“It’s the wild, wild west, and they created their own wild, wild west,” she said. Givan has called on several officials to resign, including Brookside’s mayor, Mike Bryan, and is holding the town hall so residents can air their concerns. “This city is a ticking, ticking timebomb waiting to explode,” Juandalynn Givan, a Democratic state representative, told WVTM, an NBC affiliate in Birmingham. Officers have been cited in at least five federal lawsuits for manufacturing reasons for traffic stops, “making up laws”, overcharging fines, using racist language and other misconduct allegations, AL.com said.
“Brookside is a poster child for policing for profit,” Carla Crowder, director of the nonprofit Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, told AL.com. Towing ballooned from 50 cars in 2018 to 789 in 2020, with residents reporting that they were required to pay thousands of dollars to get vehicles back. With a population of less than 2,000 and a median income of less than $40,000, in 2020 Brookside generated more than $610,000 in fines and forfeitures from drivers, a 640% increase over two years and almost half of city revenue. Officers in Brookside, a former mining town 20 min outside Birmingham, have been accused of generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in city revenue through ticketing, towing and other traffic-related fines, despite Brookside having no traffic lights and a few two-lane roads, news site AL.com first reported.
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