Inside the remarkable rise and fall of Alabama’s most predatory police force

Brookside cops were on a high-priority case in 2019.

Garbage bags filled with used adult diapers, soiled puppy pads and empty oatmeal packets had been regularly dumped along the main road through the tiny town just north of Birmingham. It infuriated police and town leaders – and created quite the stink.

Officers began to pick up the bags and bring them into the little town hall, said Kimberlee Hudgens, a Brookside dispatcher at the time. Investigators stored them as evidence, diapers and all, in a closet in the lieutenants’ office.

“They were there for a good while,” Hudgens said. “We’d have to replace air fresheners, like every other day.”

That wasn’t the worst of it.

“That’s where we kept all the supplies for feeding the inmates,” she said. “Silverware, plates and everything like that.”

A year before, Brookside’s low-key, one-man police department had begun to metastasize, at the behest of town leaders, into an insatiable band of reverse Robin Hoods, stopping so many cars, detaining and arresting so many people that it couldn’t keep up.

Officers crammed evidence – like those trash bags – wherever space could be found, according to a state audit released this month. Guns, money and drugs were tossed recklessly about, as the town arrested more people, and confiscated more property than workers or facilities could handle.

Brookside, population 1,253, had never even had an annual budget. But those town bosses wanted a big, professional police department. What they got was a nightmare.

‘A year in Brookside is a pretty long time’

The transformation of Brookside’s police department began in 2018, under the direction of long-serving and now late Mayor Roger McCondichie. He and members of the town council complained of slow response times from the county, and of drug infestations in and around the area. They opted for a more aggressive approach, and found just the man for the job: Mike Jones.

Jones had been a cop in nearby Shelby County, in the affluent suburbs south of Birmingham. At the time, Jones was still president of the Helena City Council, though it was reported he later stopped attending meetings when his private security business began to struggle. He declared bankruptcy in 2019.

But Jones sold Brookside a vision of how to turn a sleepy department into an intimidating and lucrative force.

Jones put out word that Brookside was hiring officers and dispatchers for the new department, which he cast as an interstate drug unit. He promised benefits and a place to land for police who had left other agencies but hoped to keep their law enforcement certification current. He quickly built a roster of officers, some with questionable pasts that made them more loyal, adding new staff every quarter until the force eventually topped out at 13, not counting reserves.

As the department grew, employees say it reflected Jones’ vision.

“We were working under a man who used fear as a tactic to make us do what he wanted us to do,” said Brandon McDonald, the first dispatcher hired after Jones arrived.

Attempts to reach Jones have been unsuccessful since January. He left Brookside and has not commented publicly.

McDonald recalled the way Jones ordered staffers not to adjust the temperature in the town’s jail cells, so it would remain cold all the time. McDonald attributed it to “cruelty.”

Lacey Shelton experienced that when she was jailed last year on charges she disputes. She wore a tank top and was denied a long-sleeved shirt.

“They told me they don’t give blankets,” she said. “I was freezing.”

McDonald began to struggle with the ethics of it.

He complained when frozen food for jail inmates was improperly stored for long periods in refrigerators because there was no freezer. He described how Jones hoped to turn the neighboring community center – one of the few amenities for the townspeople – into a police building and jail.

McDonald was new to policing, but soon grew disillusioned with Jones’ demands and what he considered broken promises about pay and benefits.

“When you’re naive and you work with police, you assume they’re gonna do the right thing,” he said. “It’s not until you learn right from wrong in the police world that you know just what’s going on. And I didn’t realize that until some time had passed.”

By 2020, McDonald had seen enough. He complained about Jones but no one listened, including current town leaders, he said. So he quit, after about a year on the job.

“But a year at Brookside is a pretty long time.”

‘The chief’s pretty upset’

Brookside is just 10 miles north of Birmingham, but in ways it is ages away. It’s an old mining town, tucked in the hills and hollows at the southwest tip of the Appalachians. It has one retail store, the Dollar General, and three septic tank services.

And while many Brookside residents work across the Birmingham area – the largest urban center in Alabama – they enjoy the country feel of their town, the anonymity and security that used to come with it. Since 2011, Brookside reported to the state very little serious crime – one robbery and no murders.

