Black Lives Matter

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

Author: Editors Desk, Robert Klemko Source: The Washington Post

July 3, 2024 at 17:30

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 lawyer Jill Collen Jefferson convinced the Justice Department to investigate allegedly racist and abusive policing 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. 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.