Residents from the rural town of Lexington are requesting the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals consider evidence of racially motivated police violence and harassment stretching back years, part of a lawsuit the group of plaintiffs filed in late 2022.
It follows the published findings of numerous constitutional violations and other police abuses released by the Justice Department in late 2024, which has now virtually disappeared from the town – and federal police oversight – writ large.
Michael McEwen
Lexington
About an hour north of Jackson, Lexington is the seat and highest population center of Holmes County, home to the nation's third highest populace of residents who are African American and a rich history of Civil Rights struggle, personified by figures like Fannie Lou Hamer and Hartman Turnbow.
According to the 2020 Census, when sorted by median household income, Holmes is also the second poorest county in the United States.
Despite that, and with a poverty rate nearing 36 percent, the DOJ’s pattern and practice probe found that through an unconstitutional 'stop and fine' policy conceived by the Lexington Police Department to generate revenue, each man, woman and child in Lexington owes at least $1,400 in fines and fees, totaling more than $1.7 million in a town of little more than 1,200 people.
The investigation, conducted jointly by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi, also found a litany of evidence that both officers and supervisors in LPD engaged in a systemic use of excessive force, illegal stops and searches, unlawful arrests, violations of free speech, denial of due process and discrimination against Black residents.
They also say LPD itself relies on funding from the money it raises through its law enforcement, which presents an unconstitutional conflict of interest.
“Lexington’s fines and fees have been absolutely devastating for the people who live there,” said Kristen Clarke, former Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under the Biden administration.
“The Lexington municipal court has issued bench warrants for over 650 people based on unpaid fines — equivalent to roughly half of Lexington’s population,” Clarke said in Sept. 2024.
Black residents of Lexington have for yearsalleged that both the police department and the city government engage in patterns and practices that target Black residents, who comprise roughly 77 percent of the town’s population.
Over time, that fear has seeped into the quotidian in Lexington, where something as routine as traveling through town to buy groceries or pick a child up from school has become reason for some to move entirely.
In June, 2023, dozens of Lexingtonians gathered for a closed-door community listening session with then head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke, to voice their concerns.
The pattern and practice investigation was announced later that year.
But now nearly two years since that first meeting – and with the Civil Rights Division now defanged under President Donald Trump – residents and their attorneys say Lexington Police have begun to revert to the status quo.
“I think there was a sense that after the former [police] chief, Sam Dobbins, was fired, that there would be changes. I think that there was this sense that after the DOJ investigated, there would be changes. There's been four or five private lawsuits filed in hopes that there will be changes and, in our client's view, not a lot has changed,” said Lauren Bonds, Director of the National Police Accountability Project.
“Usually when you sue a small police department like Lexington, you have one plaintiff and you have one defendant; you maybe have one or two claims. But when the NPAP and Julian sued the Lexington Police Department back in 2022, we had five plaintiffs, seven defendants – a collection of current and former Lexington Police Department officers– and over a half dozen claims,” she said.
“The reason this lawsuit is different is because the Lexington Police Department is different. As we alleged in our suit, there are systemic issues that are so deep and so numerous that few members of the black community of Lexington are safe from them.”
The group of plaintiffs, all Black residents of Lexington or nearby, rural communities, were the first to formalize complaints and reports of abuses when their federal Civil Rights suit was filed in late 2022.
Several similar lawsuits have followed its model since.
At that stage, many had faced abuse and harassment from Lexington police for years, including frequent LPD roadblocks they felt were targeted at Black residents.
Beginning in 2021, when former police chief Sam Dobbins was appointed by the city’s Board of Aldermen, the roadblocks occurred almost exclusively around community events where officers thought they were more likely to encounter Black motorists, such as graduation ceremonies or sports games at the town’s predominantly Black public school.
Other times, the roadblocks covered roads to and from the county’s numerous foundational churches on days of worship.
