Category: Mississippi News

LEXINGTON, Miss. (AP) — Some residents of a small Mississippi town where the Justice Department found severe problems with excessive and racially disproportionate policing said they were unaware of the ongoing issues, while others said harassment from officers was a part everyday of life.

In a report released Thursday on Lexington, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) north of Jackson, the Justice Department said it found a stunning pattern of racially disparate policing in a department “where officers can relentlessly violate the law.”

Mike Carr, an attorney based in Cleveland, Mississippi, represents several people charged with crimes in Lexington, a rural town of about 1,200 people, approximately 76% of whom are Black. He said residents are often charged with resisting arrest, failure to comply and disorderly conduct — which Carr derisively calls the “holy trinity.”

One of his clients, who is Black, was charged with those three counts after police saw him standing outside a nightclub with a beer in his hand. Officers shocked the man with a Taser and slammed him against a vehicle, Carr said.

Another one of his clients, Jill Collen Jefferson, said she was unlawfully arrested in 2023 while filming Lexington police conducting a traffic stop. Jefferson, who is Black, is also an attorney and president of JULIAN, a civil rights organization that filed a federal lawsuit against the Lexington Police Department in 2022 alleging its officers had “terrorized” local residents.

Jefferson has been documenting cases of police abuse in Lexington for years, but she said she was unable to get state officials to take action. Carr commended Jefferson for keeping attention on police corruption in one of the poorest towns in one of the poorest states in the U.S., eventually leading to a federal investigation.

“Lexington is a place that could easily be forgotten,” Carr said.

Jefferson compared day-to-day life for Lexington residents to living under martial law.

“Think about the people behind these findings and what they have had to deal with and the bravery it’s taken for them to speak out,” she said. “They’ve been retaliated against for just trying to get justice.”

Similar to Lexington, more than half of police departments in the U.S. are small and lacking proper oversight, Jefferson said.

“They’re not being watched, but we are watching them now,” she said. “And we’re going to scale this change from Lexington to impact over 50% of police departments in America.”

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division stopped in Lexington last year as part of a “listening tour” through the Deep South to learn where to direct federal resources and mount potential civil rights lawsuits.

The department said its investigation of Lexington is part of a broader effort to crack down on unconstitutional policing at small and mid-size police departments in the South. Last week, it announced it was opening a civil rights investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department in Mississippi, where several officers were convicted in the torture of two Black men in a racist attack that included beatings, repeated use of Tasers and assaults with a sex toy before one of the victims was shot in the mouth.

Lexington residents owe police $1.7 million in fines, and the city court has issued bench warrants authorizing the arrest of more than 650 people — roughly half of the city’s population — because of unpaid fines, the Justice Department said.

“It is unconscionable that, in 2024, a local government would subvert the law to suppress citizens’ basic human rights,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said Friday. “Debtors’ prisons, like dog whistles and state-sanctioned segregation, are reminiscent of Jim Crow-era policies. We refuse to go back.”

Sherry Harris said she worked as a Lexington police officer for three weeks in August and September but quit because she didn’t like the way officers were treating people. She said she was training on the job with the intention of going to a police academy later.

Harris, who is Black, said she saw her training officer pull Black drivers over for reasons she could not identify, often giving ticketing them for having obscured or dirty license plates.

“The guy that was training me, he loved pulling people over,” she said. “If they look like they’re speeding — they’re going to pull them over for that, because you know they ain’t got no radar.”

Harris said she brought her concerns about the officer, who is also Black, to the chief: “I said, ‘Look, he is not going to get me killed because he’s just harassing people.’”

When it came it white drivers, Harris said she never saw officers issue tickets.

That aligns with what federal investigators found. The Justice Department said Black people committing traffic offenses were arrested by Lexington police while white people committing similar traffic offenses were not. Investigators also found Lexington police disproportionately targeted Black people for arrests, and reviews of body camera footage showed officers repeatedly used force against Black people but never against a white person.

Curdarrus Simpson, who lives in Lexington, said police will pull people over first and find a reason for doing so second. Simpson, who is Black, said he and a friend were pulled over Friday and falsely accused of running a stop sign.

Jane McCrory lives close to Lexington and said she comes into town daily. McCrory, who is white, said she had only been pulled over once by Lexington police, for a minor traffic violation, and she was let go without citation. She said she was unaware of the problems Black residents have reported they are having with local police but she wants the state and federal officials to respond to the many damning allegations in the Justice Department’s report.

“Anything they found that affects any of our citizens needs to be dealt with,” McCrory said.

FLOWOOD, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said Tuesday that legislators should ignore “myths” from opponents who want to block efforts by him and some other Republican leaders to phase out the state’s income tax.

