Justice Dept. finds Lexington, Miss., police ran illegal ‘debtor’s prison’

A tiny police department in Lexington, Miss., whose chief was fired two years ago for using a racial epithet, has engaged in the systemic use of excessive force, jailed suspects improperly and targeted Black people, the Justice Department said in a report released Thursday.

The results of a nearly 11-month federal civil rights investigation found that the Lexington police force, which has fewer than 10 officers, pursued overly aggressive tactics in response to relatively minor infractions, in part as a strategy to drive up revenue through fines and processing fees.

During the past several years, the police department’s revenue grew sevenfold in a jurisdiction in one of the poorest counties in the nation, as officers routinely violated suspects’ civil rights, federal authorities said.

Among the findings of the federal probe was that the Lexington police jailed people who were unable to pay fines, conducted stops and searches without probable cause, and violated free speech rights of residents who criticized the police department.

The report came as a relief to the cadre of civil rights attorneys and activists who have worked to expose the city’s practices in recent years. Jill Collen Jefferson, founder of the civil rights law firm JULIAN, which has represented plaintiffs in two lawsuits against the city and its police, credited Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, with aiming the federal government’s investigative powers at small-town Mississippi.

Jefferson said she burst into tears as she read the 45-page report.

“This community has been through so much. They’ve finally been heard,” Jefferson said. “The local government abused them, the state government ignored them, and the FBI refused to believe them. It took the highest levels of government to finally address these abuses.”

The Lexington Police Department’s strategy was predicated on an unconstitutional conflict of interest, federal investigators said, because its operating revenue largely depends on fines and fees raised through enforcement actions. Investigators said officers arrested people for driving without insurance, parking in a wheelchair accessible space, loitering or minor traffic violations.

“In America, being poor is not a crime, but in Lexington, their practices punish people for poverty,” Clarke said at a news conference. She added: “For too long, this department has been playing by its own rules and operating with impunity. It’s time for this to end.”

Federal authorities said that hours after they announced their investigation on Nov. 8, Lexington police chased an unemployed Black man who had been accused of disturbing a business and used a stun gun on him nine times.

The man, who authorities said had a behavioral health disability, had previously been jailed 10 days for trespassing, four days for stealing a cup of coffee and 12 days for stealing a pack of sugar. By the time he was detained with the stun gun, the man owed $7,500 in fines.

By 2023, Black people, who make up more than 75 percent of Lexington’s population of 1,200, were more than 17 percent more likely to be arrested than White people, federal officials said.

Lexington’s city attorney, Katherine Barrett Riley, told The Washington Post in an emailed statement that neither she nor the city’s mayor would comment on the government’s findings before reading them but that the city plans “to work diligently with the DOJ to cure any deficiencies or make any necessary changes.”

The Lexington investigation was one of 12 “pattern or practice” probes the Justice Department has opened into state or local police agencies since Attorney General Merrick Garland took office. Last week, the agency announced an investigation into the Rankin County (Miss.) Sheriff’s Office, near Lexington, where six officers have been sentenced to prison for assaulting two Black men.

Authorities said town officials and the police department in Lexington cooperated with the federal investigation.

The alleged abuses by the Lexington police force drew the Biden administration’s attention mostly because of Jefferson, a former Obama administration speechwriter, who had been arrested for filming a traffic stop. Jefferson collected claims of rampant abuses allegedly committed by the police department and twice visited Washington to lobby officials to open a federal investigation.

At the news conference, Clarke and Todd Gee, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, detailed what they described as numerous examples of the Lexington police improperly jailing residents and leveraging the threat of prison to extract more fines and fees.

In one case, authorities said, a Black man accused of failing to pay for $15 in gas was assessed a $300 fine. He could not afford that and was kept in jail for two weeks. In another case, a man was fined $224.25 for using profanity and forced to pay $140 before police would release him from custody.

All told, fines and fees have supported more than one-quarter of the police department’s budget, amounting to an average of $1,400 for every one of the town’s 1,200 residents, federal officials said. There are a total of $1.7 million in outstanding fines that have yet to be paid.

The police “turned the jail into the kind of debtor’s prison that Charles Dickens wrote about in his novels written in the 1800s - only this happened in Mississippi in 2024,” Gee said.

Gee said federal investigators have heard reports of similar practices in other Mississippi jurisdictions.

The Lexington investigation was notable because of the size of the police force. Justice Department officials have announced similar findings of systemic abuses in large police departments in Minneapolis, Louisville and Arizona. Prosecutors are seeking to enter court-binding consent decrees in each of those cities that would require broad changes to police training, accountability and policies under the oversight of a federal monitor.

The future of the department’s police reform efforts, however, could hinge on the outcome of the presidential election. The administration of former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, sought to end the use of consent decrees and reduce federal intervention into local policing.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has voiced support for stronger federal actions regarding police reform, and she backed President Joe Biden’s policing executive order in 2022.