Alabama became the second Arizona for one month: 4 ELD tampering inspections in April, 258 in July

Data report · Carrierintel data desk · Five months of §395.8(e)(2)

Four inspections in April, 258 in July

When FMCSA activated violation code 395.8(e)(2) on April 1, 2026, everyone in the industry knew Arizona was going to be first out of the gate. What almost no one saw coming was Alabama. In April, the entire state wrote 4 ELD tampering inspections. In May, 25. In June the number jumped to 160, and in July it hit 258 — more than any other state in the country except Arizona.

Then the curve bent. In August — a partial month, because the feed runs only through August 27 — Alabama wrote 168, and Oregon, which had spent the summer fading, came back with 242. Four days are missing, so this is not a completed monthly decline; on the 27 days we have, Alabama is behind both Arizona and Oregon. Across April 1 – August 27 Alabama is the country's third tampering-enforcement state: 615 inspections against Arizona's 1,531 and Oregon's 966. The July peak was real, and so far it has not returned.

What did hold is the outcome of a citation. Of the 615 Alabama inspections that cited §395.8(e)(2), 614 ended out of service — a rate of 99.8%, against Oregon's 99.7% and Arizona's 98.8%. When an Alabama inspector opens an ELD and writes a tampering citation, the truck stops moving.

The month-by-month numbers

Distinct inspections carrying at least one §395.8(e)(2) violation, by inspection state. Arizona is still the largest producer of tampering citations in the country; Alabama went from a rounding error to second place in four months, and sits third in the partial fifth.

Values count distinct inspections with a §395.8(e)(2) tampering violation (codes 8E-HOSPDELDT and 8E-HOSPVELDT). July 2026 is the last complete month in the feed: the August row is partial, covering August 1 through August 27 only, and even those weeks are understated, because FMCSA publishes inspections with a three- to six-week lag. Federal (non-state) inspections are excluded. Source: Carrierintel §395.8(e)(2) dataset (FMCSA open data via Socrata), 2026-04-01 → 2026-08-27, computed 2026-09-13.

The tell in the data: this is not spread across the state

The strongest signal that Alabama is running a deliberate program — as opposed to simply having more aggressive troopers — is where the inspections happen. The state's 615 tampering inspections were written at 97 distinct locations, but the ten busiest hold 353 of them, 57%. The rest of the state contributes a handful each.

Inspection locations as FMCSA publishes them for Alabama §395.8(e)(2) inspections, April 1 – August 27, 2026. "Carriers" is the number of distinct USDOT numbers cited at that location — at Heflin, 68 inspections across 68 different carriers.

The record itself carries only a town name: no route number, no mile marker, no facility type. Reading a map beside the list, the pattern is easy to describe — Heflin and Oxford sit on I-20 near the Georgia line, Fort Payne and Collinsville on I-59 toward Chattanooga, and Hanceville, Good Hope, Cullman and Hayden are strung along I-65 between Birmingham and Huntsville. That corridor reading is our annotation of the geography, not a field in the FMCSA data, and we publish it as such.

What the data does support is what happens after a citation is written. Of the inspections that cited §395.8(e)(2) in Alabama, 99.8% ended out of service — 614 of 615, and the one that did not was in April. That is a conditional rate, and its limit matters: the feed records violations, so it holds no count of the trucks an Alabama inspector checked for tampering and released without one. It says nothing about how selective the stops are. The concentration in a dozen towns is consistent with pre-screening of some kind — targeting on something the inspector already knows before waving the truck in — but our data contains no evidence of what that something is, and we will not name a technology or a program that we cannot show.

Who is getting caught

549 unique USDOT numbers have been cited in Alabama. 497 of them appear exactly once; 52 appear more than once, and the worst carrier in the state was caught 6 times. That is a distribution of carriers passing through, not of local operators being worked over repeatedly.

The domicile data makes the same point far more sharply. Of the 549 carriers cited in Alabama, exactly 6 are registered in Alabama. The largest single group is Illinois with 160, then Ohio with 76 and Texas with 53. Alabama is not policing its own fleet; it is intercepting the national tampering economy in mid-lane.

If you broker or insure carriers, that changes what an Alabama citation means on a record. It is not a local quirk. It is a citation written on a heavily travelled corridor, and 99.8% of the Alabama tampering citations in this window ended with the truck out of service.

How Alabama compares

Nationally, the code has produced 5,396 inspections and 11,438 violations across 3,965 carriers in 42 states since April 1. Three states — Arizona, Oregon and Alabama — account for more than half of every tampering inspection written in the United States.

Bottom line

Alabama went from four tampering inspections in April to 258 in July, briefly taking second place in the country, and sits third across April 1 – August 27 with 615 cited inspections, 99.8% of which ended out of service. The citations are concentrated in a dozen towns on the state's main freight corridors, and they land almost entirely on out-of-state carriers. If your trucks cross Alabama on I-20, I-59 or I-65, the practical conclusion is simple: an ELD tampering citation there is no longer rare, and almost none of them end with the truck rolling on.