Residents of a small Mississippi town respond to a scathing Justice Department report on policing

LEXINGTON, Miss. (AP) — Some residents of a small Mississippi town where the Justice Department found severe problems with excessive and racially disproportionate policing said they were unaware of the ongoing issues, while others said harassment from officers was a part everyday of life.

In a report released Thursday on Lexington, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) north of Jackson, the Justice Department said it found a stunning pattern of racially disparate policing in a department “where officers can relentlessly violate the law.”

Mike Carr, an attorney based in Cleveland, Mississippi, represents several people charged with crimes in Lexington, a rural town of about 1,200 people, approximately 76% of whom are Black. He said residents are often charged with resisting arrest, failure to comply and disorderly conduct — which Carr derisively calls the “holy trinity.”

One of his clients, who is Black, was charged with those three counts after police saw him standing outside a nightclub with a beer in his hand. Officers shocked the man with a Taser and slammed him against a vehicle, Carr said.

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Another one of his clients, Jill Collen Jefferson, said she was unlawfully arrested in 2023 while filming Lexington police conducting a traffic stop. Jefferson, who is Black, is also an attorney and president of JULIAN, a civil rights organization that filed a federal lawsuit against the Lexington Police Department in 2022 alleging its officers had “terrorized” local residents.

Lexington Police Chief Charles Henderson was not in the office Friday, an employee said. The Associated Press left a message for him.

Jefferson has been documenting cases of police abuse in Lexington for years, but she said she was unable to get state officials to take action. Carr commended Jefferson for keeping attention on police corruption in one of the poorest towns in one of the poorest states in the U.S., eventually leading to a federal investigation.

“Lexington is a place that could easily be forgotten,” Carr said.

Jefferson compared day-to-day life for Lexington residents to living under martial law.

“Think about the people behind these findings and what they have had to deal with and the bravery it’s taken for them to speak out,” she said. “They’ve been retaliated against for just trying to get justice.”

Similar to Lexington, more than half of police departments in the U.S. are small and lacking proper oversight, Jefferson said.

“They’re not being watched, but we are watching them now,” she said. “And we’re going to scale this change from Lexington to impact over 50% of police departments in America.”

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division stopped in Lexington last year as part of a “listening tour” through the Deep South to learn where to direct federal resources and mount potential civil rights lawsuits.

The department said its investigation of Lexington is part of a broader effort to crack down on unconstitutional policing at small and mid-size police departments in the South. Last week, it announced it was opening a civil rights investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department in Mississippi, where several officers were convicted in the torture of two Black men in a racist attack that included beatings, repeated use of Tasers and assaults with a sex toy before one of the victims was shot in the mouth.

Lexington residents owe police $1.7 million in fines, and the city court has issued bench warrants authorizing the arrest of more than 650 people — roughly half of the city’s population — because of unpaid fines, the Justice Department said.

“It is unconscionable that, in 2024, a local government would subvert the law to suppress citizens’ basic human rights,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said Friday. “Debtors’ prisons, like dog whistles and state-sanctioned segregation, are reminiscent of Jim Crow-era policies. We refuse to go back.”

Sherry Harris said she worked as a Lexington police officer for three weeks in August and September but quit because she didn’t like the way officers were treating people. She said she was training on the job with the intention of going to a police academy later.

Harris, who is Black, said she saw her training officer pull Black drivers over for reasons she could not identify, often giving ticketing them for having obscured or dirty license plates.

“The guy that was training me, he loved pulling people over,” she said. “If they look like they’re speeding — they’re going to pull them over for that, because you know they ain’t got no radar.”

Harris said she brought her concerns about the officer, who is also Black, to the chief: “I said, ‘Look, he is not going to get me killed because he’s just harassing people.’”

When it came it white drivers, Harris said she never saw officers issue tickets.

That aligns with what federal investigators found. The Justice Department said Black people committing traffic offenses were arrested by Lexington police while white people committing similar traffic offenses were not. Investigators also found Lexington police disproportionately targeted Black people for arrests, and reviews of body camera footage showed officers repeatedly used force against Black people but never against a white person.

Curdarrus Simpson, who lives in Lexington, said police will pull people over first and find a reason for doing so second. Simpson, who is Black, said he and a friend were pulled over Friday and falsely accused of running a stop sign.

Jane McCrory lives close to Lexington and said she comes into town daily. McCrory, who is white, said she had only been pulled over once by Lexington police, for a minor traffic violation, and she was let go without citation. She said she was unaware of the problems Black residents have reported they are having with local police but she wants the state and federal officials to respond to the many damning allegations in the Justice Department’s report.

“Anything they found that affects any of our citizens needs to be dealt with,” McCrory said.

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AP reporter Michael Goldberg contributed from Minneapolis. Brewer reported from Norman, Oklahoma.