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.

  • @800XL
    2•2 hours ago

    Whoo 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