34 ms·

Police in tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’

299 points by ourmandave 5y ago

oxymoran 5y ago
“ Or there’s another resident who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate” Hell yes, stay out of the left lane unless you are passing. Everything else is a bit much though.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gknoy 5y ago
  Reading deeper on that article, you'll notice a couple of things: - they were using the lane for passing - the citation came _before_ taking more than 1.5 miles became illegal which means that they ticketed her for something that wasn't illegal.
diogenesjunior 5y ago
There's that one song... uh, I think it was made by NWA. It had Eazy-E, MC Ren and Ice Cube. Uhhh... I just can't think of the name. Super relevant though :(
- diogenesjunior 5y ago
  Nevermind, I found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51t1OsPSdBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51t1OsPSdBc
  - mattkevan 5y ago
    I think you mean this one right? :) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iZyqwOOmETI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iZyqwOOmETI
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  "No-one ever wrote a song called 'Fuck the Firefighters'!"
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    There are a couple songs called “Fuck the Fire Department,” but they’re jokes.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  There's also this one... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wjhTt9fqYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wjhTt9fqYY
throwaway879080 5y ago
nikkinana 5y ago
6510 5y ago
I from time to time look how different countries solve the same problem in different ways. Its fun to find one where an 'impossible' problem is solved in a simple rigorous way. The most shocking part is that there seems to be a complete lack of copying stuff that works even from a country next door. The preference is for every nation by it self to spend finite resources (time/money) to solve problems that have been solved elswhere. For laughs I suggest that the US police is probably doing a few things better than everyone else. We have lots of countries, each with their own formula that should serve as real world experiments. Say, do all 200 countries put the fines directly into the police budget? Or say: What are ALL the qualities one can design for in a police department or in recruitment? Then ask: How should they be prioritized? How is everyone doing this?
hyperman1 5y ago
This sounds like something that will be punished harshly in the very next local election.
- brimble 5y ago
  Might take more than that, if the police also control the vote counting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
  - not2b 5y ago
    Yes, that's pretty much the plan in many states: take control of elections away from locals (especially locals who tend to vote for the other party) and give the power to the (gerrymandered) state legislature. People don't want to pay taxes, and if the anti-tax people also want local services, they have the police raise the revenue by preying on out-of-towners and people without connections. But even without election-fixing, this kind of thing persists in some towns because the cops focus their enforcement on out-of-towners. Locals get a free lunch: services they don't have to pay for.
  - snowgrove 5y ago
    History and the Constitution provide for a solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
    - brimble 5y ago
      I go back and forth about whether a lot more stories featuring "...and then the aggrieved raided the National Guard armory..." would be a good or a bad thing, in our modern political climate. I mean, the same thing was attempted in the Tulsa massacre, by people who also thought they were the "good guys", and that whole thing was... less good.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 5y ago
ALittleLight 5y ago
1.7 average vehicle tows per household a year does seem a bit much.
- me_me_me 5y ago
  I have never heard of anyone in my life who's vehicle was towed. 1.7 avg per household - that probably an average of 1 tow for 1 car if not more
spaetzleesser 5y ago
It always mystifies me that it seems impossible to rein in police in the US.
- svachalek 5y ago
  What some consider bugs, others consider features.
- finiteseries 5y ago
  There are 18,000 different police agencies at all levels of federal, state, county, and municipal government with the bulk of the force distributed at the municipal & county levels, and essentially zero agreement on how to, or whether or not to reform any given one, what the end state should like, etc. Very, very wicked problem.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    Easy solution: Mandate federal standards for training, staffing and use of force. Congress could go and deal with this similarly to how the drinking age 21 was enforced - withhold federal funds for non-compliant states. Yes, this is messy as hell, but common standards for training are more important than to prevent of-age people of having a beer.
    - ansible 5y ago
      There should also be a national database for police officers to register with, maintained by the FBI (or somebody in the Justice Department). So you can't have cops that have been fired (for cause) in one jurisdiction just move somewhere else and easily get another police job.
    - finiteseries 5y ago
      In a sense, but that’s more a “how” than a what. As you’ve described re: drinking, tying it to funding is a clear, well trodden path for the feds but let’s not forget the even clearer message, motivation and inertia that was behind it in the MADD type stuff all of a few decades after the temperance movement. What policing is, and what its standards should be was the single most divisive topic in a year we were overrun by plague though. Nationwide protests. No resolution. Every particular reform (atm, under the current systems) takes years to see through and is shackled to locality, socioeconómics, different explanations, political warfare Very wicked problem, and that’s not even getting into anti federalism…
jandrese 5y ago
> Mayor Bryan dismissed the complaints of those who must appear in court. “Everybody’s got a story,” he said. “And 99% of them are lying.” Classic sociopath behavior.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  If I had to bet, I’d bet the mayor is the biggest lier of them all.
arpinum 5y ago
State constitutions should be updated to force all revenue and assets derived from fines to be distributed equally to all residents. That would distribute the benefits widely enough to remove the current incentives where fines line the pockets of local police and fund town operating budgets.
