Find Selma Recent Arrests

How Selma Arrests Work

Selma sits at the heart of Dallas County. It is the county seat, and the 2020 Census counted 17,971 residents. Two agencies shape most arrest records here. The Selma Police Department handles municipal policing, while the Dallas County Sheriff's Department steps in whenever an arrest leads to booking or a transfer into county custody.

One Selma arrest can leave more than one paper trail. Police write the incident and arrest report. The county controls the booking entry once a person enters its jail system, and that entry can hold the person's identity, charges, property, bond details, and custody moves. The court's final outcome lives elsewhere and must be checked on its own.

Where a person is actually held adds a wrinkle. An EF-2 tornado struck in January 2023 and badly damaged the Dallas County Jail. Reports in 2026 said the old building still sat closed, with detainees housed in other Alabama facilities while the county worked toward rebuilding. So a Dallas booking may point to a spot far outside Dallas County. Call ahead before visiting anyone in custody.

Where Selma Arrests Appear

The city's official pages carry no live arrest roster. There is no public booking feed and no police mugshot gallery either. Selma Police does offer a records request route and keeps an internal daily information log, though neither works like a same-day feed. Dallas County posts jail and sheriff contact pages, but a verified public roster is absent there too. Local news fills part of the gap with selected arrest announcements, yet each channel answers a different question about who was arrested in Selma.

Start with the official sources. A news story can still help you spot the agency or the date of an arrest. Just be careful. It may run a scene image, file art, or an agency photo instead of a true booking photograph, and the story's publication date rarely matches the arrest date itself.

Find Someone Arrested in Selma

Gather the details first. A full name, an arrest date or date range, the location, the police agency, and a case number if you have one will all narrow the hunt. Those facts keep a city incident report from blurring into a county booking record or into someone else's case entirely.

1. For an urgent current-custody question, call the Dallas County Jail at (334) 690-1200 and ask if the person was received, released, or transferred.
2. Contact Selma Police when its officers made the arrest. Ask whether an incident report, arrest report, or daily information-log entry exists.
3. Request the county booking entry separately when Dallas County handled intake. Ask for the booking number, intake time, alleged charges, bond, release or transfer date, and receiving facility.
4. Use the Dallas County Circuit Clerk to follow a filed case. A court search is not a live jail roster.
5. Keep the agency response and date. If one office redirects the request, send the same narrow facts to the named custodian.

Need to check an arrest in Selma? Start with the Dallas County recent-arrest search, which pulls together the countywide booking records and photo sources in one place.

Request Selma Arrest Records

City police reports start with the official Selma Police report page. The department sits at 1300 Alabama Avenue, Selma, AL 36703. Call the front desk and report-request line at (334) 876-1260, the direct non-emergency line at (334) 876-1259, or the incident-report line at (334) 876-1220. Email works too, at SPD@Selma-al.gov, for questions about an arrest report or a record created by city officers.

Selma's records department handles requests for crime, incident, and arrest reports. Access is limited to people with a right or need to know. Expect five to ten business days for processing, and file one form per case or incident. Records must be picked up within 30 days. Fees run $15 for an incident report and $35 for a traffic-collision report. Those are municipal charges, though, and do not set the price of a Dallas County booking record or booking photograph.

The city's official Selma Police records page lays out the request channel and contact details.

That page is a request route for police reports. It is not a live roster of people arrested in Selma, so plan on asking for a specific record rather than browsing names.

Be precise when you submit a request. Include the name, the date range, the location of the incident, and the case number if you have it. Want a booking photo as well? Ask whether Selma Police or Dallas County holds it. Get a fee estimate before the record is produced, and if anything gets withheld, request the legal basis in writing.

Note: A Selma incident report and a Dallas County jail booking record are related records, but they are not interchangeable.

Selma Daily Arrest Log Access

Selma Police policy calls for a daily information log covering significant law-enforcement activity in the city. A supervisor or the media process can make that log available to someone who asks. What the policy does not promise is an online arrest blotter, a set publication hour, or a full roster of every person arrested in Selma. So treat the log as something you request, not something you browse.

Put your records request in writing and name the dates you want. Ask for the daily information log by that exact name, but also try terms like arrest index, incident report index, and jail booking log. Probe the fields, too. Does the log show when the arrest happened, which agency made it, the charge, the bond, a release or transfer, or a case number? Wait for the custodian's answer before assuming any of that detail exists.

One timing quirk deserves a mention. Weekends and holidays push release dates and publication dates away from the date of the actual arrest, so a Friday arrest in Selma may surface in an agency announcement days later. And an intake photo can stay offline for good. When a response comes back, write down both the event date and the source date so the two never blur together.

Selma Arrest News Is Selective

Selma Police do not publish a standing arrest roster. Instead, the department releases information case by case. Black Belt News Network reported one such announcement, covering ten arrests spread across March and April 2026 in Selma. Useful as it is, a roundup like that covers only the cases the department chose to announce. It says nothing about total daily arrests or who sits in custody right now.

Joint operations complicate the picture further. WAKA and BBNN both covered an August 2026 operation in Selma's entertainment district that paired Selma Police with the Dallas County Sheriff's Office and produced both arrests and citations. Attribution matters here. A citation never equals a jail booking, so a news count of arrests is not a count of inmates.

Commercial mugshot sites deserve little trust for Selma. Busted Newspaper, RecentlyBooked, Mugshots.com, and Mugshots.zone list no verified Dallas County, Alabama section. Arrests.org has an Alabama portal but no confirmed Dallas page. Worse, a search for "Dallas" can land you on Texas material from an entirely different state. Treat official Selma and county sources as the only reliable record.

Where Selma Arrestees Are Held

Start with the official Dallas County Jail page when tracking someone arrested in Selma. It lists the temporary facility at 4805 US-80, Alabama 36786, phone (334) 690-1200, weekday hours from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Warden Steve Coleman. A county directory still shows an older jail number, (334) 874-2585. Call that one legacy and rely on the current page first.

Do not assume where an arrestee is physically held. The January 2023 tornado changed everything. Local reporting in 2026 says Dallas County inmates have been housed in other Alabama jails, so the booking record and the actual detention site may not match. Before you drive anywhere, ask which facility holds the person, when any transfer happened, and which office controls visitation and release details.

For background, the National Weather Service tornado record documents the EF-2 storm itself. It will not tell you anyone's custody status. What it explains is the reason a Selma arrest record and a jail location can point to two different places.

Note: The temporary address is an official contact point, but it does not guarantee that a named person is housed there.

Selma Police Department Location and Directions