But Jones wanted his force to show force. He acquired three military surplus trucks through the federal 1033 program, which passes used military guns and equipment to local law enforcement. The town already had weapons and a personnel carrier through the program – the feds call it a mine-resistant vehicle and residents knew it as “the tank.”

While tiny Brookside was not alone in taking such equipment and weaponry, it was particularly aggressive. The town collected surplus valued at $760,846, more than accepted by Birmingham or Montgomery, and among the highest totals in Alabama. Some residents worried the growing fleet of military equipment lined up outside town hall sent an unwelcoming message.

Jones still has some supporters in town. But his approach — which posited that Brookside was dirty, unsafe and drug-infested — offended other residents, who argued drugs exist everywhere.

Brooksiders tell vivid stories about their experiences as Jones built the police department in his image, and protected that image with intimidation, threats, embarrassing social media posts and even blue-light traffic stops.

“If you put anything on Facebook, he retaliated verbally to you,” said Brookside resident Tammy Price. “He absolutely would embarrass you. If he saw you and he was riding down the street, he would embarrass you in your front yard.”

She said she once questioned Jones’ methods in a public meeting, and he pulled up outside her house a little later. He rolled down his window and said, “I’m glad you haven’t needed me lately.”

She took that as a threat.

John Minyard told his story at a Brookside town hall meeting. Police gave him a ticket for running a stop sign, which he disputed. He posted his displeasure on Facebook, he said, and then a police officer stopped him, blue lights flashing.

Not for a crime, but for a warning.

“The chief’s pretty upset about that post you put on Facebook,” he recalled the officer saying.

Residents like Price and her neighbor Bobbie Pickle bristled when Jones began walking through backyards and into carports, posting big orange stickers on cars or boats without current tags, telling people their property would be towed.

“I had two boats in my boat shed and he put stickers on both of them and told me, because I didn’t have updated tags on them that they were gonna tow ‘em,” Pickle said.

“That’s my (late) husband’s boat,” she said. “And I don’t have to have a license for it to sit in the yard. You will not touch it.”

Strip searches and Bibles

Brookside hired Hudgens as a dispatcher in August of 2019. She’d worked for years in emergency services, but she and other dispatchers were thrust with little preparation into the job of sending new officers where they needed to go, all while using ill-suited computer equipment salvaged from Jones’ private security business, she said. They were expected to keep track of real-time police calls on Excel files.

“We were not trained whatsoever,” she said. “We were required to be jailers as well, but had no formal training.”

Hudgens oversaw inmates in the two little town hall rooms adapted as jail cells. She said she was asked to pat down female inmates, and was once made to perform a cavity search on a woman suspected of having drugs. She had no preparations for such an invasive procedure.

While police filled the cells by citing the letter of the law to drivers, they did not apply that standard to themselves. Jones made his own rules, based on his own sense of morality, Hudgens said.

“We had cameras in dispatch and there were multiple times when … he would bring an inmate into his office and shut the door,” she said. “I witnessed that he would evangelize to them. And the only way they’d be able to get out of jail is if they accepted Christ. They’d be given a Gideon’s Bible because the previous mayor was a Gideon, and they’d be released from jail.”

Brookside Mayor Mike Bryan is a former councilman who took over as acting mayor when McCondichie became ill. Bryan said he knew Jones made Bibles available in the jail, but said he had never heard of anyone being held because they did not accept Jesus.

Such a thing “would absolutely be inappropriate,” he said. “The law is the law.”

The law, according to Hudgens, was what Mike Jones said it was. It was enforced by those he picked – despite their backgrounds – to be police officers.

Jones had known James “Bo” Savelle – Agent JS, as he often wrote on his reports – from his days in Shelby County, according to former Brookside workers. Savelle became a lieutenant in Brookside.

Savelle had a history of trouble. He had past drug and alcohol charges, a DUI and an arrest for public lewdness, according to police records. And in 2019, when Jones was out of town and Savelle filling in as Brookside chief, he was charged with harassment at a Dave & Buster’s in Hoover. A police report said he drunkenly and aggressively harassed a woman and her companion.

