Police in small Mississippi city discriminate against Black residents, Justice Department finds
Police in small Mississippi city discriminate against Black residents, Justice Department finds
Police in small Mississippi city discriminate against Black people, use excessive force, Justice Department probe finds.
Police in a majority-Black Mississippi city discriminate against Black people, use excessive force and retaliate against critics, the Justice Department said Thursday in a scathing report detailing findings of an investigation into civil rights abuses.
The Lexington Police Department “has created a system where officers can relentlessly violate the law” in one of the poorest counties in America, according to the Justice Department. Investigators found police also sexually harassed women and kept people behind bars for minor offenses because they couldn’t afford to pay fines.
“Today’s findings show that the Lexington Police Department abandoned its sacred position of trust in the community by routinely violating the constitutional rights of those it was sworn to protect,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
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Thank God, I thought it was way more widespread than that, so glad to hear it's just a small town in Mississippi.
30Wow this is really fucked up. Here are some numbers from the article that can sorta quantify how bad it is:
"Lexington — a rural town of about 1,200 people, approximately 76% of whom are Black."
"Lexington residents owe police $1.7 million in fines, and the city court has issued bench warrants seeking the arrest of more than 650 people — roughly half of the city’s population — because of unpaid fines, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said."
And there's a lot of other horrible stuff in there that they did to people. Too bad the BLM Antifa destruction squads were made up, they could use one there.
23This one caught me (emphasis mine):
Investigators said they saw officers repeatedly use force against Black people but NEVER against a White person.
7With a town of 1200, only 288 of them not-black, most of the white people are probably cops, or related to one.
ACABs
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“Today’s findings show that the Lexington Police Department
abandonedcontinued its sacred position of mistrust in the community by routinely violating the constitutional rights of those itwas sworn tomust bind but not protect,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said."FTFY" doesn't apply here. It's still fucked, but it's more accurate.
12Whoo boy, someone hand the Justice Dept a book about how policing came to be.
Spoiler: it involved finding runaway slaves siccing bloodhounds on them and brutally beating them somewhere in the range of half to fully dead.
When U.S. police departments didn't evolve out of slave patrols, they tended to form out of a desire to protect the property of the wealthy. In practice, this meant beating, murdering and arresting people who didn't want to work 12 hour days until they died.
Here's a link to a fantastic Behind the Bastards episode about how the police came to be.
https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/how-the-first-police-went-from-gangsters-to-an-arm
10Well on the bright side, it's just one small city in some crappy state. Isolated incident it would seem. Let's not ignore this, but let's focus on bigger issues that affect all of us like immigrants eating housepets.
😒
10Join us for tonight's news at eleven, where we have breaking headlines that water is wet and the pope is catholic.
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9i believe this to be common knowledge
7Mississippi raciest I am in total shock!!!!
4Ai could be used to find these kinds of departments and cops.
-2Why? You get more accurate results if you hang a map on the wall, cover your eyes, and throw darts at the map.
6we've provided an amnotated dataset that shows that actually almost all the cops are good, please train the AI accordingly :3
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