A Mississippi town that made headlines when a recording of its police chief bragging about shooting a Black man 119 times went viral is now the subject of a damning new report from the U.S. Department of Justice alleging widespread civil rights violations.
Lexington police have arrested roughly a fourth of the town’s population since 2021 and levied fines of more than $1.7 million over that period, the the DOJ revealed Thursday following a nearly one-year investigation. That accounts to about $1,400 for every man, woman and child in the Delta town of 1,200 residents located in one of the poorest counties in the nation.
The money was used to fund the police department. From 2021 to 2023, Lexington increased spending on police from $662,925 to $965,130.
“Lexington has turned the jail into the kinds of debtors’ prisons Charles Dickens described in his novels written in the 1800s,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Todd Gee said.
Black residents, who make up 76 percent of the town’s population, were specifically targeted, the DOJ said, and arrested for minor offenses such as profanity. That comes as no surprise, considering Lexington’s recent history.
In 2022, Police Chief Sam Dobbins, appointed to the job one year earlier, was fired after he was recorded bragging about shooting “that N—– 119 times, OK?”
A year later, his tenure was cut short when a former LPD officer leaked an audio
recording of Dobbins’s comments. He claimed to have killed 13 people in the line of duty, said he doesn’t talk to “queers” and told another officer, “I don’t give a f-ck if you kill a motherf-cker in cold blood.”
The DOJ found the increase in low-level arrests targeting Blacks coincided with the appointment of Dobbins, who is white. Under his leadership, the Lexington PD averaged an arrest rate more than 10 times that of the rest of the state, per capita, according to prosecutors.
Dobbins’ second-in-command, Charles Henderson, replaced him as chief and has continued to foster “a culture of abuse and harassment,” according to community members quoted in the Justice Department’s report.
In one incident, which took place hours after the DOJ announced its investigation into Lexington police, officers pursued a Black man — accused of disturbing a business — through a field, using a Taser on him nine times. The man began foaming at the mouth; one of the officers then noted that a probe he fired had hit the suspect in the head.
The man, who had a behavioral health disability, had been arrested three times that year for trespassing, stealing a cup of coffee, and stealing packets of sugar. On each occasion, police illegally detained him until he paid off old fees from previous misdemeanors. But with each arrest, another fine was added, and by November 2023, the man, jobless with no assets, owed more than $7,500, the DOJ recounted.
“Through a combination of poor leadership, retaliation, and a complete lack of internal accountability, LPD has created a system where officers can relentlessly violate the law,” the DOJ report states.
They were often brutal in their enforcement, sometimes using a cattle prod to force compliance, 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,” Clarke said.
Local civil rights leader Jill Collen Jefferson was arrested in 2023 for recording a traffic stop. She said Lexington residents are essentially living a police state.
“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,” Jefferson told the Mississippi Free Press.
Town leaders have expressed a willingness to reform since they were informed of the DOJ’s finding in February, according to the report. They are no longer arresting and detaining people for outstanding fines, for example.
“But … LPD has a persistent pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct, and additional remedies are necessary to stop it,” the report concludes.
