WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Justice Department will launch a civil rights probe of Lexington, Mississippi, and its police department after reports of excessive force and discriminatory policing, Kristen Clarke, the head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, said on Wednesday.
The probe will examine whether police in the city of about 1,600 residents routinely commit civil rights violations.
Clarke said the Justice Department received credible allegations that Lexington police, a department with fewer than 10 officers, stopped and searched people without justification and routinely arrested people solely for using profane language.
“No city, no town, no law enforcement agency is too big or too small to evade our enforcement of the constitutional rights every American enjoys,” Clarke said at a press conference in Jackson, the state’s capital.
Lexington is located in Holmes County, where about 83% of the population is Black, according to U.S. Census data.
The probe follows the firing last year of the department’s previous chief, Sam Dobbins, after a recording surfaced of him using racist slurs and boasting about killing 13 people while in the line of duty, according to local media reports.
Meanwhile, civil rights leaders last week called for a federal investigation into the Jackson Police Department in Mississippi’s capital and the case of Dexter Wade, a 37-year-old Black man from Jackson who was reportedly struck and killed by police and buried without his family’s knowledge.
In August, six white former Mississippi law enforcement officers pleaded guilty on Thursday to federal civil rights crimes for brutally assaulting two Black men earlier this year.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Aurora Ellis)
