Just moments after Trey Crozier backed his silver 2002 Mercury Sable onto a small road in Castleberry, a wisp of a town in south Alabama, he found himself face-to-face with two police officers wearing military-style flak jackets, and camouflaged trousers tucked into dark assault boots.

The officers opened the doors of Crozier's vehicle and forced him and his passenger out on to the street so the vehicle could be searched. Despite the dramatic attire of the Castleberry Police Force, it was not a military operation. Crozier was being stopped for improperly backing out of a driveway.

But what was supposed to be a standard driving infraction turned into an early Halloween nightmare for Crozier, on Oct. 26, 2016. His car was towed and the Castleberry Police Department confiscated $1,750 from him.

He was caught in one of the worst speed traps in Alabama.

And he was never charged with a crime. And according to the lawsuit and court records, he was never even charged with a traffic offense.

Invisible cops

Show me the money

Crozier's story is just one of more than a dozen similar tales from this small south Alabama town of about 550 people, where a police force five times larger than the national average per capita regularly uses speed traps to pull over out-of-town drivers, taking money and belongings on the basis that they were from the proceeds of drug crime, according to allegations in a current lawsuit against the town and its former Chief of Police.

It's also alleged that the police towed the vehicles of many people they pulled over, later forcing owners to pay a $500 impound fee to have them released. No belongings or money have ever been returned to the plaintiffs named in the lawsuit, according to attorney Richard Nix.

The former mayor doesn't dispute the idea of a speed trap built to prop up the town budget.

Mayor J.B. Jackson is a heavily built man of 70 years. He started the ball rolling in 2009, back when there wasn't a police officer working in the little town. Jackson hired a chief, Tracy Hawsey.

This story is the latest in a series from Reckon by AL.com. Follow Reckon on Facebook.

"We didn't have much so Hawsey come to me and said 'There is a lot of crime in this town and a lot of drugs coming through this town,'" Jackson told AL.com earlier this month, sitting on his couch, looking into the late afternoon sun with his one good eye. "So he said why don't we set up a court system to get some money coming in."

And that's exactly what happened. "We hired our own DA and own judge," Jackson added. "The revenues started to grow and we built out the police department."



Jackson said that before they set up the court system cases from the town went to Evergreen, a larger town about 15 minutes north that is home to about 4,000 people. He said the Castleberry cases would get thrown out regularly because Evergreen was so busy. So Jackson made the suggestion to the Castleberry city council. They agreed.

The former Mayor of Castleberry

"At first I didn't think catching people speeding would last more than six months before they got the idea and slowed down," said Jackson. "It actually got worse."

On the day Crozier had his money taken he had travelled up from Orange Beach and was on his way to look at a truck that he found on Facebook Marketplace, a popular buying and selling feature of the social media site.



But he never made it. The suit alleges Castleberry police relieved him of $1,500 in the vehicle and $250 in his wallet.



"The cops took every penny I had," Crozier said. "I have no idea where my money is now. I've tried to get it back for almost a year."

No charges were ever filed against him. The drug accusations, he said, "were made up so they could tow my car and take my money and belongings."

Small town in decline

Castleberry, like so many other small towns throughout the United States, is in decline. Since 1980, the town's population has dropped from around 880 people to just over 550 in 2016, according to a Census estimate.

Most of the jobs in the town were provided by a South Korean car part manufacturer, lumber yards, and surrounding farms. Around a quarter of people in Castleberry live in poverty.

The old laundromat in Castleberry, Alabama

The main street, all 600 feet of it, is made up off burned-out buildings, and businesses that bear the faded outlines of past hopes. The laundromat, with its hand-painted sign, is boarded up. Shiny industrial kitchen fittings can be seen through the window of an old restaurant, while anonymous buildings, some without roofs, line the quiet road.

Retired farmer Leon Thomas lives across the tracks on the east side of the town. He was the only person walking in the town on what was a crisp fall morning in mid-October. Aware of the lawsuit against the city, Thomas said of Hawsey and of the traffic stops: "He was always nice to me, but I heard that he'd taken money from people all over Alabama."

The case against him in Castleberry is mounting.

In all, 15 plaintiffs accuse Hawsey and the town of negligence and conversion, meaning unreasonable policing and meaning improperly converting their private assets to police assets. The lawyer later added claims of fraud and false imprisonment.

The small town this year moved to dismiss the case, claiming immunity. The lawyer for Hawsey in June argued the same: "In his individual capacity, Chief Hawsey enjoys peace officer immunity against all claims, including claims based upon his enforcement of the Town's ordinances."

The suit also accuses the town of setting up an ordinance in Dec. 2015 that allowed the police department to charge $500 to release towed vehicles if the driver was found to be transporting drugs, whether it be a small amount of prescription drugs that were not in the name of a person in the car or a kilo of cocaine.

