On July 19, 2022, the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting released audio of Sam Dobbins, then the chief of the police department in Lexington, Mississippi, boasting about shooting a “n***er” 119 times. “I don’t give a fuck if you kill a motherfucker in cold blood,” Dobbins told another officer. 

Dobbins is white, and Lexington, a small town bordering the Mississippi Delta, is predominantly Black. The Lexington Board of Aldermen already knew about the audio, but the leak forced its hand: The day after the recording made national news, the Board ousted Dobbins as police chief by a vote of 3–2.

Lexington residents tried to seize this moment to confront the systemic anti-Blackness and culture of impunity that Dobbins’s comments reflected. Local activists contacted the U.S. Department of Justice to request an investigation into the Lexington Police Department. And in August 2022, five Black residents filed a lawsuit in federal district court alleging a raft of police abuses, including regular use of excessive force, unreasonable searches and seizures, and retaliatory arrests. The court was immediately skeptical: In September 2022, for instance, when Judge Tom Lee denied the residents’ request for preliminary relief, he concluded his opinion by noting that Dobbins “is gone now,” and that “the policing situation in Lexington has improved.”

The situation had not, in fact, improved. Two years later, in September 2024, the Department of Justice published a report on the Lexington Police Department showing not only that racial discrimination became ubiquitous under Dobbins’s leadership, but also that it continued unabated after he was removed as chief. In some ways, it even got worse: Before Dobbins, for example, Black people were 2.5 times more likely than white people to be arrested by LPD. Under Dobbins, the disparity rose to 12 times more likely. And after Dobbins, the gulf widened to 17.6 times more likely.