Police in Mississippi tasered a black man 18 times until he was covered in his own vomit, Justice Department says

A Mississippi city that made headlines when a video of its police chief bragging about shooting a black man 119 times went viral is now the topic of a damning latest report by the U.S. Department of Justice alleging widespread civil rights violations .

Since 2021, Lexington police have arrested roughly a quarter of the town’s residents and issued greater than $1.7 million in fines during that period – The Justice Department made the disclosure Thursday after a nearly year-long investigation. That works out to about $1,400 for each man, woman and child in the Delta town of 1,200, positioned in certainly one of the poorest counties in the country.

The money was intended to finance the Police. For 2021-2023, Lexington increased police spending from $662,925 to $965,130.

“Lexington has turned the prison into the kind of debtors’ prison that Charles Dickens described in his novels written in the 19th century,” said Todd Gee, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi.

The Justice Department said black residents, who make up 76 percent of the town’s population, were particularly targeted and arrested for minor offenses resembling profanity. This is not any surprise given Lexington’s recent history.

In 2022, Police Chief Sam Dobbins, appointed to the position a 12 months earlier, was fired after he was recorded bragging that he shot “that N—- 119 times, OK?”

A 12 months later, his term was cut short when a former LPD officer released an audio recording
recording of Dobbins’ comments. He claimed to have killed 13 people in the road of duty, said he didn’t confer with “queers” and told one other officer, “I don’t care if you kill a motherfucker in cold blood.”

The Justice Department found a rise in low-level arrests targeting black people coincided with Dobbins’ nominationwhich is white. Under his leadership, Lexington police had a mean per capita arrest rate greater than 10 times higher than the remaining of the state, prosecutors said.

According to community members cited in the Justice Department report, Dobbins’ deputy, Charles Henderson, has replaced him as chief and continues to foster a “culture of abuse and harassment.”

In one incident, which occurred hours after the Justice Department announced it was opening an investigation into Lexington police, officers chased a black man – accused of obstruction – into a field and used a Taser on him nine times. The man began to foam on the mouth; certainly one of the officers then noticed that the probe he fired had hit the suspect in the top.

The man, who suffered from a behavioral disorder, has been arrested three times this 12 months for trespassing and stealing a cup of coffee and a bag of sugar. Each time, police illegally detained him until old charges for previous offenses were settled. But with each arrest, one other wonderful was added, and by November 2023, the unemployed and asset-less man owed greater than $7,500, the Justice Department said.

“Through a combination of poor leadership, retaliation, and a complete lack of internal accountability, LPD has created a system in which officers can ruthlessly violate the law,” the Justice Department report said.

They were often brutal in enforcing the law, sometimes using cattle prods to force compliance, said Assistant U.S. Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Kristen Clarke.

“For example, officers used a Taser to strike a black man 18 times until he was covered in his own vomit and could not speak or talk,” Clarke said.

Local civil rights activist Jill Collen Jefferson was arrested in 2023 for recording a traffic stop. She said Lexington residents essentially live in a police state.

“They are arresting them for things like taking too long to get out of their car at the grocery store…the police have waged a complete and total campaign of fear and control over Black citizens” – Jefferson he told the Mississippi Free Press.

The report shows that city officials expressed willingness to implement reforms after being informed of the Justice Department’s findings in February. They not arrest or detain people for outstanding fines, for instance.

“But … LPD has an ongoing pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct and additional measures are necessary to stop it,” the report concluded.