Brookside, with a population of about 1,400, is 15 miles northwest of Birmingham. The town, a former mining community, has its own police force.

Under Alabama law, police officers are generally restrained from operating more than 1.5 miles outside their city or town limits. In addition, the state law prohibits towns with populations below 19,000 from issuing speeding tickets on interstate highways.

After hiring Police Chief Michael Jones in 2018, Brookside began expanding its police force and aggressively patrolling a section of Interstate 22 located outside the town’s boundaries but within the 1.5-mile legal buffer.

The officers did not issue speeding tickets; instead they stopped motorists for a wide range of moving violations, such as failing to signal or having a broken taillight. According to claims by persons who said they were wrongfully arrested by Brookside officers, the initial traffic stops appeared pretextual. For example, after the stop officers frequently said they smelled marijuana in the vehicle, which gave them probable cause to conduct a vehicle search. They also issued citations and made arrests for failure to display insurance, possession of marijuana, concealed-carry violations, and other misdemeanors.

Seventeen of the 22 defendants were Black, a disproportionate percentage in Jefferson County, where Black residents are approximately 42 percent of the population. The police seized many of these vehicles and towed them to an impound lot. This forced the motorists to pay fees to the town and the towing company to get their cars back.

Featured Cases: Chekethia Grant and Alexis Thomas

Two of the cases dismissed involved Chekethia Grant and her daughter, Alexis Thomas, who were arrested on February 15, 2020. According to court filings, an officer initially stopped Thomas on the grounds that her tag light was out. Thomas called Grant and said the officers were asking for proof of insurance. She gave the officers her license. Grant began driving from her home in nearby Quinton, about 10 miles away.

Then, Thomas claimed, the officers said they smelled marijuana in her car. They forced her out of the car, grabbed her phone, placed her in handcuffs, and put her in the back of a police cruiser. When Grant showed up, the officers asked for her identification, which Grant said was in a purse in the daughter’s car.

The officer opened up the purse and rifled through the contents and then claimed to find a small amount of marijuana in a prescription pill bottle. The women were arrested, strip-searched, and placed in a cell in the Brookside Police Department. Their charges included possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, and obstruction of government operations.

Their cars were towed, and they each had to pay $175 to the town and $150 to the towing company. They were convicted in Brookside Municipal Court on December 8, 2021, and appealed. Circuit Judge Shanta Craig Owens dismissed their cases on March 15, 2022.

They have filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the Town of Brookside and the towing company.

These cases ended up before a judge in Brookside Municipal Court who found the defendants guilty based on the police reports. The court costs and fines associated with these cases enriched the town’s coffers. According to reporting in AL.com, Brookside’s income doubled between 2018 and 2020, from $582,000 to $1.2 million, and fines and forfeitures increased 640 percent.

The town’s police force increased as well, from a single officer in 2018, to 13 officers in 2020. As far back as 2019, drivers in the Birmingham area questioned the aggressive tactics of the Brookside police. One woman told a local television station at the time that after she took her complaints to Facebook, a Brookside officer called and accused her of slander. She said he threatened her with arrest if she did not take down the posts.

The first wrongful convictions associated with this group also occurred in 2019. In 2020, a woman filed a civil-rights lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama against the town, claiming she was falsely ticketed for excessive driving in the left lane, a frequent citation by the officers. The suit noted that at the time of her arrest, the law that restricted use of the left lane did not set any penalties or enforcement policies.

The woman’s charge was dropped; her lawsuit is still pending.

In May 2019, the Alabama Legislature again targeted left-lane drivers by restricting the use of the passing lane for more than 1.5 miles. The law’s aim was to reduce road rage caused by motorists potentially upset at slower vehicles hogging the passing lane. The Brookside police took advantage of the new law to stop motorists on Interstate 22.

On January 19, 2022, AL.com published an investigative series about the Brookside Police Department and its aggressive tactics. The series detailed the excessive charging of motorists and the actions of the officers to silence any defendants who pushed back too hard.

“Brookside is a poster child for policing for profit,” Carla Crowder, the director of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, a nonprofit organization devoted to justice and equity, told the website. “We are not safer because of it.”

The fallout was swift. Jones resigned as police chief on January 25, 2022. His top deputy resigned two weeks later. The town’s mayor also ordered the police department to stop patrolling Interstate 22.

Separately, Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth ordered an audit of Brookside and its police force by the state’s Chief Examiner of Public Accounts.

That report↗, released on April 15, 2022, found widespread problems with internal controls, including a lack of recordkeeping and oversight on disbursements.

The audit did not address the issue of wrongful arrests or convictions, but it noted significant problems with the department’s evidence storage. For example, 19 weapons listed in the department’s evidence logs went missing. Conversely, 63 weapons included in the evidence inventory did not appear on the evidence logs. The audit also said officers generally failed to log evidence properly, and the evidence rooms were disorganized.

