COLDWATER

COLDWATER

The Department That Policed for ProfitBy Mohamed Aslam
Michael Caine
Listen with Sir Michael Caine™ and 1,000+ voices
Length1h 21m

About this audiobook

For over a decade, a small-town Texas police department turned a nineteen-mile stretch of interstate into its largest source of revenue — seizing cash and property from drivers who were almost never charged with a crime. Then a routine stop over a broken taillight and eight thousand dollars in legitimate business cash ended with a man dead on the highway shoulder, and the department's official story very nearly held. Coldwater: The Department That Policed for Profit traces a financially incentivized policing scheme from its quiet beginnings through the death it caused, the deputy who gave up her career to tell the truth about it, the reporter who spent three years fighting records requests to prove it, and the federal civil rights investigation that finally forced a reckoning. A story about what happens when a department's survival depends on treating the people it's sworn to protect as a revenue source.

Audiobook details

GenreTrue Crime
Length1 hr 21 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJul 27, 2026
LanguageEnglish

Table of contents

1Introduction
2Prologue: The Corridor
3Chapter One: Policing for Profit
4Chapter Two: What the Money Actually Paid For
5Chapter Three: The Stop
Show all chapters
6Chapter Four: Forty Minutes
7Chapter Five: What the Department Said Happened
8Chapter Six: Deputy Vasquez-Reyes Resigns
9Chapter Seven: The Reporter Who Wouldn't Let It Go
10Chapter Twenty-Four: Three Years of Records Requests
11Chapter Eight: What the Footage Actually Showed
12Chapter Nine: The Department of Justice Arrives
13Chapter Ten: What the Data Showed
14Chapter Nineteen: The Ones Who Never Got Their Money Back
15Chapter Eleven: A Formal Finding
16Chapter Twenty: A National Pattern, Not a Local One
17Chapter Twelve: The Indictments
18Chapter Twenty-One: Randall Kessler Before the Stop
19Chapter Thirteen: The Trial
20Chapter Twenty-Two: What the Medical Examiner Found
21Chapter Twenty-Five: What Training Experts Told the Jury
22Chapter Fourteen: The Verdict
23Chapter Fifteen: What Holcombe Said
24Chapter Sixteen: A Department Remade
25Chapter Twenty-Three: The Council That Looked Away
26Chapter Seventeen: What Marcus Deveraux Left Behind
27Chapter Eighteen: Rewriting Texas Forfeiture Law
28Chapter Twenty-Six: Eight Places, One Country
29Author's Note
30Epilogue: What the Highway Remembers

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