A little Mississippi city has a brand-new cops chief after its last was covertly tape-recorded boasting about shooting and killing individuals in the line of responsibility — consistingof a Black male who he declared to have shot more than 100 times — in a racist and homophobic tirade.
Former Lexington Police Department Chief Sam Dobbins was fired Wednesday after the city’s board of aldermen voted to oust him in a session that lasted more than an hour, WLBT reported.
The vote came after a previous officer dripped a recording of a discussion he had with the chief in April. The officer, Robert Lee Hooker, gave the covertly tape-recorded audio to JULIAN, a civil rights and global human rights company, which launched it to the media — riling up the little city of 1,600 about 60 miles north of Jackson. About 80% of the city, almost 1,300 individuals, are Black, census information programs.
The freshly designated interim authorities chief, Charles Henderson, who is Black, told USA TODAY in an interview Friday that the language utilized by his predecessor in the recording “is something generally that I wouldn’t usage and that I wouldn’t desire anyperson used with under my administration to usage.”
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In the audio, Dobbins can be heard boasting he shot and eliminated 13 individuals in the line of responsibility, consistingof a Black male who he states he shot 119 times, according to a copy of the 16-minute recording acquired by USA TODAY.
During the discussion, which was veryfirst reported by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, Dobbins can be heard stating he would smash suspects through a window if they “got out of line.”
Dobbins, who is white, can be heard utilizing numerous racist and homophobic slurs as he declares he would d