The predatory, for-profit policing of the Lexington Police Department has repeatedly violated the civil rights of residents, making arrests equal to roughly a fourth of the entire town’s population and burdening them with fines and debts of over $1.7 million, the U.S. Department of Justice laid out in a damning report today. That amounts to around $1,400 for every man, woman and child in the town.

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Todd Gee, explained the gravity of the charges in a livestreamed morning press event. “Lexington has turned the jail into the kinds of debtors’ prisons Charles Dickens described in his novels written in the 1800s,” Gee said. “Only this is happening in Mississippi in 2024.”

The report details a litany of brutal, extractive practices primarily aimed at the Black residents of Lexington: countless arrests over extreme minutiae, including “illegal arrests, jailing people for conduct that is not criminal, like using profanity and owing money to the police.”

Since 2021, Lexington police have engaged in an aggressive campaign of punishment, often violent, against the residents of the town, the DOJ alleges. “We found instances in which officers used a taser like a cattle prod to punish people or to make them comply more quickly with officers’ orders,” said U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Kristen Clarke. “For example, officers used a taser to shock a Black man 18 times until he was covered in his own vomit and unable to speak or talk.”

The aggression and over-policing, the DOJ alleges, comes in search of lucre gained from fining residents, a practice that has massively inflated the operating budget of the Lexington Police Department. The department’s funding ballooned from 2021 onward, rising from $662,925 to $965,130 in 2023, all a consequence of the plunder taken from the residents of the town, the investigation found.

“The fact that fines and fees fund the department drives its law enforcement, resulting in a crude policing-for-profit scheme,” Clarke explained.

Jill Collen Jefferson, a lawyer and president of JULIAN, a civil rights organization, experienced the abuses of the Lexington Police Department firsthand: in 2023 she was arrested for recording a traffic stop. In an afternoon interview with the Mississippi Free Press, Jefferson said the residents of Lexington have lived under what amounts to a state of occupation.

“People in Lexington are living in a military state—under martial law, essentially,” she added. “They’re getting arrested for things like taking too long to get out of their car at the grocery store … the police had a complete and total campaign of fear and control over the Black citizens.”

‘The Only Way Past This Is To Give Me What I Want’

Lexington is a tiny town in Holmes County, north of Jackson, just on the cusp of the Mississippi Delta and shrinking alongside the region—down to roughly 1,200 people from 1,602 at the start of the decade. Lexington is just over three-fourths Black: its mostly Black police force “broadly reflects” the town’s demographics.

For ages, Lexington existed under the shadow of white dominion, as did the rest of Mississippi. In their report, the DOJ highlighted the words of Chalmers Archer Jr., born in neighboring Tchula. Archer wrote in his memoir “Growing Up Black In Rural Mississippi” of Balance Due, a community in Lexington’s orbit, named for its “Black families who, after they bought the property from a prosperous white farmer, found that whenever they thought they had finished paying for the property, there was always a balance due.”

In more recent years, Lexington has been in the news for ongoing allegations of civil-rights abuses by former Police Chief Sam Dobbins, who is white, and his successor, Chief Charles Henderson, who is Black. Dobbins was removed as chief following a leaked recording where he bragged about claims of killing 13 people, and claiming he “shot (a) n***er 119 times.”

Henderson, who is still the police chief of Lexington, was accused of propositioning roughly a dozen women for sex, jailing or ticketing those who refused. The DOJ detailed this practice in their report, writing of “reports that multiple male LPD officers routinely engage in sexual harassment. … Four current and former LPD officers also reported that they had directly witnessed officers sexually harassing women while in uniform.”

One woman told the DOJ that Lexington police arrested her on an illegal “investigative hold,” saying that over the course of her detention two officers, including one member of leadership, led her into one of the department’s vehicles where they attempted to coerce her into sex.

“The only way to get past this (is) to give me what I want,” the officer told her.