- Cerium 5y ago
  I have long thought that safety related fines should go to cover people harmed by those accidents. Hit by running a red light, receive some compensation from the red light ticket fund.
  - brimble 5y ago
    Traffic-related fines should go to a state public transit fund.
    - pishpash 5y ago
      As the top parent says, it should not go to any special group, neither victims nor transit, as anything like that sets up perverse incentives. All fines should be revenue neutral, because the only thing they should accomplish is to be a disincentive for some behavior, not any other side effects.
      - brimble 5y ago
        Public transit gets people off the roads, though. Certainly that's where parking tickets should go, and probably drunk driving fines. At the very least.
        pishpash 5y ago
        No, they should not. If you want to fund transit, fund it directly. It's an independent decision.
        5y ago
runnerup 5y ago
The article (almost certainly inaccurately) portrays this as the police are heavily victimizing citizens of their own town. But in actual small towns, this strategy tends to only work when the police are harming only out-of-towners that are passing through. If you unfairly fine 600 people in an area with a population of 1200...anyone who had the power to prevent this will get voted out in the next election. Jalopnik appears to have intentionally played fast and loose with language to give the wrong impression here. Example: "Or there’s [link]another resident[/link] who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate. " That link to 'another resident' takes you to an article about Ramon Perez[0] where he's described as a "Chelsea business owner". Chelsea is 34 miles away from Brookside. Ramon is certainly a "resident" of....somewhere....but probably not Brookside. Most likely, the police know many of the in-town vehicles and avoid pulling them over. When they do, they probably see the local address on the drivers license and let people go with a warning. The point I'm making is that if this were as Jalopnik presents it, there is an existing remedy: the townspeople can vote out the mayor, then the new mayor would reform the 8-person police department. Instead, the people being victimized have no representation in the government that is victimizing them, so people are seeking alternative remedies (federal involvement, etc). This also probably applies when a smaller portion of a population is victimized by its government e.g. 80% of citizens unaffected, 20% experience problems. Whats interesting about the 80/20 rule is that while classically in the US we think about racial/age/wealth divides, it also pops up in ways that aren't in people's top-3 intuition: using rarely-used government services. - Building a house and victimized by zoning commission? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change. - Running a business and victimized by licensing commission? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change. - Can't get an obscure department to return your calls? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change. I see a bit of a parallel here to accessibility for disabled people. It turns out that when we build in accessibility into our physical and digital environments, it improves the experience for fully-abled people as well. Poor quality article on that here[1] but there are better ones to find, or you can imagine your own example. The usual top-1 example is closed-captioning ... even if your hearing is fine you've probably found CC/same-language subtitles useful on occasion. Perhaps there may exist a similar effect for creating systems which allow people to escape victimization. If you build it for the "obviously disadvantaged", it will create wide benefits for the "classically advantaged" classes as well. 0: https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-... 1: https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibility-helps-everyone https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibilit...
rossdavidh 5y ago
Am I the only one who was completely derailed from reading the article by the fact that it had "Out Out" in the title?
- pishpash 5y ago
  Sign that the article hasn't been reviewed once. Another example in the article: "It’s not known for havinv a lot of crime." [sic]
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    I was confused by that too. It means the author used an editor that didn't have spell check?
  - QuantumYeti 5y ago
    I also noticed that, and gave up reading at that point. Maybe I'm cynical, but when people can't do the basic minimum to be understood... I don't feel any obligation to understand them.
- jmugan 5y ago
  I thought it was a clever way of trying to say the opposite of what they were saying. I was all kinds of confused.
devindotcom 5y ago
This is the original report by investigative reporter John Archibald: https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-... Some notable points collected by a commenter on another site: - "...just one of the 10 Brookside vehicles is painted with police striping, but nine others bear no emblems..." - "...officers wear gray uniforms with no Brookside insignias." - "The names of the officers were not listed on the tickets in secretive Brookside." - "[the city budget] did not feature a breakout of the police department." - "Asked in December how many officers were on staff, [the police chief] refused to say, citing “security” concerns..." - "[The mayor and the police chief] said neither the town nor the police department relies on the revenue officers bring in. In fact, they said in November they didn’t know how that money is spent." As others have pointed out, this sort of thing is not exactly rare, this is just a particularly egregious example of it. And this is after decades of attempts to 'reform' the police. When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community.
- dang 5y ago
  Ok, we've changed the URL to that from https://jalopnik.com/this-tiny-alabama-town-of-1-200-has-been-overrun-by-pol-1848389331 https://jalopnik.com/this-tiny-alabama-town-of-1-200-has-bee.... Thanks!
  - ipnon 5y ago
    Doing Always Naturally Great
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  > When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community. Some sure. Certainly not all. I don't even think most. If I'm wrong, then the meme itself needs better phrasing.
sb057 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(feudalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(feudalism)
