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.
The newly appointed interim police chief, Charles Henderson, who is Black, told USA TODAY in an interview Friday that the language used by his predecessor in the recording “is something typically that I wouldn’t use and that I wouldn’t want anybody employed with under my administration to use.”
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In the audio, Dobbins can be heard bragging he shot and killed 13 people in the line of duty, including a Black man who he says he shot 119 times, according to a copy of the 16-minute recording obtained by USA TODAY.
During the conversation, which was…
