The New York Times in 1975 wrote of the legendary Alabama speed trap town of Fruithurst as if aggressive policing was a Southern surety.
“Like watermelon stands and signs tacked onto pine trees warning sinners of dire fate in the world to come, the speed trap has been a fixture on some Southern highways for years — as if form of perpetual revenge inflicted on the Yankees for Sherman’s march through Georgia,” Ray Jenkins wrote for the Times in April of that year.
“For the most part, these traps have been operated by local courthouse cliques with a sharp eye for the Yankee Collar and state officials have viewed them as unbecoming of traditional Southern hospitality.”
While the South has seen its share of traffic traps, one might now dispute that their intent is to stick it to the damn Yankees. Then-Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley found other reasons for Fruithurst, Ala., to turn to aggressive policing. It was a cash cow, and one the town of 250 near the Alabama/Georgia border embraced with much the same gusto as Brookside in northern Alabama has done in recent years.
By 1975 Fruithurst, in Cleburne County, had come to employ six police officers, paying them all more than $10,000 a year – in excess of $50,000 each in today’s money. It pulled in hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and forfeitures in 1974 – more than a million dollars in current buying power, and was accused of predatory policing, stopping drivers with the goal of heaping on questionable charges that forced them to come to court. And enter into debt.
AAA – the American Automobile Association – named Fruithurst a national traffic trap, the only one with that label at the time. Baxley, the state’s top law enforcement officer then, called it “America’s worst traffic trap,” and “a terrible blot on the good name of “Alabama.”
Yet on the surface what was going on in Fruithurst was argued by some to be legal. Aggressive, perhaps, but defensible.
But that’s not the way Baxley saw it.
Baxley, 47 years later, is still perhaps the South’s most famous traffic trap fighter, and this week he joined a team of lawyers suing the town of Brookside, which has become known in recent weeks as the Fruithurst of the 21st Century. He said he still has much to learn of Brookside, and did not want to telegraph his strategy on the Brookside situation, but explained how he and others ended that speed trap and ultimately its police department.
He had been overwhelmed by complaints, by mail from across the country outlining drivers’ experiences there, so he asked Fruithurst town officials to come have a chat. He thought they would be reasonable.
“I reckon at first I was naïve,” he told Al.com last week. He tried to explain to them “rudimentary facts of what you should and shouldn’t do in law enforcement,” and he thought they listened. But nothing changed.
He called again, a little more sternly, and “tried to give them a little class in criminal law and constitutional law and law enforcement,” and Fruithurst promised to do better, he said. But the stops, and the complaints, continued.
So Baxley, with support from Alabama State Troopers, made an unusual and memorable choice.
He got a trailer, moved it to Fruithurst, staffed it with lawyers – almost all of his legal staff volunteered – and hung up the AG’s shingle. He would be the public defender, and vowed to work for every person charged with a traffic crime in Fruithurst.
“Every time there was a stop on that road we’d go up there in a trooper car with a trooper in uniform,” he said. “We wouldn’t interfere while they were writing the ticket, but as soon as it was over we’d go to the victim, to the motorist and hand him a card.”
He or his staff would tell the driver that “unfortunately, you have been the victim of a speed trap.” As a result, the attorney general of the state of Alabama would like to represent them, free of charge
“We would represent them for free in city court, where we would probably lose,” he said. “And then we would appeal to county or state court, whichever was appropriate. And then, if we lost there we’d appeal to the court of criminal appeals. If we lost there we’d appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court. And, if we lost there, we’d try to go to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley and staff in the mid 1970s.
There was method to his madness, he recalls. Because he knew he’d never have to try all those cases. He knew some lawyer would have to represent the town of Fruithurst in all those cases, and it would soon get so expensive that a traffic ticket that usually earned Fruithurst $50 would cost the town thousands.
He filed a federal lawsuit, too, and it didn’t take long before Fruithurst succumbed to the financial pressure. It didn’t just reform its police department. It abolished it.
Much of the Fruithurst story is reflected today in Brookside, where residents at a town hall last week called for abolition of the police department, and perhaps even the town, and accused police of tactics similar to those employed in Fruithurst. At least eight lawsuits – another was filed Monday afternoon by a former Birmingham police officer who claims mistreatment at the hands of Brookside police – have been filed against the town and its police department.
In 2020 Brookside – a quarter of the size of the fictional town of Mayberry – issued 3,024 citations, or 2.4 for every man, woman and child who call Brookside home. It’s police chief and second-in-command resigned after an AL.com story detailed those and a string of other findings in January.
Brookside may be as bad as Fruithurst, or worse, Baxley said, because the town is prohibited by law from writing speeding tickets on the interstate. Instead it has used “inventive ways to stop all those people.”
Those ways include stops for no tag light, following too closely, driving (not speeding) in the left lane or failing to turn on headlights as soon as dusk falls. Many drivers stopped with those charges argue that they were manufactured out of whole cloth.
So far Steve Marshall, the current Alabama attorney general, has been silent on the issue of Brookside. He did not respond to questions about the traffic trap there, and his office will neither confirm nor deny whether it is conducting any investigation there. That’s despite interest and outrage from top officials in both parties in Montgomery.
Baxley would not comment when asked about Marshall.
“I don’t want to be critical of anybody,” he said. “I’ll just tell you what we did in Fruithurst.”
But Baxley, who successfully prosecuted Robert Chambliss, the first of the Klansmen convicted in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, said response to his Fruithurst action was like nothing he ever saw again.
“If you look at everything I did in public office, every big case I won and every action we took that I thought was good, if you put all those together, the favorable letters I got in the speed trap thing were more than everything else combined,” he said. “I don’t remember getting a bad one.”
Baxley said he is excited to turn his attention to Brookside.
“I’m real thankful that we got a good team together and I’m looking forward to jumping in it and rolling up my sleeves,” he said.
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