DOJ Investigation: Mississippi PD Ran ‘Dickensian Debtors Prison,’ Violated Rights Regularly

Legal Issues

from the bigots-with-badges-beating-a-small-town-into-submission dept

It’s not just the Rankin County (MS) Sheriff’s Office being scrutinized by the US DOJ. While that’s the main concern following the conviction of six deputies of a self-proclaimed “Goon Squad” who spent hours brutalizing and torturing two black men, the rest of Mississippi apparently isn’t in great shape either.

This recently-released report [PDF] details the inner workings of the Lexington, Mississippi police department, which has apparently spent years abusing the rights of the 1,200 residents of the town. There’s old, old, extremely-old school policing going on in Lexington, where officers have leveraged their power to enrich themselves while reviving jail practices that align it with a pre-Civil War past in an entirely different country. Here’s more, from Nick Judin of the Mississippi Free Press.

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.”

That’s just the stuff at the surface level. The extensive report is far more granular. And it details the sort of things you’d hope you’d never see committed by sworn law enforcement officers.

For instance, there’s the person whose experience with the Lexington PD opens the DOJ’s report — a litany of rights abuses that clearly demonstrates local officers felt they were above the law.

Hours after the Department of Justice announced its investigation of the Lexington Police Department (LPD) on November 8, 2023, officers chased a Black man through a field and tased him nine times. The man began foaming at the mouth. One officer pointed to a Taser probe lodged in the man’s hat and said, “Damn, one of my probes hit him in the head.” The man, who has a behavioral health disability, had been accused of disturbing a business.

This was not the man’s first encounter with LPD. Earlier that year, LPD officers had jailed him for ten days for trespassing; four days for stealing a cup of coffee; and twelve days for stealing packets of sugar. Each time they arrested him, LPD unlawfully refused to release the man until he paid money towards old fines and fees he owed from misdemeanors and traffic tickets. But each arrest added more fines and fees to the ledger. By November 2023, the man— who has no job, no assets, and no bank account—owed more than $7,500.

There’s the debtors prison — a corrupt system aided and abetted by officers willing to jail someone for twelve days for stealing sugar packets. Things haven’t improved despite a regime chance — something that only accomplished replacing one odious so-called public servant with another.

LPD made national news in July 2022 when a former officer released a recording of LPD’s Chief of Police, Sam Dobbins, bragging about shooting a Black man he referred to as a “n—–.” After the recording of Dobbins came to light, Lexington’s Board of Aldermen replaced him with Charles Henderson, who is still Chief today. During Dobbins’s year-long tenure, and continuing under Henderson, LPD has pursued an aggressive approach to policing low-level offenses. Officers arrest people for minor infractions like driving without insurance and parking in a wheelchair accessible space. They also make illegal arrests, jailing people for conduct that is not criminal, like using profanity and owing money to the police.

“Owing money” is the thing that motivates the Lexington PD. If the department can’t ensure a steady flow of fines and fees, officers have been forced to take unpaid time off. This literally poor town (its median income is only $39,000) can’t generate the revenue needed to pay officers, so officers have decided to take the law into their own hands to ensure their revenue stream goes uninterrupted, leading directly to horrific stuff like this:

For example, in July 2023, LPD officers broke down a 63-year-old Black man’s door to arrest him for calling 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. 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. Officers handcuffed him on the ground.

Guns out for calling someone a “bitch,” something these officers likely do on multiple-times-daily basis, solely for the purpose of putting a few more dollars back into the town’s till so officers could keep getting paid to engage in further abuses to generate more income, etc.

The report goes on to note similar arrests and acts of violence, like officers tasing a man six times because he had an open container in the parking lot of a local bar or tasing another man for 15 seconds because he had tinted windows on his car. (Tasers cut off at 10 seconds, so the officer had to fire it again to hit the 15-second mark despite the first tasing having incapacitated the driver.)

There’s no hiding the fact that this is a rogue law enforcement agency abusing a single town for the sole purpose of enriching itself. Every arrest generates an automatic $50 “processing fee” that goes directly to the department, on top of whatever else officers can extract in additional fines and fees.

In 2019, LPD made 70 arrests. But LPD arrested 375 people in 2022 and 294 in 2023. Over the past two years, LPD has made nearly one arrest for every four people in town. That is more than ten times the per capita arrest rate for Mississippi as a whole.