“Getting rid of our state income tax, in my opinion, is the next step in continuing to unleash our full economic potential,” Reeves told a few hundred businesspeople, lobbyists, legislators and other elected officials at a conference in the Jackson suburb of Flowood.

Republican House Speaker Jason White set the daylong meeting for people to discuss potential tax cuts that the GOP-controlled state House and Senate could debate during the three-month legislative session that begins in January.

Mississippi, which has long been one of the poorest states in the U.S., is in the process of reducing its personal income tax under a law Reeves signed in 2022. The state will lower its top rate to 4% in two years.

In July, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas signed legislation that will reduce her state’s income tax to 3.9%. Reeves has long said that Mississippi should eventually eliminate its income tax to compete with Florida, Tennessee and Texas, which don’t levy the tax.

Mississippi collected almost one-third of its general fund revenue from the individual income tax during the budget year that ended June 30, 2023, according to the state Department of Revenue. Only the sales tax is a larger source of money.

Critics will say that cutting taxes won’t lead to more jobs, and that cuts will make it harder for the state to fund public education and balance budgets, the governor said. He said all three points are wrong.

Reeves pointed to job announcements earlier this year, including one that Amazon Web Services will build two data centers in central Mississippi. He also said Mississippi has improved its high school graduation rate and has had substantial budget surpluses.

White on Tuesday repeated his often-expressed support for phasing out the income tax. He also said he wants to cut in half the state’s 7% sales tax on groceries, “as soon and as quickly as we can.”

Two Republican senators, Jeremy England of Vancleave and Finance Committee Chairman Josh Harkins of Flowood, said legislators should be cautious in considering big changes to taxes because the state has to pay for obligations such as the Public Employees Retirement System and the maintenance of public buildings.

England pointed to Kansas, which enacted big tax cuts in 2012 and 2013 but repealed most of them in 2017 after revenue fell short.

“We don’t want to end up in a situation where we’ve gone too far,” England said.

House Ways and Means Committee Committee Chairman Trey Lamar, a Republican from Senatobia, said Mississippi could grab attention by enacting a “transformational” phase-out of the income tax.

“That money belongs to the taxpayers of the state of Mississippi,” Lamar said. “And it’s time for the state of Mississippi to do something big.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he told a congressional committee Tuesday.

Favre made the disclosure as part of his testimony about a welfare misspending scandal in Mississippi. Favre, who does not face criminal charges, has repaid just over $1 million in speaking fees funded by a welfare program in the state and was also an investor in a biotech company with ties to the case. The biotech firm has said it was developing concussion treatments.

The former football star told the committee that he lost his investment in the company “that I believed was developing a breakthrough concussion drug I thought would help others.”

“As I’m sure you’ll understand, while it’s too late for me — I’ve recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s — this is also a cause dear to my heart,” Favre said.

What causes Parkinson’s disease is unknown, and it is unclear if Favre’s disease is connected to his football career or head injuries. He said in 2022 that he estimates he experienced “thousands” of concussions in his two decades in the NFL.

Favre appeared at the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee hearing to advocate reform of the federal welfare system to better prevent fraud.

“The challenges my family and I have faced over the last three years—because certain government officials in Mississippi failed to protect federal TANF funds from fraud and abuse, and are unjustifiably trying to blame me, those challenges have hurt my good name and are worse than anything I faced in football,” Favre said.

Favre has said he didn’t know the payments he received came from welfare funds and has noted his charity had provided millions of dollars to poor kids in his home state of Mississippi and in Wisconsin, where he played most of his career with the Green Bay Packers.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre, who has repaid just over $1 million in speaking fees funded by a welfare program in Mississippi, is scheduled to appear before a Republican-led congressional committee that’s examining how states are falling short on using welfare to help families in need.

The House Ways and Means Committee hearing in Washington is scheduled for Tuesday. A committee spokesperson, J.P. Freire, confirmed to The Associated Press on Friday that Favre is scheduled to appear and was invited by the chairman, Republican Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri.

Favre will take questions “per the usual witness policy,” Freire said. However, it’s unclear how much the Pro Football Hall of Famer might say because a Mississippi judge in 2023 put a gag order on him and others being sued by the state.

House Republicans have said a Mississippi welfare misspending scandal involving Favre and others points to the need for “serious reform” in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

“Democrats have failed to hold a single hearing on TANF or conduct oversight to identify ways the program could be improved,” Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee said in a November 2022 letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

The letter did not mention that Republicans control the Mississippi government now, as they did during the welfare misspending scandal that officials called the state’s largest public corruption case.