A small Mississippi city has a new police chief after its last was secretly recorded bragging about shooting and killing people in the line of duty – including a Black man who he claimed to have shot more than 100 times – in a racist and homophobic rant.
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 former officer leaked a recording of a conversation he had with the chief in April. The officer, Robert Lee Hooker, gave the secretly recorded audio to JULIAN, a civil rights and international human rights organization, which released it to the media – riling up the small city of 1,600 about 60 miles north of Jackson. About 80% of the city, nearly 1,300 people, are Black, census data shows.