“They were set up so frequently over the short period that it caused a huge disruption in the regular lives of our clients, and other members in the Lexington community,” said Lauren Bonds, with the NPAP.
“It caused them to miss family events, it caused them to lose work opportunities. It caused one of our clients to drive 30 miles round trip to get groceries from another town.”
The lawsuit, now before the Fifth Circuit Court for reconsideration after being rejected by a lower district court, is seeking injunctive relief – providing the five original plaintiffs with the opportunity to stop an illegal practice or policy should the court rule in their favor.
In this case, that would mean the Lexington Police Department, and by extension the city government – currently in the midst of a municipal election concluding June 3 – would have to end their unconstitutional policy of targeted road blocks, subsequent fines and excessive use of force.
In a sense, the first five plaintiffs to sue Lexington over those practices – Malcolm Stewart, Peter Reeves, Eric Redmond and brothers Robert and Darius Harris – invited the full weight of LPD retaliation and harassment onto themselves for the chance to end them for the entire community.
Outside the June, 2023 closed-door DOJ meeting, several of them told MPB News that the harassment from police only increased as a result – not with the targeted stops and fines, but rather by tailing the men through town, threatening and carrying out further violence and, in the case of the Harris brothers, threatening their lives.
Only nine days after that first closed-door DOJ meeting, Civil Rights attorney Jill Jefferson, who filed the first federal lawsuit on behalf of those residents, was leaving a community trail ride when she found herself in the same position as many of her clients: physically and psychologically abused by officers, illegally searched, wrongfully arrested and sitting in the Holmes County jail.
According to Jefferson’s personal attorney Michael Carr, she was arrested by officers Scott Walters and Aaron Agee, both of whom are named in the federal suit and several more complaints of harassment and brutality filed by residents.
Jefferson told MPB news she was filming a traffic stop to obtain evidence for her ongoing federal lawsuit – a constitutionally protected right – and that the arrest came as a form of retribution that residents in the town have lived in fear of for years.
According to a suit Jefferson herself and the ACLU of Mississippi recently filed seeking punitive damages for her 2023 arrest, Lexington PD officer Scott Walters first threatened Jefferson out of her car with his taser.
Once out, both he and Agee allegedly slammed her against the rear door of her car, hung up the ongoing phone call with her attorney, placed her in the squad car and began to illegally search through her belongings – including legal documents for the first federal Civil Rights she filed on behalf of residents – case naming both Walters and Agee as defendants.
They then told Jefferson they knew exactly who she was, and officer Walters allegedly shaped his hand into that of a gun and motioned pulling the trigger while pressed against her head.
Jefferson spent the next three days in jail because she refused to pay the $50 ‘processing fee’ Lexington Police require of all who are being released from custody, even without assessing their ability to do so, which is also unconstitutional.
“Jail was not the worst part. The worst part was the arrest and all that they did and said. Jail was difficult, but it wasn't as difficult as that,” Jefferson told MPB News.
“They finally let one of my team bring a notebook to me so I could write and take notes from the other women who were in there with me. But all I had before that was a few sheets of paper with crossword puzzles and things like that. So I was really just spending that time thinking about what are the next steps, what do we do now?”
In Feb. 2024, before Holmes County Justice Court Judge Marcus Fisher on several charges related to her arrest, Jefferson experienced yet another face of justice in the small, rural town that the DOJ described as unconstitutional to the core.
In his verdict, Fisher found Jefferson guilty of five charges, including resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, blocking a public roadway and failure to comply, from what she and her attorney, Michael Carr, say appears to have been an order pre-written by someone other than himself.
“I knew that it was going to be a canned verdict before my trial even started because we arrived early and watched other trials. We noticed that the judge had the verdict already written out and printed on his desk before the trial started,” Jefferson told MPB News in 2024, shortly after the trial.
“And when the trial was over and it was time for him to render his verdict, he read verbatim from that paper, even flipping pages, and we could tell he didn’t write that because he couldn’t pronounce some of the words in the verdict.”
