Civil rights attorney Jill Collen Jefferson has filed lawsuits alleging false arrests, excessive force and worse by the police department in Lexington, Miss. LEXINGTON, Miss. — Handcuffed in the cramped lobby of the Lexington Police Department, standing eye-to-eye with the chief, Jill Collen Jefferson was given a choice. She had been arrested while filming a nighttime traffic stop in this county seat of roughly 1,500 people and four traffic signals.
Similar Justice Department probes have focused on much larger places, such as Minneapolis, Baltimore and Seattle. 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 DepartmentLexington, seat of Holmes County, drew the Biden administration’s attention mostly because of Jefferson.
Jefferson began meeting with many of them, making weekly trips in her cracked-windshield Mini Cooper from her home in Hattiesburg, 150 miles away, to record their accounts. On behalf of her social justice nonprofit, JULIAN, she mobilized a network of reform-minded lawyers to help represent defendants in Lexington’s municipal court.
His solution: aggressively police the roads. Officers quickly tripled violations issued for “disturbing the peace” and “following too close,” according to data obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union via public-records request. Jefferson talked to residents about suing the department, asking them to trust a justice system that many viewed with suspicion and fear. She told Hooker he should make his recordings of Dobbins public.Lexington’s mayor, Robin McCrory, who is White, declined to be interviewed.
The young Jefferson regularly played with Pickering’s granddaughter, sometimes running laps around Pickering’s estate. One day when Jefferson was 5, she watched from a distance as Pickering delivered a new directive to her aunt and grandmother: Jill could no longer go inside the house unless she was working with them. Jefferson saidPickering forbade the friendship because his granddaughter was White, and Jill was Black.
In May last year, 44-year-old Leroy Secherest told JULIAN that police had retaliated against him for interrupting officers who were beating a young, developmentally disabled woman he knew. Secherest said he was driving down Highway 12 when he saw officers punching her.