The town of Brookside, Alabama, recently made national headlines for an abusive ticketing practice that essentially deployed the small town’s police department as revenue collectors.
While the facts are appalling, they are not unique. Policing for profit occurs throughout the country every day.
The Brookside police chief resigned in January, the same day that the state’s lieutenant governor requested a state audit of the town. Others called for state and federal investigations. This came after AL.com reported that Brookside, a town of 1,250 people with no stoplights and six miles of roads, had collected more than $610,000 in fines, fees and forfeitures in 2020, or almost half the town’s entire revenue. This ticketing spree came at the height of the pandemic when many chose to remain at home. The 10-person police force is alleged to have manufactured reasons for traffic stops and to have just invented laws on the spot to collect revenue.
Unfortunately, this abuse is widespread throughout the country. The town of Valley Brook, Oklahoma, population 870, collected about $1 million in fines and fees in 2018.
Large cities treat their residents like ATMs as well. Chicago collected more than a quarter of a billion dollars in ticket revenue in 2016. These are extreme examples, but the search for revenue that motivated these towns is rife in the American criminal and civil enforcement system.
Fines and fees are a uniquely attractive form of enforcement because, as Justice Antonin Scalia noted in Harmelin v. Michigan (1991), unlike other forms of punishment, fines are a source of revenue from which the state stands to benefit. Similarly, civil forfeiture laws also pervert justice because, as Justice Clarence Thomas has written, the government that seizes the property often keeps it, which “has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses” frequently directed at the poor and other groups least able to defend their interests. Indeed, policing for profit is often specifically directed at low-income individuals, driving them deeper into poverty and forcing them to make choices between paying court debt or paying for their housing, medical care, education and caring for their children.
Using the criminal justice system to collect revenues causes local officials — police, prosecutors and judges — to prioritize revenue over justice and public safety. This is precisely what the Department of Justice (DOJ) uncovered in its investigation into the criminal justice system in Ferguson, Missouri. The DOJ found that the city urged police to deliver ticket revenue increases and its municipal court used its judicial authority as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advanced the city’s financial interests.
The desire for revenue has not only led to over-enforcement but also overcriminalization. The city of Doraville, Georgia, used tickets for small-time offenses, such as having a cracked driveway or improperly stacked wood, to account for a quarter of its yearly budget. A small city with a population of just around 10,000, Doraville reportedly wrote over 40 tickets per day.
In Ferguson, the city’s quest to maximize revenue led it to criminalize harmless situations and engage in biased policing. However, it was no outlier. In St. Louis County, municipalities routinely used their prosecutors and municipal courts as revenue generators. The cities of Calverton Park, Bella Villa, Vinita Terrace and Pine Lawn all derived around half (or more) of their general revenue from fines and fees. When the state of Missouri capped the amount of money that municipalities could retain from traffic fees, municipalities turned to ticketing people for things like having a barbeque in their front yard or basketball hoops in the street.
Counterintuitively, over-policing has made society less safe, not more. Empirical research shows that using prosecutions to raise revenue leads to fewer violent and property crimes being solved. That is because law enforcement officers, in response to political pressure, devote resources not to solving crime but to generating revenue. One study produced by our firm, the Institute for Justice, showed that allowing law enforcement agencies to reap financial benefits from forfeitures encourages the pursuit of property over the impartial administration of justice. These incentives lead to systemic distortions of priorities: revenue over public safety, fees over justice. Moreover, aggressive enforcement of unnecessary laws increases the number and intensity of negative interactions between the police and the communities they serve. One need only look at what happened in Ferguson to see what can result from policing for profit.
Social scientists, lawyers, judges, law enforcement officials and others have identified solutions that can mitigate the harm such policies do. Requiring all ticketing revenue collected by a municipality to be remitted to the state; the abolition of municipal courts (which are operated, staffed and funded by the same locality doing the ticket writing); aggressive reporting requirements for fines, fees or forfeitures revenues; and the possibility of municipality disincorporation for ticketing abuses would all do much to remove the perverse incentives that can result in outcomes like Brookside’s. Federal solutions are limited, although the Obama administration worked hard to bring the issue to national attention. Regardless, the Biden administration has failed to provide organizational or rhetorical leadership. It falls, then, to the states to end the use of the criminal justice systems as tax collectors.
The good news is that reforming fines, fees and forfeiture abuses enjoys bipartisan support. Reform would bring relief to tens of thousands of Americans driven into poverty and incarceration by an unfair and cruel system. Until that happens, however, we can expect more Brooksides to continue to spring up across the country.
Bill Maurer and Joshua House are attorneys with the Institute for Justice.