Attempts to reach Savelle failed. His listed phone is not accepting calls and he did not respond to emails.

Savelle was not the only Brookside officer with past issues. Another Brookside officer had been indicted for the strangulation of his girlfriend in 2019, though that case was dismissed when the woman failed to show up for court. At least two others were in arrears on child support, and another had been charged with harassment, though the charges were dropped.

RELATED: How government reliance on fines and fees cripples families

Another, the second-leading ticket-giver between 2018 and 2020, according to records filed in a lawsuit against the town, had been ticketed eight times by other agencies for speeding, four times for driving with no seat belt, twice for driving without insurance, twice for driving without a visible tag, and once – this one years ago – for driving on a suspended license.

Hudgens said she quit as a dispatcher because of the way the town handled — and in her mind, glossed over — Savelle’s arrest.

“I just knew that I did not want to be part of a workplace that did such low-down things,” she said.

Town officials ignored signs of trouble because they were so infatuated with the influx of money that they “had blinders on,” she said.

“It was a dictatorship.”

A revenue strategy: tickets, tows and arrests

The money Hudgens spoke of was substantial.

In 2018 total revenue for the town of Brookside was $586,000. By 2020 – due almost entirely to aggressive policing – it rose to $1.2 million. Fines and forfeitures made up 49 percent of the town revenue, and most of it went right back to the police and courts.

Jones reimagined the police department as a sort of drug task force on the corridor between Birmingham and Memphis — and he was creative.

He pushed the boundaries of the town’s police jurisdiction beyond the town limits, and blanketed nearby Interstate 22 with police cars. Traffic tickets increased more than 600 percent in a single year, arrests almost 450 percent.

While the town paid officers as little as $12 an hour, Jones used state-disbursed federal grant money to lure new hires with thousands of hours of overtime.

He expected officers to stay busy, and they were. Officers appeared to approach drivers with the presumption that they were guilty of something, many drivers would later say. And the town bought in.

Police under Jones stopped drivers for minor traffic violations. Lots of them.

If you drove too long in the left lane, you became an offender, though lawyers have argued the “crime” police often cited was not on the books. Officers detained and questioned drivers, often handcuffing them during the search as they brought in drug-sniffing dogs named Axl and Cash. When drivers asked why they were being treated as criminals, officers responded, as Jeanetta Jones claims they did to her, by saying they were the police, and could do what they wanted.

Town leaders did not question. As Brookside Mayor Bryan told AL.com when first asked about aggressive policing in December: “Everybody’s got a story, and 99% of them are lying.”

The town began to tow huge numbers of cars, and reap huge rewards. Just 50 cars were towed in 2018, but that jumped to 789 cars two years later, or an average of more than two a day. Multiple drivers say Jett’s Towing Co. showed up on the side of the road at the same time as police stops. Cars were towed for failure to show insurance, for not having a driver’s license, and lawsuits now claim officers frequently ignored insurance paperwork as an excuse to tow cars.

Although the town has no towing contract, it had a no-bid relationship with Jett’s, a state audit described. That audit report, released last week, has said such an arrangement is illegal.

The town required drivers to pay $175 in “restitution” to receive a release form — nothing but a piece of paper — to take to Jett’s to reclaim their car. Jett’s then demanded its own payment — sometimes more than the city’s, and demanded cash for owners to retrieve their vehicles. As the state audit pointed out, such fees “must be reasonably related to covering the cost of administration, not to generate revenue.”

Wayne Jett, the owner of Jett’s Towing, referred questions to his lawyer, Jay Tidwell. Attempts to reach Tidwell were unsuccessful.

Katie Baggett moved to Brookside in December of 2020. In less than three months, she said, Brookside separately pulled over both her and her housemate and impounded both of their vehicles.

She was stopped on Valentine’s Day of 2021 as she drove home during a winter storm warning. Visibility was low and she was driving cautiously, she said.

A dark, seemingly unmarked SUV pulled behind her, she said. Another SUV faced her, bright lights on, and yet another pulled at the rear. Officers said they stopped her because the tag light on her Honda Odyssey was not visible from 50 feet away.