- Pigalowda 5y ago
  Brigandry and Robber Barons never went out of style
dionidium 5y ago
This jalopnik link is a light-on-details blog post that links to the actual reporting here: https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-... When you drive down into what's happening here, it looks pretty clearly like the town is operating a "speed trap" on a section of Interstate that goes through the city limits. It's overwhelmingly likely that a majority of these stops are technically legitimate, even if the article is able to come up with a handful of sensational-sounding cases. Traffic violations are routine. You could sit a cop on just about any stretch of road in the town where I live and pull people over all day every day for totally legitimate violations, if that's what you wanted to do. Hell, there's a school speed-zone camera right outside my window. I could sit here and watch its flash light-up violators' license plates all day -- on a stretch of road that's clearly marked as a school zone with a speed camera! The status quo is that a significant percentage of drivers violate the law every time they get behind the wheel and a lot of Americans more or less think it's no big deal, despite overwhelming evidence for the problems it causes. Alas, as this article demonstrates, if you hold these drivers accountable, then most Americans will perceive them to be innocent victims of out-of-control police.
- whymauri 5y ago
  >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. Let's recap. A group of unmarked men in an unmarked vehicle pulled over a woman for using her lights at night, destroyed her property, denied her medical assistance, strip searched her, accused her of drug possession, threatened to charge her with escaping jail, charged her with resisting arrest for tightening her arms, and released her way past posting bond. AND, this is one of the luckier, wealthier victims who had legal recourses to file lawsuit. In another instance, an officer was literally inventing law on the fly -- this is more than a speedtrap.
gknoy 5y ago
Looking at the map, I'm surprised that Google Maps/etc don't route around such abuse. For people that have no choice but to go through there, fine, but this seems like the kind of thing that would be worth driving an extra half hour to avoid. They already have "avoid toll roads", and this is worse.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  Lord yes; I want the "avoid speed trap" option.
- Benlights 5y ago
  This should be one of the options for google maps routing. A "Avoid Overpoliced Municipalities" toggle.
  - gknoy 5y ago
    I mean, ideally I'd like to be able to define my own don't-go-there areas, such as near airports or areas that smell bad, but having defaults that route traffic around areas like this seems good. Legislating that traffic/etc fines go to a _state_ budget instead of local town budgets might solve this, but I imagine that would be very hard to pass, let alone survive lawsuits.
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    All roads may end up leading to Canada.
- Guessnotgauss 5y ago
  The i22 corridor is practically unavoidable if you are traveling west through north alabama, past birmingham.
- tehwebguy 5y ago
  The closest thing I can think of that they did was with Google Flights "basic economy" and similar fares (no carryon, etc) had a big red warning icon, most airlines ditched those types of fares within like a year.
pc86 5y ago
> Or there’s another resident who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate. "Simply using the left lane" is illegal unless you're actively passing someone. In my state it's one mile. If you haven't passed someone in the last mile, you need to be in the right lane. I know in some states it's a quarter mile, which at 65-75 seems a bit aggressive (basically saying you have to be going 15-20+ faster than the person you're passing just to safely get over in time). But seriously, hanging out in the left lane is stupid and unsafe, regardless of your speed.
- s1mon 5y ago
  It really depends on the state laws [0]. It also really depends on the traffic patterns. In places like California where there are 7+ lane wide roads, the left lane is not so special (unless it's a HOV lane). If you've only got two lanes, it's more important to keep the left lane for passing, but when things are bumper to bumper, that doesn't make any sense. [0] https://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html https://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
  - ars 5y ago
    Seems like it would be the opposite to me: If there are only 2 lanes, you need both for travel. But if you have 7 you can reserve some for speeders. And in all my driving, I've yet to be overtaken legally on the left - they always speed in order to do it, which is illegal. So I'm not clear why "it's more important to keep the left lane for passing". Just make the left lane "speed limit" lane, and the right lane slow lane. Meaning if you are going the speed limit you can stay in the left lane. (This is a hot topic, I'm sure I'll get downvotes, I don't care about that, but I would appreciate replies more. Specifically about what's wrong with staying in the left lane if you are going the maximum legal speed.)
    - dreamcompiler 5y ago
      My friends who are left lane hoggers say this all the time. My response is "show me your badge." Because unless you have one, you're not authorized to enforce speed limits. If you want to call 911 and report the speeder in the left lane, fine. But if you want to drive in the left lane just because you like it over there, you're forcing people to pass you on the right (which is dangerous) and you're disrupting the normal flow of traffic (also dangerous). If you think it should be your job to hog the left lane to slow down speeders, join your local police department. Otherwise move to the right unless you're passing.
dandare 5y ago
This may be controversial but: Policing for profit is in theory a good thing. Every time they enforced a good law the society profits. Every time they enforce a bad law the society should change the law. The alternative is having bad laws that are enforced just sometimes, at the discretion and personal biases of the not-for profit police.
- rdedev 5y ago
  The problem is when you do things for profit, it just becomes a race to extract as much profit as you can. Goodharts law comes to mind
  - dandare 5y ago
