US Justice Dept finds abuses by Mississippi police department
2024.09.26 14:25
By Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday it found a series of civil rights violations by a small-town Mississippi police department, accusing officers of routinely using excessive force and arresting people who owed fines for minor traffic offenses.
The department’s Civil Rights Division reported finding that Black people in Lexington, Mississippi, were disproportionately targeted by an aggressive police enforcement strategy and that actions by police were driven in part by “intentional discrimination.”
The investigation is unusual in that it focused on a police department with about 10 officers in a city of just 1,600 people.
“Small and mid-sized police departments must not be allowed to violate people’s civil rights with impunity,” Kristen Clarke, the head of the Civil Rights Division, told reporters.
“Lexington is a small, rural community, but its police department has had a heavy hand in people’s lives, wrecking havoc through use of excessive force, discriminatory policing, retaliation and more.”
Justice Department officials said the police department and town of Lexington cooperated and pledged to implement reforms.
The report focuses on what Clarke called a “crude policing-for-profit scheme” in which the police department’s budget depends on revenue it raises through enforcement.
Police routinely arrest people for minor offenses such as loitering and traffic offenses and hold people with outstanding fines in jail until they pay, the department said.
The police department’s revenue through fines and fees grew by a factor of seven in recent years while outstanding debt to the department rose to $1.7 million, the Justice Department found.