The DOJ investigation found a staggering pattern of racial discrimination in the Lexington police’s arrest rates, a trend that increased dramatically even after Dobbins’ departure. “In 2019, Black people were 2.5 times more likely to be arrested by LPD than white people,” the report reads. “But by 2022, Black people were 12 times more likely to be arrested, and in 2023 … Black people were 17.6 times more likely to be arrested by LPD than white people were.”

And the wealth extraction of the Lexington Police Department’s illegal practices have similarly targeted the Black residents of the town. “Since July 2021, LPD has collected more than a half a million dollars in fines and fees,” the DOJ wrote. “About 94% of it was paid by Black people. Of the fines and fees paid by residents of Lexington (excluding those paid by people from other towns), about 98% was paid by Black people.”

Queried about the clear racial disparities in the police department’s campaign, Lexington Mayor Robin McCrory demurred, suggesting to the DOJ that certain “families … are involved more in crime. Here it’s mostly Black.” She then opined that it may be different in other states. The DOJ found no evidence to support the mayor’s defense of the Lexington Police Department.

A Lexington police officer told the DOJ that a lack of resources on behalf of the victims explains why the police department so consistently targeted Black residents. “(The police are) more focused on Black people because it is easier for them to be abused, rights to be taken, stripped, dulled down,” the officer said.

Those actions have left an entire community traumatized, Jefferson said. “This community is still afraid. When they stood up for themselves, they were retaliated against. Understand what it’s taken for each of these people who’ve come forward and spoken to DOJ … the bravery that’s taken. They have put their lives and livelihoods on the line just to do that.”

Clarke told this reporter at today’s press conference that the DOJ’s announcement was squarely focused on the civil investigation. The investigators had no comment on any possible forthcoming criminal investigation into the police conduct in Lexington.

Pay Up or Languish In Jail

The structure of Lexington’s police racket is simple: a massive surge in stops, searches, arrests, and citations for low level violations, some legal, others illegal.

“Officers arrested anyone they caught driving without a license,” the DOJ wrote. “They arrested people for crimes like playing loud music and improper parking. LPD arrested and jailed one man for four days because he bought coffee at a gas station, then refilled his coffee without paying for a second cup.”

One man was allegedly arrested for having previously called a woman a “bitch” in a public place. “On direct orders from the police chief, an LPD officer used a baton to smash in the man’s back door, then entered his home with his gun drawn,” the DOJ wrote. “As the man ran out of his front door in fear, an LPD supervisor shouted, “Get him! Tase him!” The man fell while running and injured his leg.”

Arrests, no matter how minor or frivolous, triggered a $50 processing fee. Those who could not afford the fee languished in jail. Holmes County, where Lexington is located, is one of the poorest counties in Mississippi and, consequently, the entire nation. One Lexington resident alone, a Black man with a history of “behavioral health disabilities” had been arrested three separate times in one year for offenses as minor as the theft of sugar packets.

By the end of 2023, the DOJ reported, he owed more than $7,500, another droplet in a sea of debt unleashed on the town.

In spite of this consistent pattern of abuse, attempts to cajole the state and the FBI into action were initially rebuffed, Jefferson said.

“It’s because this town is so small and so Black,” she said. “We advocated on every level … We tried to get the state government involved—they told us to call the FBI. The governor’s office never even responded to any of our requests. When we called the FBI, every time the FBI would come and investigate, they would side with the police.”

Now, with the extraordinary efforts of activists and residents, that oppressive weight may finally be shifting. “We had an amazing coalition of organizations that included the National Police Accountability Project, (Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz) in New York, ACLU Mississippi and Rukia Lumumba, the Mississippi Bail Fund—and then there were amazing criminal defense attorneys like Michael Carr.”

The DOJ report states that the town of Lexington and the Lexington Police Department cooperated fully with the investigation; yet how they will be expected to change in coming weeks and months is not yet clear. Reached this afternoon, a representative from the Lexington Police Department hurriedly declined to comment and hung up on this reporter.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly said, ‘There can be no equal justice when the kind of [justice] a man gets depends on how much money he has,’” the report concluded. “And yet, in Lexington, justice very much depends on who has resources and who does not.”