    Why exactly is this problem? I personally see a problem with having laws that we enforce only if the offender is black, or a similar discretion or bias of the policeman.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  > Every time they enforced a good law the society profits. Some of these departments have used these "profits" for BBQs for the police, or flat screen TVs, or for personal vehicles for officers. And in some of the cases where such "misuse" of funds has been taken to court, oftentimes the court has ruled that the PD has the perfect right to do so. Not sure how this is a societal profit.
  - dandare 5y ago
    That is problem of the laws governing the use of the funds, not a problem of policing per se.
- tdeck 5y ago
  > The alternative is having bad laws that are enforced just sometimes, at the discretion and personal biases of the not-for profit police. This happens whether policing is "for profit" or not. Do you think they'll give the mayor or the police chief's spouse a speeding ticket if it means $100 extra in the department budget? These powers are always used selectively. The police just have to avoid using the "bad laws" against a core group of people with political power, and maybe share some of the spoils of enforcement with that group.
Cupertino95014 5y ago
There IS a website [1] listing all the speed traps in Alabama, and Brookside is on it. Speed traps have been around for decades. "Fleece the out-of-towners" has always been a great revenue source for tiny towns. How likely are you to go back to East Jesus, MS to fight your ticket? [1] https://www.speedtrap.org/alabama-speed-trap-cities/ https://www.speedtrap.org/alabama-speed-trap-cities/
Bhilai 5y ago
In the town I live in, the police has decided to not to respond to nonemergency calls. They put the blame on their budget being cut and #defundthepolice movement. As it turns out some smart reporters looked up numbers and the budget was reduced in 2020 but it was increased back significantly in 2021. Anecdotally, I see a constable car hiding near a stop sign close to my home almost everyday and ticketing people who do a rolling stop. How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me.
- tehwebguy 5y ago
  > reporters looked up numbers and the budget was reduced in 2020 but it was increased back significantly in 2021 Exactly, with negligible exceptions every police force in the country has always had their budget increase.
- nostromo 5y ago
  It’s interesting that the cities who wanted to fire all cops and then ran them out of town with pitchforks are suddenly upset cops aren’t policing as much as they used to. De-policing was the goal and that goal has been partly achieved. Now we all get to live with it until trust is restored.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Their budgets are still bigger than ever. De-policing hasn't been achieved because most of the goal was to better utilize those resources. Police refusing to do the basics of their job and increasing their budget isn't a point in favor of their positions.
  - altacc 5y ago
    I'd be interested if can you supply a good body of evidence to support the claim that significant, widespread de-policing has occurred in the US and it's effects. Mostly I've just seen opinion pieces that cherry pick numbers.
    - nostromo 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tomohawk 5y ago
> there’s another resident who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate They've got my vote!
01acheru 5y ago
Can someone please explain something to me? How is it that in the US the police is such a deregulated entity? Almost anywhere I’ve been in the world the police worked the same nation or state wide, maybe the local police department of town A works a little different from that of town B but the core rules are many and the same for all of them. Which historical, legal and cultural reasons bring to this situation where a small town can shape a police department so freely?
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  Because the united states is designed politically and legally to be decentralized, giving large discretion to localities and states over how they run their rules and business. For example, most people in jail are not in federal jail. Most people are served by local police. Rules on taxes vary county to county as needs vary county to county. This is good and bad
  - giantg2 5y ago
    That's true but largely irrelevant to this story - traffic laws are the same through the state. The main thing in this is law enforcement discretion. There's no way the population would vote these malicious leaders in if the tickets were being given to residents. They are mostly hitting non-residents. This is very common near military bases. The law is the same, but they choose not to apply it to residents (and apparently make up violations too). Hopefully people have dashcams, and record interactions on their phones. It sounds like they will end up losing much more in lawsuits than they are bringing in. Perhaps the FBI and DOJ will get involved due to rights and color of law violations.
  - 01acheru 5y ago
    Yeah this is something I know and understand, I also appreciate this line of thought. What I don’t understand is about police in particular, if police is “law enforcement”. I’d expect some laws to be national, then some laws to be state, then going down and down until we reach a single small town where something might be different from the next one but they should share many things… how is it that the enforcement part of those same laws is so subjective? IMHO the law has two sides: the normative one, what it actually is, and the enforcement one, how it is applied to society. If the enforcement part is highly subjective we are distorting the law. It should be desirable to minimize the differences of enforcing the same law. Is it something really appreciated by the population over there that the same law is applied very differently in the next town over simply because it decides to enforce it in a different manner?
giantg2 5y ago
Sounds like the DA from the article needs to Guiglio list these officers. He seems to know there are a lot of issues over there.
sosodev 5y ago
Reminds me of my grandmother’s small Alabama town. They have a population of around 1500 and the city spent a large chunk of relief funds after some bad tornado damage building a huge “city hall” police station. Last time I was there they had multiple military vehicles parked outside. Meanwhile parts of the city haven’t even been cleaned up and the roads are in terrible shape.
dmz73 5y ago
I think "defundthepolice" slogan has caused too much harm from the start by polarizing people and it will be used to cause more harm going forward being used by bad actors to justify their actions. It should be changed to something that most people can agree on - something like "reformthepolice".

