  I hope the feds bring down the hammer here.

        Brookside is the horse.

 

[Rich Conway]

I live 15 minutes away and had no idea this is going on.  I have to drive through that part of interstate next week and will definitely be on the lookout.  

Interesting that this popped up here - I read it yesterday and didn't know that it would blow up (or maybe Rich is really good at finding stuff like this).  Like everyone else who reads this I'm floored and incensed they're doing this.  I hope the feds bring down the hammer here.

        Brookside is the horse.

I enjoy long-form journalism and this happened to pop up on digg.com, one of my go to sites.