In March 2018, Michael Jones began serving as the police chief of Brookside, Alabama, a small town near Birmingham. During the next two years, the city's annual revenue from "fines and forfeitures" rose by 640 percent, from $82,467 to $610,307. The increase since 2017, the year before Jones took over, was even bigger: about 1,100 percent.
By 2020, fines and forfeitures accounted for nearly half of Brookside's annual revenue. But Jones thought he could do even better. While "a 600% increase" was "a positive story," he said, it was also "a failure" because "with more officers and more productivity you'd have more."