299 points by ourmandave 5y ago

“ Or there’s another resident who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate” Hell yes, stay out of the left lane unless you are passing. Everything else is a bit much though.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gknoy 5y ago
Reading deeper on that article, you'll notice a couple of things: - they were using the lane for passing - the citation came _before_ taking more than 1.5 miles became illegal which means that they ticketed her for something that wasn't illegal.

diogenesjunior 5y ago

There's that one song... uh, I think it was made by NWA. It had Eazy-E, MC Ren and Ice Cube. Uhhh... I just can't think of the name. Super relevant though :(

diogenesjunior 5y ago
Nevermind, I found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51t1OsPSdBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51t1OsPSdBc
- mattkevan 5y ago
  I think you mean this one right? :) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iZyqwOOmETI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iZyqwOOmETI
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
FireBeyond 5y ago
"No-one ever wrote a song called 'Fuck the Firefighters'!"
- 1123581321 5y ago
  There are a couple songs called “Fuck the Fire Department,” but they’re jokes.
throwawayboise 5y ago
There's also this one... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wjhTt9fqYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wjhTt9fqYY

throwaway879080 5y ago

nikkinana 5y ago

6510 5y ago

I from time to time look how different countries solve the same problem in different ways. Its fun to find one where an 'impossible' problem is solved in a simple rigorous way. The most shocking part is that there seems to be a complete lack of copying stuff that works even from a country next door. The preference is for every nation by it self to spend finite resources (time/money) to solve problems that have been solved elswhere. For laughs I suggest that the US police is probably doing a few things better than everyone else. We have lots of countries, each with their own formula that should serve as real world experiments. Say, do all 200 countries put the fines directly into the police budget? Or say: What are ALL the qualities one can design for in a police department or in recruitment? Then ask: How should they be prioritized? How is everyone doing this?

hyperman1 5y ago

This sounds like something that will be punished harshly in the very next local election.

brimble 5y ago
Might take more than that, if the police also control the vote counting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
- not2b 5y ago
  Yes, that's pretty much the plan in many states: take control of elections away from locals (especially locals who tend to vote for the other party) and give the power to the (gerrymandered) state legislature. People don't want to pay taxes, and if the anti-tax people also want local services, they have the police raise the revenue by preying on out-of-towners and people without connections. But even without election-fixing, this kind of thing persists in some towns because the cops focus their enforcement on out-of-towners. Locals get a free lunch: services they don't have to pay for.
- snowgrove 5y ago
  History and the Constitution provide for a solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
  - brimble 5y ago
    I go back and forth about whether a lot more stories featuring "...and then the aggrieved raided the National Guard armory..." would be a good or a bad thing, in our modern political climate. I mean, the same thing was attempted in the Tulsa massacre, by people who also thought they were the "good guys", and that whole thing was... less good.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
5y ago

ALittleLight 5y ago

1.7 average vehicle tows per household a year does seem a bit much.

me_me_me 5y ago
I have never heard of anyone in my life who's vehicle was towed. 1.7 avg per household - that probably an average of 1 tow for 1 car if not more

spaetzleesser 5y ago

It always mystifies me that it seems impossible to rein in police in the US.

svachalek 5y ago
What some consider bugs, others consider features.
finiteseries 5y ago
There are 18,000 different police agencies at all levels of federal, state, county, and municipal government with the bulk of the force distributed at the municipal & county levels, and essentially zero agreement on how to, or whether or not to reform any given one, what the end state should like, etc. Very, very wicked problem.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  Easy solution: Mandate federal standards for training, staffing and use of force. Congress could go and deal with this similarly to how the drinking age 21 was enforced - withhold federal funds for non-compliant states. Yes, this is messy as hell, but common standards for training are more important than to prevent of-age people of having a beer.
  - ansible 5y ago
    There should also be a national database for police officers to register with, maintained by the FBI (or somebody in the Justice Department). So you can't have cops that have been fired (for cause) in one jurisdiction just move somewhere else and easily get another police job.
  - finiteseries 5y ago
    In a sense, but that’s more a “how” than a what. As you’ve described re: drinking, tying it to funding is a clear, well trodden path for the feds but let’s not forget the even clearer message, motivation and inertia that was behind it in the MADD type stuff all of a few decades after the temperance movement. What policing is, and what its standards should be was the single most divisive topic in a year we were overrun by plague though. Nationwide protests. No resolution. Every particular reform (atm, under the current systems) takes years to see through and is shackled to locality, socioeconómics, different explanations, political warfare Very wicked problem, and that’s not even getting into anti federalism…

jandrese 5y ago

> Mayor Bryan dismissed the complaints of those who must appear in court. “Everybody’s got a story,” he said. “And 99% of them are lying.” Classic sociopath behavior.

the_only_law 5y ago
If I had to bet, I’d bet the mayor is the biggest lier of them all.

arpinum 5y ago

State constitutions should be updated to force all revenue and assets derived from fines to be distributed equally to all residents. That would distribute the benefits widely enough to remove the current incentives where fines line the pockets of local police and fund town operating budgets.