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Plaintiffs were forced to pay in cash directly to Hawsey, according to the suit. In some cases, Hawsey did not give receipts, and when he did it was handwritten on scraps of papers, said local attorney Richard Nix.

Nix contends the ordinance was unconstitutional.

"This is about getting money," he said. "Not a lot of people in Castleberry have money so it made sense to catch those with out-of-state plates."

Castleberry, Alabama

Facebook

In most of the cases in the lawsuit, no mention of drugs was made before the vehicles of the plaintiffs were towed. In some cases, large sums of money were confiscated by police.

Nix also said in an interview with AL.com that Hawsey gloated about taking the money in the local paper and on Facebook. "It's not going to be hard to prove that he took the money," Nix said.

Nix said that he was not yet aware of how many local citizens or out-of-state people are affected by the town ordinance or Hawsey's confiscations, but he believes that it may be more than a hundred. Nix added that only custodial arrests would allow for towing and impounding, not traffic offenses.

In one case, Nix said that Hawsey had a car towed for a non-custodial arrest. The person paid the $500 for their vehicle to be returned. When the person was ultimately not imprisoned, Hawsey did not return the $500. In another case where a car was towed, Nix said the passenger of the vehicle could have taken custody of the vehicle and driven it away to avoid the impound and towing fee, but Hawsey did not allow it.

As arrests intensified, Hawsey took pictures on his Facebook of the people he had arrested and any drugs he had found on them. In multiple videos, Hawsey and other members of the force are seen joking around or discussing arrests. Hawsey also liked to take photos of donuts, and himself.

Castleberry's growing police department

Within a few years of being hired, Hawsey had added four full time police officers and five new police cars, according to Jackson.

In addition to the forcing the owners of towed cars to pay the $500, the force also began raiding the homes of local people accused of dealing drugs. Signs with the words "narcotics checkpoint" were erected around the town, said Jackson, and cars were regularly searched and towed. Jackson said that Hawsey had 84 drug cases during his last full year on the job in 2015. That amounts to $42,000 in towing fees, assuming that each car was towed in accordance with the ordinance.

A Castleberry Police Department vehicle.

But laws in Alabama allow law enforcement to keep 100 percent of proceeds from civil asset forfeiture, according to a report from the Institute for Justice, an Arlington, Va. law firm and legal think tank. In Alabama, there is no requirement to collect or record information on those that the assets were taken from.

In Mississippi, for example, the state must prove if the asset was used for illegal activities, according to the report.

While Hawsey claimed that he was taking people's assets under civil forfeiture laws, he didn't follow the correct procedure, according to Nix. "He would have had to file with the county district attorney about why he was taking assets."

Conecuh County District Attorney Steve Waddlington was unavailable for comment on whether Hawsey has gone through with the correct procedures.

Hawsey has since been hired as an investigator in a small town near to Andalusia and is a shareholder in a pizza shop in Evergreen, according to Nix.

In a Facebook message, Hawsey said that he did not wish to comment for the story and was not aware of how the case against him was progressing.

The newly elected mayor of Castleberry, Henry Kirksey, who took office in November last year, said he wouldn't comment on pending litigation, but said that Hawsey resigned from his position. Kirksey beat Jackson by just 30 votes, according to the former mayor.

In the United States, the average number of cops in a city or town is about 16.6 officers for every 10,000 people, according to calculations made by the website Governing, a Washington DC publication that covers politics, policy and management for state and local government leaders.

Castleberry with a population of 550 people and a police force of five at the end of Hawsey's reign earlier this year averaged 90.9 per 10,000 people, or 126.7 police employees per 10,000 people. That's more than five times the national average per capita, or the equivalent of a football team taking to the field with 55 players.

Castleberry Police Department

Castleberry had two additional staff that were not cops. Since Hawsey left Castleberry in March 2017, locals estimate that the police department now has between two and four cops, which include the new police chief.

Waiting on justice

In order to get his car back, Crozier called his mother and she came to Castleberry to pay the "impound fee" of $500 in addition to towing fees levied by the towing company.



Crozier has driven to Castleberry from his home in Orange Beach four times in an attempt to reclaim his money since being pulled over by Hawsey.



Crozier said that Castleberry's police cars are not meant to be noticed. The force has two identical white unmarked Ford Explorers with blacked out windows. It also has a jet black Dodge charger with barely visible writing on the side identifying it as from the Castleberry Police Department. It has another two vehicles that Crozier identified as Chevrolet Tahoes. "I really don't know how they are paying for all those brand new vehicles, but it makes you wonder when they refuse and then cannot come up with the money they owe people."

While Crozier continues to wait for the return of his money, officers from the Castleberry Police Department are still pulling people over in unmarked cars, still wearing the camouflage army-style fatigues, boots and flak jackets. The towing and fining continues.

Broken Justice is a series by Reckon examining criminal justice in Alabama. Some of the earlier stories have looked at voting, at pretrial intervention and at money bail.