Alabama police department put on leave after grand jury recommends its abolition | Hacker News Reader

Alabama police department put on leave after grand jury recommends its abolition

nbcnews.com

81 pointsgeox16 comments

For anyone who has driven through those parts of the deep south, it's not too surprising.

Conditions down there are pretty dire. Driving through most of those little towns is very depressing.

You can tell there used to be tons of beautiful, small, walkable communities dotted across the South, in places like this, but now they are mostly just the corpses of post-WW2 growth that have long, long since been abandoned, with no story for economic turnaround coming.

A lot of those small towns struggle with having their hands tied by their given state too. States restricting small towns from raising / gathering funds to provide services / make their town more desirable is pretty common in those areas. Often times policing is one of the few services provided, if only because they gather funds from their activities, and that is its own perverse incentive a times.

It's tough to be a small town anywhere, but in the south it seems far more dire / there's very little that can be done by local cities.

It's unfortunate as with the potential for work from home type situations some of these picturesque small towns might provide a great spot for people to move to, but when you see the parks are a mess, pool closed ... you don't want to move there.

> A lot of those small towns struggle with having their hands tied by their given state too. States restricting small towns from raising / gathering funds to provide services / make their town more desirable is pretty common in those areas.

I hadn't heard about this... do you have a link with more information?

This isn't a great article about it but it does reference the issue:

https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2025/01/28/lawmaker-files-b...

As a quick example, Alexandra Pineville metroplex would do a needle exchange but the state said they could not. Louisiana.

The Deep South isn’t as bad as the Great Plains. Go look at population charts for proof. The Deep South is growing while the Great Plains are being depopulated.

I’m not sure that applies to small towns.

Atlanta growing doesn’t mean anything for small towns.

Atlanta is really a blue island in a sea of red. Very developed and progressive compared to its surroundings.

I'm from small town Alabama. I'm pretty confident that this needs to happen across the state. These are just the guys who got caught.

Even in Huntsville, how many millions have been spent on the legal defense for that cop that blatantly murdered someone?

A police department of eight people is way too small to be viable. Even if it wasn't a corrupt everyone-knows-everyone situation, the duplication of admin effort involved across hundreds of tiny police departments must be considerable.

Depends on the town. 8 police in a 4.2 square mile town of less than 3,000 is reasonable, maybe overkill.

*Edit: Unless what you're saying is that there's no way that 8 people given so much authority with minimal oversight is not going to lead to corruption, in which case I agree.

Alabama has a lot of racist cops because the racism is so deeply ingrained in the culture that you can't even tell who is racist and who is just acting normal in the social context.

I had to move away to realize that being followed around grocery stores as a brown kid isn't "normal".

My neighbor and I are good friends, but he's a southerner and when he talks to coon-ass southerners he drops n-bombs and the like. Not meanly, in the same tone as "he drove a nissan".

I got to see something amazing a few years ago. My youngest and I were over there and some coon-ass he knew drove up and asked him about a part they were waiting to get delivered. The bomb was dropped, and immediately after the other person left he apologized to me "I forgot your kid was here, sorry" ; and I knew from his face it actually took 30 seconds to process what he had just said in front of a 5 year old.

Our conversations never enter racism territory even when the subject would be ripe for it if you couldnt help yourself at all.

Hope this made sense.

edit: in context it was like "the part showed up yet?" "nope, the nbomb fedex driver is late" "oh, alright. I'll call you in an hour when i get back from town." "k, seeya" he's 20 years my elder, but i also frequent mastodon where it is most CERTAINLY not used in this way.

Reminds me of the movie In the Heat of the Night (1967). A black cop from Philadelphia winds up accused of murder in a small Mississippi town and tries to clear his name and catch the real killer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(fi...

There I was reading that the whole state's police was being disbanded, and then, again, I got reminded about the dopamine/attention economy madness we're in.

You had me at Alabama.

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