Cerium 5y ago
I have long thought that safety related fines should go to cover people harmed by those accidents. Hit by running a red light, receive some compensation from the red light ticket fund.
- brimble 5y ago
  Traffic-related fines should go to a state public transit fund.
  - pishpash 5y ago
    As the top parent says, it should not go to any special group, neither victims nor transit, as anything like that sets up perverse incentives. All fines should be revenue neutral, because the only thing they should accomplish is to be a disincentive for some behavior, not any other side effects.
    - brimble 5y ago
      Public transit gets people off the roads, though. Certainly that's where parking tickets should go, and probably drunk driving fines. At the very least.
      - pishpash 5y ago
        No, they should not. If you want to fund transit, fund it directly. It's an independent decision.
        5y ago

runnerup 5y ago

The article (almost certainly inaccurately) portrays this as the police are heavily victimizing citizens of their own town. But in actual small towns, this strategy tends to only work when the police are harming only out-of-towners that are passing through. If you unfairly fine 600 people in an area with a population of 1200...anyone who had the power to prevent this will get voted out in the next election. Jalopnik appears to have intentionally played fast and loose with language to give the wrong impression here. Example: "Or there’s [link]another resident[/link] who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate. " That link to 'another resident' takes you to an article about Ramon Perez[0] where he's described as a "Chelsea business owner". Chelsea is 34 miles away from Brookside. Ramon is certainly a "resident" of....somewhere....but probably not Brookside. Most likely, the police know many of the in-town vehicles and avoid pulling them over. When they do, they probably see the local address on the drivers license and let people go with a warning. The point I'm making is that if this were as Jalopnik presents it, there is an existing remedy: the townspeople can vote out the mayor, then the new mayor would reform the 8-person police department. Instead, the people being victimized have no representation in the government that is victimizing them, so people are seeking alternative remedies (federal involvement, etc). This also probably applies when a smaller portion of a population is victimized by its government e.g. 80% of citizens unaffected, 20% experience problems. Whats interesting about the 80/20 rule is that while classically in the US we think about racial/age/wealth divides, it also pops up in ways that aren't in people's top-3 intuition: using rarely-used government services. - Building a house and victimized by zoning commission? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change. - Running a business and victimized by licensing commission? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change. - Can't get an obscure department to return your calls? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change. I see a bit of a parallel here to accessibility for disabled people. It turns out that when we build in accessibility into our physical and digital environments, it improves the experience for fully-abled people as well. Poor quality article on that here[1] but there are better ones to find, or you can imagine your own example. The usual top-1 example is closed-captioning ... even if your hearing is fine you've probably found CC/same-language subtitles useful on occasion. Perhaps there may exist a similar effect for creating systems which allow people to escape victimization. If you build it for the "obviously disadvantaged", it will create wide benefits for the "classically advantaged" classes as well. 0: https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-... 1: https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibility-helps-everyone https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibilit...

rossdavidh 5y ago

Am I the only one who was completely derailed from reading the article by the fact that it had "Out Out" in the title?

pishpash 5y ago
Sign that the article hasn't been reviewed once. Another example in the article: "It’s not known for havinv a lot of crime." [sic]
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I was confused by that too. It means the author used an editor that didn't have spell check?
- QuantumYeti 5y ago
  I also noticed that, and gave up reading at that point. Maybe I'm cynical, but when people can't do the basic minimum to be understood... I don't feel any obligation to understand them.
jmugan 5y ago
I thought it was a clever way of trying to say the opposite of what they were saying. I was all kinds of confused.

devindotcom 5y ago

This is the original report by investigative reporter John Archibald: https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-... Some notable points collected by a commenter on another site: - "...just one of the 10 Brookside vehicles is painted with police striping, but nine others bear no emblems..." - "...officers wear gray uniforms with no Brookside insignias." - "The names of the officers were not listed on the tickets in secretive Brookside." - "[the city budget] did not feature a breakout of the police department." - "Asked in December how many officers were on staff, [the police chief] refused to say, citing “security” concerns..." - "[The mayor and the police chief] said neither the town nor the police department relies on the revenue officers bring in. In fact, they said in November they didn’t know how that money is spent." As others have pointed out, this sort of thing is not exactly rare, this is just a particularly egregious example of it. And this is after decades of attempts to 'reform' the police. When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community.

dang 5y ago
Ok, we've changed the URL to that from https://jalopnik.com/this-tiny-alabama-town-of-1-200-has-been-overrun-by-pol-1848389331 https://jalopnik.com/this-tiny-alabama-town-of-1-200-has-bee.... Thanks!
- ipnon 5y ago
  Doing Always Naturally Great
BobbyJo 5y ago
> When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community. Some sure. Certainly not all. I don't even think most. If I'm wrong, then the meme itself needs better phrasing.

sb057 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(feudalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(feudalism)

