On September 26, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a report concluding that the City of Lexington, Mississippi, and the Lexington Police Department (LPD) engaged “in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprived people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law.” The report’s findings highlighted several abuses against residents of Lexington, including findings that LPD:
- Arrests, jails, and detains people who cannot pay fines or fees, without assessing their ability to pay;
- Uses excessive force;
- Conducts stops, searches, and arrests without probable cause, including jailing people on illegal “investigative holds” and arresting people solely because they owe outstanding fines;
- Imposes money bail without justification or assessment of ability to pay and often in the amount of unpaid fines and fees;
- Jails people without prompt access to court;
- Violates the rights of people engaged in free speech and expression, including by retaliating against people who criticize the police;
- Discriminates against Black people; and
- Operates under an unconstitutional conflict of interest because LPD’s funding depends on the money it raises through its enforcement.
Across all its findings, the DOJ highlighted how the unlawful use of fines and fees and predatory collection practices played a significant role in how LPD violated people’s rights. The DOJ found that starting in July 2021, LPD aggressively began policing low-level misdemeanors, traffic offenses, and municipal violations. The report found that any person arrested by LPD was required to pay a $50 “processing fee” before they would be released. If they owed outstanding fines, they also had to pay those before being released. If they were unable to pay these threshold costs, they would wait in jail – sometimes for weeks – before seeing a judge. The municipal judge, in talking with DOJ investigators, estimated that “well over 90 percent” of people who are ultimately convicted of these low-level offenses were sentenced to a fine.
The DOJ found that although the money collected by LPD goes to the city, the city uses that money to fund the police department. The city’s revenue from fines and fees has “increased more than sevenfold—from $30,000 per year to over $240,000.” As revenue increased, so did the police department’s budget, which accounted for nearly 40 percent of the city’s expenditures in some years. According to the DOJ, the police controlled much of the decision-making on how revenue was collected and when cash was extracted from people. Coupled with evidence that officers could be penalized with reduced hours or lost pay if they did not meet specific quotas, the DOJ concluded that LPD had a conflict of interest that violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In Lexington, the municipal court is effectively run by the police department. The Chief of Police supervises the court clerk and the municipal judge is paid from LPD’s budget, further compounding the conflicts. At the time of the report, LPD had a practice of applying for arrest warrants for anyone with unpaid fines or fees, despite the fact that the Constitution requires evidence that a person has the ability to pay a fine and is wilfully refusing to pay before a warrant can be issued. The municipal court had a practice of granting these unsupported warrant requests. In a city with a median income 50 percent lower than the national average, this practice led to approximately 600 of the 1200 residents being subject to arrest warrants for nonpayment. Law enforcement should have recognized that these warrants were constitutionally invalid.
The criminalization of debt created by aggressive policing effectively placed a significant portion of the city’s population, which is approximately 76 percent Black, under a constant threat of arrest. According to the report, “LPD made more arrests of Black people compared to white people than it had before [instituting the new policing strategy]. As a result, Black people have literally paid the price of LPD’s efforts to raise funds.” Moreover, “Of the fines and fees paid by residents of Lexington (excluding those paid from other towns), about 98% was paid by Black people.” The DOJ uncovered evidence that police specifically targeted Black people for enforcement and that there was intentional discrimination in LPD’s policing practices, even though the chief and many of the officers were also Black. In 2023, “Black people were 17.6 times more likely to be arrested by LPD than white people were.” One former LPD officer told DOJ investigators that “most Black people in Lexington lack resources to challenge the police’s authority. White people, on the other hand, are more likely to have both resources and connections that insulate them from law enforcement.”
Among the more than a dozen recommendations the DOJ makes for change necessary to bring LPD and the city into compliance with the law, three are focused on the way LPD and the city generate and use fine and fee revenue:
- Implement policies, training, and practices to ensure that the City and LPD do not arrest or otherwise cause anyone to be jailed or detained for non-payment of a sum of money absent constitutionally appropriate consideration of an arrestee’s ability to pay and alternatives to detention.
- Create and implement a process to assess ability-to-pay fines, fees, and money bail that complies with constitutional standards, which includes clearing debt obligations that would be unlawful to enforce. A person may be deemed able to pay only if the person can pay the amount at issue without sacrificing basic needs.
- Implement policies, training, and practices to ensure that LPD does not operate under an unlawful financial conflict of interest and to remedy outstanding fine debt imposed under an unlawful conflict of interest.
The investigation report also recounts unlawful actions by police in the use of force, sexual harassment, denial of access to courts or defense counsel, unlawful searches and seizures, and violations of citizen’s First Amendment rights, among other concerns.
You can read the full report here.