Baggett and the officers went back to look at the tag light, and it worked. She said one officer told her “Well, we didn’t say it wasn’t working. We said we couldn’t see it from 50 feet away.”

Baggett was driving on a suspended license, though the suspension had ended and she hadn’t had the money to have it reinstated. She was ticketed for improper tag light and driving while suspended, and her vehicle was towed.

An officer insisted on taking her home – which embarrassed her. Baggett asked about her vehicle on the way.

“I said, ‘Where are y’all taking my car?’” she said. “And he’s like, ‘We can’t tell you unless you give me your phone number.’ I said ‘I don’t wanna give you my phone number.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna tell you unless you give it to me.’”

She refused. When she called town hall a few days later, she was told Brookside needed the officer’s name to determine the location of the car, she said. The officer had identified himself only by an agent number.

It was only after she went to court six weeks later that she learned where the car was impounded. By the time she found it the storage fees topped $2,000.

“It was more than the car was worth in fines,” she said.

Her Odyssey, and all the items in it, were auctioned off, she said. Baggett took Ubers and Lyfts to the Avondale area of Birmingham to work, at $35 a pop, plus tip. It wiped out half her income.

In court she pleaded down to driving without a state license – less serious than driving while suspended – and ultimately got her license back. It took four months before she could save for another car.

“As a single mom that really messed me up,” she said. “I’m still kind of in debt from that.”

Debt collectors with guns

Brookside police didn’t just wait for the money to come to them. They went out and got it, in other municipalities, as armed debt collectors.

Chana Hodges handles billing at a mom-and-pop medical supply store in nearby Fultondale, Ala. She recounts a day in 2020 when her boss walked to the cubicle and told her a police officer was looking for her.

She wondered if her family was OK as she walked past coworkers and customers. Then she saw the officer tap the radio on his chest.

“I see her,” she heard the man say. “She’s in my sight.”

Another Brookside cop ran from the rear of the building, where he had positioned himself to prevent her escape. As she stepped out of Jernigan Healthcare the two snapped handcuffs on Hodges’ wrists and led her to the police car.

“I’m like, what have I done?” she recalled in March. “What could I have done to warrant police from a different city showing up at my work to arrest me?”

The answer would come soon, as the first officer spoke: “Do you remember getting a ticket in Brookside?”

She did. She remembered being pulled over five years before. For driving with an expired tag.

Hodges made monthly payments to chip away at the $400 fine, but moved away and forgot about it after paying about half. She was taken to jail and told she couldn’t leave without a $500 cash bond and $206 she still owed on the original offense. Her boss paid her fine.

Hodges said she asked Jones at the time why police didn’t just call her and tell her to come in.

“He told me it would be in my best interest if I just shut the F up,” she said.

“I had to be patient”

Lawyer Bill Dawson, who has filed multiple lawsuits against Brookside, first became aware of the town’s overreach in 2019.

A client came to him after she was stopped for driving in the left lane of the interstate, a crime he insists did not exist at the time. Dawson was struck by the testimony, and the sheer number of people who packed the Brookside court with similar charges.

“I’ve always been suspicious of small town courts, and I’ve seen a lot of abuses” from them, he said.

Jefferson County Public Defender Adam Danneman said he began to notice Brookside a year or so ago. He looked closer and noticed troublesome “code words” that offered vague excuses such as “driver acted nervous” to justify questionable stops. He instituted a “no pleas from Brookside” rule, and asked his workers to flag for scrutiny every case out of that town.

Dawson and Danneman suspected what the world would come to know in January, when Brookside’s reign would end as suddenly as it started.

The town became the poster child for policing for profit when AL.com published a series of revelations Jan. 19. That story unleashed a torrent of testimonials from people who said they were victimized by Brookside police, and prompted state lawmakers from both parties to call for investigations and reforms.

Chief Jones resigned on Jan. 25. Savelle left soon after, as did more than half the force. Mayor Bryan announced he had pulled police officers from Interstate 22 as the Alabama Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission and the Alabama Department of Examiners of Public Accounts swooped in for audits. The examiners’ sharp report was released this month, outlining missing guns, poor financial practices and shoddy storage of evidence, including an unmarked trash bag filled with prescription medicines that did not seem to be associated with any particular case.