Defendants convicted in Alabama's municipal court have the right to appeal their cases to circuit court. Even before the series and the audit on the problems in Brookside, many defendants appealed their convictions. These cases landed before Judge Shanta Owens of Jefferson County Circuit Court. In February and March of 2022, she dismissed convictions involving 22 defendants. Owens cited a “lack of credibility and public trust” in the arresting officers, and said that cases where the only witness was a Brookside police officer would be “met with heavy scrutiny.”

Separately, the Jefferson County District Attorney dismissed 69 open felony cases involving arrests made by Brookside police officers. “We don't want to be associated with a police department that clearly felt like it was above the law,” District Attorney Danny Carr said. “We feel like it is important that citizens trust law enforcement. Anything that damages that trust hurts law enforcement and the cases.”

Featured Case: Gary Griffith

On May 28, 2021, at about 2:20 p.m., a Brookside police officer pulled Gary Griffith for excessive use of the left lane.

The officer said in his report that he was monitoring traffic on the highway – right at the very edge of the town’s extended jurisdiction – and saw Griffith in the left lane failing to yield to other motorists. The officer said he followed Griffith for a mile and a half, then activated his emergency lights to get Griffith to pull over. Two miles later, the officer said, Griffith finally stopped. The officer said Griffith seemed disoriented, and he gave Griffith a field sobriety test. According to the officer’s report, Griffith was unsteady on his feet and unable to follow instructions, He was arrested and charged with excessive use of the left lane, driving under the influence of an unnamed controlled substance, and failure to yield to an emergency vehicle (the officer’s cruiser).

A judge convicted Griffith on all three charges on November 4, 2021, and he received fines and court costs of $1,545. Griffith appealed, which required that he secure $3,090 in bonds to proceed. By the time Griffith’s case came up in Jefferson County Circuit Court, the problems with Brookside’s police department were in the open.

The officer who arrested Griffith no longer worked for the department. The prosecutor moved for dismissal without prejudice, and said the officer’s unavailability made it impossible to proceed. Griffith’s attorney asked for a dismissal with prejudice, meaning the charges couldn’t be refiled. In court documents, the attorney noted that Griffith was not even able to ascertain the name of the arresting officer; the ticket and charging documents referred to the officer only as “wb2705.”

“Given the environment and culture surrounding the practices of the Brookside Police Department which have been made known to the public in recent months, the validity of the complaints against the Defendant should be, at best, taken with a grain of salt,” the defense motion said. Owens vacated Griffith’s convictions and dismissed his charges with prejudice on March 16, 2022. 

Victims of the Brookside Police Department said the officers abused their power in numerous ways. They would:

■ Break up a charge into several smaller charges, in order to maximize the court costs for a case.

■ Wait outside an apartment complex or the Dollar General, the town’s only store, and make unwarranted stops in order to search cars and find chargeable offenses.

■ Not accept registration and insurance documentation, and then impound a driver’s car.

■ Falsely claim they smelled marijuana to justify a vehicle search.

■ Target Black motorists.

Fourteen of the Brookside defendants were wrongfully convicted of 23 traffic offenses. Ten were wrongfully convicted of 16 drug offenses. Eleven were wrongfully convicted of driving under the influence of either alcohol or a controlled substance. In addition, 10 defendants were wrongfully convicted of 52 other offenses, including obstruction, resisting arrest, container violations, disorderly conduct, and littering. Six defendants were wrongfully convicted on weapons charges.

One defendant, Roger Currier, was initially convicted in Brookside Municipal Court on 30 separate counts of littering. He confessed to the crime, but later appealed his conviction. His charges were dismissed on March 13, 2022. The town’s prosecutor said that the officer involved in Currier’s arrest was unavailable to provide evidence or testimony, making it “unlikely that at the time of trial a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt can be obtained.”

Many of the requests for dismissals contained similar language. The fallout from the scandal led to half the police force leaving by early February.

In early May 2022, the dismissed police chief Michael Jones was arrested in Covington County, Alabama, and charged with impersonating a police officer. At least seven civil-rights lawsuits have been filed against the town of Brookside, the towing company, and its former officers, alleging civil-rights violations by people who were either wrongfully convicted or wrongfully arrested. The cases are still pending. In addition, the Alabama legislature passed a law in 2022 capping at 10 percent the amount of revenue a town can receive from fees and fines associated with traffic-related tickets.

– Ken Otterbourg

Members of this group

Here are the known members of this group:  Brandon Carrington, Jessica Coins, Cenderia Coleman, Roger Currier, Chekethia Grant, Gary Griffith, Jori Jones, Larry Kennon, Howard Lamar, Melissa Leith, Sandra Martin, Tamyia Meshell, Ashley Mitchell, Nathaniel Neny, Anyl Pascal, Jackie Pickle, Christopher Rowser, Younoussa Souma, Robert Stallworth, Alexis Thomas, Brittany Todd, and Alexus Young.