Handcuffed in the lobby of the Lexington, Miss., Police Department, Jill Collen Jefferson was given a choice after being arrested while filming a nighttime traffic stop and four traffic signals. Pay a $35 processing fee, the chief said, and we’ll release you. Days before, Jefferson had met with Justice Department investigators from Washington hoping to turn their attention to the police force, whose new, Black police chief, Charles Henderson, was accused of continuing the racist and discriminatory practices of the White commander he replaced. Jefferson, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former Obama administration speechwriter, declined Henderson’s offer. Instead, she made the journey to the county jail. “I’m going to tell the world what you’re doing here,” she vowed to Henderson in June 2023. Almost five months later, the head of the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division announced an investigation of Lexington’s police force, which had dwindled to about 10 officers and would shrink further, reports the Washington Post.
Rural America is guaranteed the same rights as large cities, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke told those in attendance, some of whom were plaintiffs in the lawsuits Jefferson had filed alleging false arrests, excessive force and more. The agency has also investigated conditions in jails and prisons in Mississippi, a state where multiple local law enforcement agencies have been found to use violence as a tool of policing, and where the Justice Department won lengthy sentences for six members of the infamous “Goon Squad” of the sheriff’s department in Rankin County. Lexington drew the Biden administration’s attention mostly because of Jefferson. Twice she went to Washington to lobby officials and lay out her case. She had collected claims of rampant abuses allegedly committed by the small department’s chiefs and officers: that they were targeting Black people for prosecution; falsifying or destroying evidence; committing assaults, including of a young disabled woman; and coercing Black women into sex.