Alabama Highway Patrol
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The Alabama Highway Patrol is the highway patrol agency for Alabama, which has jurisdiction anywhere in the state. It was created to protect the lives, property and constitutional rights of people in Alabama.
The Alabama Bureau of Investigation traces its history back to 1936, the year the Alabama Highway Patrol was founded, and a need for a sub-section of that organisation to serve as "special-investigators" was found. Out of the 74 who originally made up the Highway Patrol, 2 were appointed to begin the work of what would later become the Investigative and Identification Division, the precursor to the Bureau. The Division found that much of its early work consisted of providing assistance to local and federal law enforcement agencies in investigations. It also pursued crimes on its own account for the state of Alabama. Typical crimes investigated in the early years of the Division were espionage and desertion.
The functions of the Division further expanded in 1943 when it became the central repository for records of all fingerprints taken in Alabama. This expansion of function did not prevent the Division experiencing a precarious existence in the late 1940s and early 1950s. 1947 saw the Division formally separated from the Highway Patrol as the Bureau of Investigation and Identification, but this was reversed two years later in an unsuccessful experiment, the aim of which was to better coordinate the uniformed and plain clothes divisions of the Department of Public Safety. The experiment only lasted a year and the Bureau was reactivated after strong pressure from other parts of the law enforcement community in Alabama. From 1952 to 1954, there was a further break in the existence of the organisation. The Bureau was dissolved in 1952 and the former Department was reestablished in 1954.
In the 1970s, further changes saw the Division assume its modern form. In 1971, three units were created inside the Division, those of Auto thefts, Narcotics and Criminal Investigations. Three years later the modern Alabama Bureau of Investigation was formed by an executive order of the state governor.
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