The town announced that all police cars and uniforms would be clearly marked. It agreed to give back the tank. In February, Brookside even suspended court. This month the town judge, Jim Wooten, announced he would step aside and recuse himself from all pending cases. Court is now set to resume this Thursday.

Brookside hired Ken Simon, a former circuit judge and current member of the University of Alabama Board of Trustees, to investigate its own department. Simon said early findings point to a police force that preyed on people who looked like they wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight, because of poverty, race, or previous run-ins with the law.

He spoke of “meanness.”

At a Feb. 1 town hall meeting near Brookside, residents and drivers told vivid stories of police abuses – and more meanness – and called for investigations, restitution and even dissolution of the police force and the town itself.

“I always pray, and this day has come at the right time,” Netta Womack said at the town hall. “Lord, after all this time you heard me. I had to be patient.”

The town now faces at least 13 suits – or one for every 96 residents. Lawyers for eight people argued this month in a federal lawsuit that Brookside and Jett’s Towing engaged in a “pattern of racketeering activity.” The lawyers cited federal anti-corruption RICO statutes and the Hobbs Act.

Preying on people

What happened in Brookside is a lesson for all those who fail to see the signs – in Brookside or elsewhere – and do nothing, said Carla Crowder, the director of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice.

“The abuses that have come to light in Brookside were simmering for years and no one in power was paying attention,” she said.

Brookside is one tiny place that caught the brief attention of the nation and could help people understand the dangers of using law enforcement to fund governments, she said.

“It can happen anywhere, and it should not have to happen on this scale — with college students stranded on the side of the road, and pastors mistreated for driving nice cars, and unlabeled evidence strewn about a police station – for reform to happen.”

The Alabama Legislature in the last week of this year’s session passed a bill – sponsored in the Senate by a Republican and in the House by a Democrat – that bars municipalities from using fines and traffic fees to supply more than 10 percent of their budgets.

“The law we enacted will prevent abuses like those in Brookside from being repeated elsewhere in Alabama,” said Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth, a Republican who vowed to do something about Brookside-style behavior. “It puts all cities, towns, and crossroads on full notice that such behavior is unacceptable. Law-abiding citizens should not fall prey to a renegade police department that is accountable to no one.”

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, the state’s top law enforcement officer, has declined to comment on Brookside, but others have acted.

Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr asked judges to drop 69 felony drug charges that originated in Brookside, along with 22 associated misdemeanors, saying he did not want to be associated with a “rogue police force.”

Circuit Judge Shanta Craig Owens threw out another 41 cases on appeal from Brookside involving more than a dozen people, calling the evidence “garbage.” She said she would not consider a case credible if the only witness was a Brookside police officer. Brookside prosecutor Mark Parnell, fought dismissal of some of those cases, but asked for the dismissal of others.

Notably, he asked for dismissal of charges against the man who was arrested for dumping trash along Brookside-Coalburg Road. The man had admitted to the police and to the former mayor that he had dumped trash, though his lawyer argued the confession was coerced and the charges based on dates the police simply guessed about. He was charged with 31 counts of criminal littering, and town Judge Wooten had fined him $14,268. But Brookside could not make the case.

The arresting officers were gone. The evidence and testimony were insufficient. The town’s credibility was in tatters. Brookside walked away.

At a March 7 town council meeting Mayor Bryan stood in the spot where Wooten sat on court days, in the reflection of the Ten Commandments. Bryan told a supportive crowd that he is working to build a better future in a way that makes families feel safe.

The Brookside council passed three ordinances as part of the ongoing reforms. It raised police officers’ hourly pay to $18, established a police reserve program and rescinded tax collection from areas of police jurisdiction outside the town limits – which applies mainly to people in nearby Mt. Olive.

“We made the decision that we wouldn’t do that again, that this would just be a self-contained Brookside,” said council member Chris McCondichie, the former mayor’s son.

“Let’s create our opportunities here and grow Brookside and not do it any other kind of way.”