A small town policing-for-profit scheme that netted hundreds of thousands of dollars for the police department to spend each year has taken a huge blow, from a federal court’s decision not to dismiss the lawsuit.
“Brookside has rightly become the national posterchild of policing for profit,” said IJ Attorney Jaba Tsitsuashvili. “The court’s unequivocal denial of the town’s effort to evade accountability for its abusive ticketing and towing practices is a welcome sign. It should serve as a warning to local governments across the country that they can’t prey on the vulnerable to generate revenue. Enough is enough. People are fighting back, asserting their rights, and demanding accountability.”
The city had demanded that the lawsuit by several individuals victimized by the town’s policy be dismissed, and a private towing company named as defendant also had asked to be protected against the legal action.
But the IJ reported “Judge Anna M. Manasco of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama denied Brookside’s request to dismiss the lawsuit and rejected a private towing company’s request to be dismissed from the case.”
The case was brought by four individuals, but “demands accountability on behalf of all drivers affected by the town’s unconstitutional system of abusive fines, fees, and property seizures,” the IJ said.
The legal team explained for years the town and its towing company partner pursued and prioritized police revenue and private profit over constitutional rights. The small town made national headlines last year for ticketing drivers and towing their cars to fuel a concerted policing-for-profit system that resulted in a 600% increase in revenue from fines and forfeitures, with hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing to police coffers annually.
But the judge found: “Plaintiffs are seeking to dismantle the financial incentive system for law enforcement that the town allegedly erected beginning in March 2018 – a system that allegedly caused the town to be investigated by the Alabama Attorney General’s office.”
She said the claims are “sufficient to plead a due process claim based on the institutional interest of the police department in generating impound fees and making arrests.”
The IJ explained, “As the court recognized, Brookside police towed the cars of the named plaintiffs – Brittany Coleman, Brandon Jones, Chekeithia Grant, and Alexis Thomas – regardless of whether the vehicles could be safely operated. They had to pay $175 to Brookside before paying $160 (plus daily impound fees) to a private towing company to get them back. Even with criminal charges dismissed, there is no way to get that money back – or the hundreds of dollars in bail and court costs that were also piled on, further padding town revenues.”
WND had reported just months earlier when the court also rejected the police officers’ demand that they be protected from any lawsuit over their actions.
The court at that point noted officers had not provided any reason at all for handcuffing one plaintiff.
Also, “body camera footage flatly contradicts” their argument that they towed the car for driving under the influence of marijuana. To the contrary, the footage shows one of the officers admitting, “I don’t believe you’re going to be under the influence,” but then the officers deciding to take the car because “‘the Chief’ wanted them to tow in these circumstances,” the report explained.
This part of the case charges that the Brookside officers handcuffed Brittany Coleman and had her car towed – without any justification.
When she sued, as part of a class action case, the officers claimed qualified immunity, a legal standard that states if their actions were not clearly confirmed as illegal in law, they could get by with what they did.
In the officer’s comment, “the chief,” is former Brookside police chief Mike Jones, “who boasted publicly about implementing a ticketing and towing system that resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for the tiny town of 1,200 residents – money that went almost entirely back to the police department,” the IJ noted.
His system issued more than 3,000 tickets and towed nearly 800 cars in 2020 alone.
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Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.