She also says that when comparing her arrest documents with her attorney, who obtained his copies shortly after her June 2023 arrest, they discovered in the courtroom that a number of charges were added after the fact by the arresting officers.
Body camera footage documenting the arrest also was not made available to Jefferson nor her attorney, Michael Carr, until January 30, 2024, the night before her trial began.
Officer Scott Walters, who Jefferson says was the main officer involved in her arrest, also reportedly bragged about the arrest at a number of businesses in town and even sent Jefferson a Facebook friend request after her initial verdict as a form of taunting.
Through a courtroom review of Jefferson’s cell phone video from her arrest, Carr then caught Walters in a number of lies while on the stand for cross-examination.
But Jefferson says that despite that and other contradicting testimony – and without a full review of all available evidence – Judge Fisher found her guilty anyways.
“I’m sure this isn’t the first time, and it’s definitely emblematic of what we’re organizing against. If there hadn’t been public outcry, this never would have gotten reversed – and quite honestly that’s what is frustrating about this,” she said.
“I think that I think it took my arrest in part to show the callousness toward Black people in Lexington, that it does not matter who you are – that if you are black that you are going to be treated awfully that you're not going to be treated the same as a white person. It's such a clear cut case of absolutely no wrongdoing, but an arrest comes from it, and then a jailing and then a conviction.”
“It showed the extent of the hate, of the division, and of the Jim Crow norms that still exist there. And I think that that was something that led to other things unfolding, like the DOJ investigation. So I wouldn’t do anything differently.”
But just as that investigation’s findings were released – and as the DOJ and Lexington officials publicly agreed to work on proposed solutions – president Donald Trump's re-ascension to the White House and subsequent changes to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division have turned that work on its head.
“I wouldn't say that we've seen anything quite at this level before. Definitely during the last Trump administration, in 2017, you saw investigations getting abandoned. But we've never seen the entire Civil Rights Division cut as we've seen now,” said Lauren Bonds, with the NPAP.
“We haven't seen this kind of uniform pulling out of all Civil Rights cases. We've definitely seen retreats, we've definitely seen shifts in priorities. But I would say it's unprecedented in terms of the scale and the breadth of what's happening right now.”
According to reporting from NPR, roughly 70% of the Civil Rights Division’s attorneys are set to resign this month as Trump has redirected the division to enforce his executive orders, mostly surrounding alleged radical indoctrination in schools, defending women from "gender ideology extremism," and combating antisemitism and purported anti-Christian bias.
The Division also recently halted their pattern and practice probe into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department following the 2024 sentencing of five former deputies in a Jan. 2023 racially motivated no-warrant raid – orchestrated by the self-styled ‘Goon Squad – that led to a nearly two hour long torture session and one of the victims, Michael Corey Jenkins, shot through his mouth and nearly killed in a mock execution gone awry.
That sudden and debilitating withdrawal by the DOJ is why the original plaintiffs in Lexington, all Black men, are asking the Fifth Circuit to reconsider their evidence of the culture of police abuse and harassment – and also why groups like the ACLU and National Police Accountability Project are doubling down in their efforts to fight for accountability.
“These are systemic events enabled, not curtailed, by federal inaction. But because the DOJ has stepped back, we are stepping forward,” said Devin Barrington-Ward, with the NPAP.
“Our lawsuit against the Lexington Police Department is now the only remaining path for justice for black residents of Lexington. It is a path carved out of necessity, because the institutions that should have protected them are failing them. We are here to say that the struggle for civil rights is not over. Police violence is not just an urban issue, it's not just a southern issue -- it's a national emergency that requires federal leadership, not federal cowardice,” he said.
“To the Trump administration, we say to them, ‘You cannot claim to care about law and order when you abandon the law and destroy justice to our communities.’”
Kat Stromquist, senior criminal justice reporter with the Gulf States Newsroom, contributed reporting to this story from New Orleans.