The only reason for the small decline in arrests is that the DOJ announced its investigation in 2023. For a short period of time, the PD ceased arresting anyone for anything. But it didn’t last. And despite the presence of DOJ investigators, officers soon returned to their regularly scheduled abuses.

It’s all about the money:

In 2022, after LPD adopted its expansive arrest policy, Lexington’s revenue from fines increased more than sevenfold—from $30,000 per year to over $240,000. In 2023, Lexington collected more than $220,000 from fines, which made up nearly a quarter (23 percent) of LPD’s budget.

[…]

In a town of about 1,200 people, the total sum of outstanding fines is more than $1.7 million.

The PD can issue its own bench warrants for unpaid fines and court fees, generating even more arrests and processing fees. During its investigation, the DOJ discovered the LPD has 652 unique bench warrants on file — covering more than half the town’s population of 1,200 people.

Lexington residents are living in a police state — one overseen by town officials who either don’t care or feel powerless to end this. Most likely it’s the former, since part of the city’s budget is also covered by collected fines and fees. The incentives are so perverted, the town is under the thumb of a squad of full-time perverts.

The mission to collect old fines is so pervasive that officers use nearly every interaction with the public to check and see what people may owe. In July 2022, a woman came to the police station as a witness to give a statement in a murder investigation. LPD arrested her for old fines. In September 2023, an officer handcuffed a passenger from a traffic stop and brought her to the police station so that he could determine whether she owed them anything (she did not). In December 2022, an arrested man’s father arrived to bring his car home; LPD found that he owed old fines and threatened to arrest him unless he paid.

No one here is providing anything resembling “public service.” The report details the arrest of a man on disorderly conduct charges because he ran into the police station to avoid being beaten by an assailant who was chasing him. The alleged assailant was ignored by officers so they could book the person who ran into their station seeking help. In another case, officers booked someone on felony possession despite the amount of marijuana recovered being small enough to only trigger a misdemeanor under state law. DOJ investigators personally witnessed officers “brainstorming” additional charges during arrests to trigger as many fines and fees as possible.

The PD operates with so much impunity, this is the sort of thing its does on the regular.

In February 2023, officers arrested a Black woman on an “investigative hold.” LPD did not accuse the woman of any crime. Nevertheless, officers handcuffed her and brought her to jail, where she remained for the next five days. While the woman was in LPD’s custody, officers interrogated her about her boyfriend, who was a suspect in a murder investigation.

Officers also arrested and jailed the woman’s boyfriend on an “investigative hold.” After interrogating him, officers obtained a no-knock warrant to search the home that he shared with the woman. In the warrant application, officers stated that he confessed to shooting a gun and selling drugs. In body-worn camera video from his interrogation at the police station, he denied both.

The search did not yield evidence to charge anyone with murder. But officers did find about an ounce of marijuana and a bottle of pills they believed were ecstasy. They also found something else: the woman had running water, even though they believed she had not paid her water bill. Chief Henderson threatened to charge her with felony theft and federal racketeering for using the water. “And every gallon that’s been used, it’s gonna be charged,” the Chief said. “If it’s over so much, you’re gonna be charged with a felony, and you gonna be sitting in jail for a long time.” She could avoid these charges, he told her, if she could get her boyfriend to talk.

After the woman waited for two days in jail, LPD baselessly charged her with felony drug trafficking for the small amount of drugs found in her home. She bonded out five days later. Neither the woman nor her boyfriend was ever charged in connection with the murder.

There’s a lot more in the report. And it’s all disturbing and disgusting. This is sort of thing you might expect in nations where the entire government is corrupt or overseen by autocrats (or any blend of both). You don’t expect to see this in the supposed Land of the Free where certain rights are supposed to be inalienable. But this is what happens in the United States, especially in areas where law enforcement knows the population is too impoverished to fight back. There isn’t a single officer here that should still have a job, but sadly, it appears the department has yet to discipline any officers, much less fire them. The only response it has provided to this point is a “no comment” as it circles what’s left of its wagons and waits for the DOJ to leave town and take its spotlight with it. These are criminals with badges — nothing more and nothing less. And if town officials have any spine left, they’ll kick every last one of these assholes off the payroll.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, 5th amendment, doj, excessive force, investigation, lexington pd, mississippi, police misconduct, rights violations