Pigalowda 5y ago
Brigandry and Robber Barons never went out of style

dionidium 5y ago

This jalopnik link is a light-on-details blog post that links to the actual reporting here: https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.html https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-... When you drive down into what's happening here, it looks pretty clearly like the town is operating a "speed trap" on a section of Interstate that goes through the city limits. It's overwhelmingly likely that a majority of these stops are technically legitimate, even if the article is able to come up with a handful of sensational-sounding cases. Traffic violations are routine. You could sit a cop on just about any stretch of road in the town where I live and pull people over all day every day for totally legitimate violations, if that's what you wanted to do. Hell, there's a school speed-zone camera right outside my window. I could sit here and watch its flash light-up violators' license plates all day -- on a stretch of road that's clearly marked as a school zone with a speed camera! The status quo is that a significant percentage of drivers violate the law every time they get behind the wheel and a lot of Americans more or less think it's no big deal, despite overwhelming evidence for the problems it causes. Alas, as this article demonstrates, if you hold these drivers accountable, then most Americans will perceive them to be innocent victims of out-of-control police.

whymauri 5y ago
>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. Let's recap. A group of unmarked men in an unmarked vehicle pulled over a woman for using her lights at night, destroyed her property, denied her medical assistance, strip searched her, accused her of drug possession, threatened to charge her with escaping jail, charged her with resisting arrest for tightening her arms, and released her way past posting bond. AND, this is one of the luckier, wealthier victims who had legal recourses to file lawsuit. In another instance, an officer was literally inventing law on the fly -- this is more than a speedtrap.

gknoy 5y ago

Looking at the map, I'm surprised that Google Maps/etc don't route around such abuse. For people that have no choice but to go through there, fine, but this seems like the kind of thing that would be worth driving an extra half hour to avoid. They already have "avoid toll roads", and this is worse.

lostcolony 5y ago
Lord yes; I want the "avoid speed trap" option.
Benlights 5y ago
This should be one of the options for google maps routing. A "Avoid Overpoliced Municipalities" toggle.
- gknoy 5y ago
  I mean, ideally I'd like to be able to define my own don't-go-there areas, such as near airports or areas that smell bad, but having defaults that route traffic around areas like this seems good. Legislating that traffic/etc fines go to a _state_ budget instead of local town budgets might solve this, but I imagine that would be very hard to pass, let alone survive lawsuits.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  All roads may end up leading to Canada.
Guessnotgauss 5y ago
The i22 corridor is practically unavoidable if you are traveling west through north alabama, past birmingham.
tehwebguy 5y ago
The closest thing I can think of that they did was with Google Flights "basic economy" and similar fares (no carryon, etc) had a big red warning icon, most airlines ditched those types of fares within like a year.

pc86 5y ago

> Or there’s another resident who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate. "Simply using the left lane" is illegal unless you're actively passing someone. In my state it's one mile. If you haven't passed someone in the last mile, you need to be in the right lane. I know in some states it's a quarter mile, which at 65-75 seems a bit aggressive (basically saying you have to be going 15-20+ faster than the person you're passing just to safely get over in time). But seriously, hanging out in the left lane is stupid and unsafe, regardless of your speed.

s1mon 5y ago
It really depends on the state laws [0]. It also really depends on the traffic patterns. In places like California where there are 7+ lane wide roads, the left lane is not so special (unless it's a HOV lane). If you've only got two lanes, it's more important to keep the left lane for passing, but when things are bumper to bumper, that doesn't make any sense. [0] https://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html https://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
- ars 5y ago
  Seems like it would be the opposite to me: If there are only 2 lanes, you need both for travel. But if you have 7 you can reserve some for speeders. And in all my driving, I've yet to be overtaken legally on the left - they always speed in order to do it, which is illegal. So I'm not clear why "it's more important to keep the left lane for passing". Just make the left lane "speed limit" lane, and the right lane slow lane. Meaning if you are going the speed limit you can stay in the left lane. (This is a hot topic, I'm sure I'll get downvotes, I don't care about that, but I would appreciate replies more. Specifically about what's wrong with staying in the left lane if you are going the maximum legal speed.)
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    My friends who are left lane hoggers say this all the time. My response is "show me your badge." Because unless you have one, you're not authorized to enforce speed limits. If you want to call 911 and report the speeder in the left lane, fine. But if you want to drive in the left lane just because you like it over there, you're forcing people to pass you on the right (which is dangerous) and you're disrupting the normal flow of traffic (also dangerous). If you think it should be your job to hog the left lane to slow down speeders, join your local police department. Otherwise move to the right unless you're passing.

dandare 5y ago

This may be controversial but: Policing for profit is in theory a good thing. Every time they enforced a good law the society profits. Every time they enforce a bad law the society should change the law. The alternative is having bad laws that are enforced just sometimes, at the discretion and personal biases of the not-for profit police.

rdedev 5y ago
The problem is when you do things for profit, it just becomes a race to extract as much profit as you can. Goodharts law comes to mind
- dandare 5y ago
  Why exactly is this problem? I personally see a problem with having laws that we enforce only if the offender is black, or a similar discretion or bias of the policeman.
FireBeyond 5y ago
> Every time they enforced a good law the society profits. Some of these departments have used these "profits" for BBQs for the police, or flat screen TVs, or for personal vehicles for officers. And in some of the cases where such "misuse" of funds has been taken to court, oftentimes the court has ruled that the PD has the perfect right to do so. Not sure how this is a societal profit.
- dandare 5y ago
  That is problem of the laws governing the use of the funds, not a problem of policing per se.
tdeck 5y ago
> The alternative is having bad laws that are enforced just sometimes, at the discretion and personal biases of the not-for profit police. This happens whether policing is "for profit" or not. Do you think they'll give the mayor or the police chief's spouse a speeding ticket if it means $100 extra in the department budget? These powers are always used selectively. The police just have to avoid using the "bad laws" against a core group of people with political power, and maybe share some of the spoils of enforcement with that group.

