welcome once again to lato's law here's steve lato every now and again my inbox gets pummeled by stories people send in saying steve have you seen this you've seen this you've seen this and that's an indication of a couple things not the least of which is it's something that people want me to talk about but it's also something that's poked a nerve and this story is one such story sent to me by countless people but john archibald wrote this for URL_TOKEN and i've seen this pop up in more places it is a very very well-written well-researched story about a major problem in a small town down south but it's also something that shows you what can happen when the people in charge of the police department of small town kind of lose their way so the headline is police in this tiny alabama town suck drivers into a legal black hole so he gives the example of a man named ramon perez who came to court last month ready to fight the tickets he'd been handed in brookside by brookside police and one was for they claimed he had rolled through a stop sign and another for driving NUMBER_TOKEN and NUMBER_TOKEN. now he said that he saw the cop before he got the stop sign so he knows he stopped he said i saw him and we looked eye to eye there's no way i was going to run that stop sign now a lot of people right now early on in the story saying but steve people roll stop signs maybe he did well here's the deal when he got to court in december he saw scores of people just like him lining up to stand before a judge complaining of penny anti-crimes and harassment by the police there he saw so many people trying to park in the grassy field outside the building that police had to direct traffic and the reporter confirmed that that on days they hold court for these traffic tickets so many people show up that they've actually got to find extra parking for them and direct the parking and it's like going to a rock concert or something except no one's happy so he figured it wasn't worth fighting he said i saw the same attitude in every officer and every person that's why i hesitated to fight it they were doing the same thing to every person that was there they own the town and the reporter says it appears that perez was right months of research and dozens of interviews by URL_TOKEN found that brookside's finances are rocket fueled by tickets and aggressive policing and again we've heard stories of small towns that raise tons of money by writing lots of tickets this town appears to push it further they they really do so in a two-year period between NUMBER_TOKEN and NUMBER_TOKEN brookside revenues from fines and forfeitures soared more than NUMBER_TOKEN percent and now make up half the city's total income half the city's total income is from basically traffic enforcement the police chief has said he wants to see more of this he likes the way this is going now you might say steve brookside alabama never heard of it the town has a population of NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN people live there now it's just north of birmingham alabama and they reported just NUMBER_TOKEN serious crimes in the eight year period NUMBER_TOKEN to NUMBER_TOKEN so it would be what we call a
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