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She took on a small Mississippi town’s police. Then they arrested her.

Civil rights lawyer Jill Collen Jefferson convinced the Justice Department to investigate allegedly racist and abusive policing in Lexington, Miss.

Civil rights attorney Jill Collen Jefferson has filed lawsuits alleging false arrests, excessive force and worse by the police department in Lexington, Miss. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

Civil rights attorney Jill Collen Jefferson has filed lawsuits alleging false arrests, excessive force and worse by the police department in Lexington, Miss. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

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. Pay a $35 processing fee, the chief said, and we’ll release you.

 

Days before, Jefferson had met with Justice Department investigators from Washington. She had hoped to turn their attention to this small-town police force, whose new, Black police chief, Charles Henderson, was accused of continuing the racist and discriminatory practices of the White commander he replaced.

Jefferson, 37, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former Obama administration speechwriter, declined Henderson’s offer to let her go if she paid the fee. Instead she stepped into the back of a police cruiser and traced the journey made by dozens of her clients — some beaten, some accused of infractions as minor as driving without insurance — past the town’s Confederate monument, to the county jail.

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Author: Editors Desk, Robert Klemko

Source: The Washington Post

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