https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-town-suck-drivers-into-legal-black-hole.htmlArchive link
https://archive.is/L9bLsThis is crazy, and the article is too long to copy and paste, but...
The town of 1,253 just north of Birmingham reported just 55 serious crimes to the state in the entire eight year period between 2011 and 2018 – none of them homicide or rape. But in 2018 it began building a police empire, hiring more and more officers to blanket its six miles of roads and mile-and-a-half jurisdiction on Interstate 22.
By 2020 Brookside made more misdemeanor arrests than it has residents. It went from towing 50 vehicles in 2018 to 789 in 2020 – each carrying fines. That’s a 1,478% increase, with 1.7 tows for every household in town.
Police stops soared between 2018 and 2020. Fines and forfeitures – seizures of cars during traffic stops, among other things – doubled from 2018 to 2019. In 2020 they came to $610,000. That’s 49% of the small town’s skyrocketing revenue.
There's only one store in this tiny town and they're making hundreds of thousands on bogus tickets and arrests. They're spending the money on bullshit like an armored riot control vehicles that looks like a tank.
If you have to travel through Alabama, avoid Brookside or you could end up being pulled over by an unmarked vehicle and charged with using the left lane on the highway. srsly