Cupertino95014 5y ago

There IS a website [1] listing all the speed traps in Alabama, and Brookside is on it. Speed traps have been around for decades. "Fleece the out-of-towners" has always been a great revenue source for tiny towns. How likely are you to go back to East Jesus, MS to fight your ticket? [1] https://www.speedtrap.org/alabama-speed-trap-cities/ https://www.speedtrap.org/alabama-speed-trap-cities/

Bhilai 5y ago

In the town I live in, the police has decided to not to respond to nonemergency calls. They put the blame on their budget being cut and #defundthepolice movement. As it turns out some smart reporters looked up numbers and the budget was reduced in 2020 but it was increased back significantly in 2021. Anecdotally, I see a constable car hiding near a stop sign close to my home almost everyday and ticketing people who do a rolling stop. How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me.

tehwebguy 5y ago
> reporters looked up numbers and the budget was reduced in 2020 but it was increased back significantly in 2021 Exactly, with negligible exceptions every police force in the country has always had their budget increase.
nostromo 5y ago
It’s interesting that the cities who wanted to fire all cops and then ran them out of town with pitchforks are suddenly upset cops aren’t policing as much as they used to. De-policing was the goal and that goal has been partly achieved. Now we all get to live with it until trust is restored.
- monocasa 5y ago
  Their budgets are still bigger than ever. De-policing hasn't been achieved because most of the goal was to better utilize those resources. Police refusing to do the basics of their job and increasing their budget isn't a point in favor of their positions.
- altacc 5y ago
  I'd be interested if can you supply a good body of evidence to support the claim that significant, widespread de-policing has occurred in the US and it's effects. Mostly I've just seen opinion pieces that cherry pick numbers.
  - nostromo 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tomohawk 5y ago

> there’s another resident who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate They've got my vote!

01acheru 5y ago

Can someone please explain something to me? How is it that in the US the police is such a deregulated entity? Almost anywhere I’ve been in the world the police worked the same nation or state wide, maybe the local police department of town A works a little different from that of town B but the core rules are many and the same for all of them. Which historical, legal and cultural reasons bring to this situation where a small town can shape a police department so freely?

calvinmorrison 5y ago
Because the united states is designed politically and legally to be decentralized, giving large discretion to localities and states over how they run their rules and business. For example, most people in jail are not in federal jail. Most people are served by local police. Rules on taxes vary county to county as needs vary county to county. This is good and bad
- giantg2 5y ago
  That's true but largely irrelevant to this story - traffic laws are the same through the state. The main thing in this is law enforcement discretion. There's no way the population would vote these malicious leaders in if the tickets were being given to residents. They are mostly hitting non-residents. This is very common near military bases. The law is the same, but they choose not to apply it to residents (and apparently make up violations too). Hopefully people have dashcams, and record interactions on their phones. It sounds like they will end up losing much more in lawsuits than they are bringing in. Perhaps the FBI and DOJ will get involved due to rights and color of law violations.
- 01acheru 5y ago
  Yeah this is something I know and understand, I also appreciate this line of thought. What I don’t understand is about police in particular, if police is “law enforcement”. I’d expect some laws to be national, then some laws to be state, then going down and down until we reach a single small town where something might be different from the next one but they should share many things… how is it that the enforcement part of those same laws is so subjective? IMHO the law has two sides: the normative one, what it actually is, and the enforcement one, how it is applied to society. If the enforcement part is highly subjective we are distorting the law. It should be desirable to minimize the differences of enforcing the same law. Is it something really appreciated by the population over there that the same law is applied very differently in the next town over simply because it decides to enforce it in a different manner?

giantg2 5y ago

Sounds like the DA from the article needs to Guiglio list these officers. He seems to know there are a lot of issues over there.

sosodev 5y ago

Reminds me of my grandmother’s small Alabama town. They have a population of around 1500 and the city spent a large chunk of relief funds after some bad tornado damage building a huge “city hall” police station. Last time I was there they had multiple military vehicles parked outside. Meanwhile parts of the city haven’t even been cleaned up and the roads are in terrible shape.

dmz73 5y ago

I think "defundthepolice" slogan has caused too much harm from the start by polarizing people and it will be used to cause more harm going forward being used by bad actors to justify their actions. It should be changed to something that most people can agree on - something like "reformthepolice".