Someone in Brookside deleted the police department’s emails, according to attorneys for a group of drivers suing the town over allegations of ticketing for profit.

It’s unclear exactly who deleted the account, said attorney Jaba Tsitsuashvili. But, regardless, the drivers are asking a federal judge to hold Brookside responsible for it.

“There’s a lot of finger-pointing and cross-recriminations here, but I think what it boils down to is that Brookside is responsible for this email deletion,” said Tsitsuashvili of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian nonprofit based in Virginia. “We’re confident that the judge will understand that the town deleted four years worth of police policy emails after the town had already been sued several times for its police policies.”

The nonprofit is suing Brookside, a town of about 1,300 people north of Birmingham, on behalf of four drivers. They allege the town exploited them by arresting, ticketing them and towing their cars to buoy the police department’s funds, the lawsuit says.

Reporting by AL.com in January of 2022 found that Brookside’s finances were buoyed by tickets and aggressive policing. Revenues from fines and forfeitures soared more than 640% between 2018-2020 and came to account for more than half of the town’s income.

Mike Jones, the police chief who orchestrated the department’s expansion and crackdown on drivers, resigned almost immediately after the first story published. And in April of 2022, the Institute for Justice filed the class-action lawsuit, one of at least a dozen brought against the town and its police.

In a court filing earlier this month, attorneys for the drivers said that Brookside blamed Jones for deleting the email account. But Jones testified in May that he hadn’t deleted emails, according to court records.

“The e-mail system went dark when litigation concerning the police department’s policies was already ongoing—including, almost certainly, this case,” the July 7 filing reads. “The mayor, the interim police chief, and the current chief all knew. Yet no one did anything to try to preserve or recover anything.”

Brookside has not responded to the filing. Warren Kinney, an attorney representing Brookside, declined to comment for this article.

Attorneys for the drivers allege that the town could have attempted to recover the email account system through Google for up to two years after it went dark, according to court records.

“Instead, they let the clock tick and quietly switched to a different e-mail system altogether,” the July 7 filing reads. “The town made those decisions knowing full well that it was already facing ‘numerous lawsuits and civil claims’ concerning its police department.”

In response to the lawsuit, Brookside has asked the judge to dismiss the case. The town denies the allegations, and says police had a right to tow the drivers’ vehicles.

“Each and every action taken was done so in good faith belief that the same was legal and lawful at the time so taken,” the town said in an April 2023 filing.

The attorneys for the drivers requested the emails in discovery in July 2023. It wasn’t until late 2024 when Brookside said that the email system had been deleted, according to court records.

The drivers are asking U.S. Magistrate Judge Staci Cornelius to enter an order “presuming the deleted police department emails were unfavorable to Brookside” as a sanction. They asked that that sanction establish that Brookside’s spikes in citations and towing were part of an intentional policy to fund the town’s growing police department and that those policies were communicated to every officer via their email accounts, according to court records.

“The police-department e-mail system was used extensively — and daily — for internal communications during the whole of Chief Jones’s four-year tenure,” the July 7 filing reads. “What few e-mails have been salvaged are (charitably speaking) unfavorable to the town.”

The lawsuit seeks damages, repayment of fees with interest, return of property and a declaration that the town had an unconstitutional policy to increase revenue, according to the complaint.

Meanwhile, attorneys for the drivers and the town are currently in settlement talks. Those discussions started on Tuesday, and Judge Cornelius scheduled the mediation to continue on July 31, according to the court docket.

Tsitsuashvili added that the details of the mediation process are confidential, but any settlement deal that comes out of it would be public.

“This wholesale deletion of Brookside Police Department email accounts is indicative of the way we’ve seen the town behave in the course of this litigation,” he said.