Jan. 14, 1963 

On the same portico of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy, Alabama Gov. George Wallace delivered his inaugural address, telling the crowd, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” 

Asa Carter, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote his speech, which made national headlines and thrust Wallace into the national spotlight. 

Seven months later, Martin Luther King Jr. responded to that speech, saying, “I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification’ — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” 

Before his death, Wallace called his most famous phrase “his biggest mistake.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Nate Rosenfield and Brian Howey are examining the power of sheriffs’ offices in Mississippi as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

Last summer, a Mississippi police officer approached Vivian Burks as she sat in her car at a local park reading the Bible.

He was cordial at first, offering to help Ms. Burks replace her expired tags with the new ones she had in her car. But the encounter changed quickly after the officer, Blaine Musgrove, said he smelled marijuana and a second Carthage police officer demanded to search the vehicle.

When Ms. Burks, a 65-year-old great-grandmother with no criminal record, tried to get back into her car, the officers grabbed her and ordered her to place her hands behind her back, body camera footage shows. When she did not immediately comply, Officer Musgrove pressed his Taser into her back and shocked her, sending her to the ground in a heap.

Over the next 30 seconds, the video shows, Officer Musgrove shocked her three more times as she twisted her hands to avoid being handcuffed and begged the officers to stop, repeatedly shouting, “I’m sick!” The officers called an ambulance and then left her moaning for help until the paramedics arrived.

“I couldn’t breathe,” Ms. Burks told reporters in an interview. “I just thought that they were going to kill me.”

In many places across the nation, the repeated shocking of Ms. Burks — who was not acting aggressively and was largely under the officers’ control — would be considered an improper and dangerous use of a Taser by the police.

Not in Mississippi.

Here, police agencies set their own rules about Taser use, and many departments have held on to vague, outdated policies that allow officers to shock virtually anyone, for any behavior they see as threatening, with little fear of repercussions. As a result, cases like Ms. Burks’s have occurred all over the state without raising alarms, an investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today found.

Under national standards widely embraced in other states, officers are told to use Tasers only against people who are an imminent threat. To reduce the chance of causing injury or death, they are advised to avoid shocking people who are elderly or who have heart conditions and to avoid shocking anyone for more than 15 seconds over the course of an encounter.

Tasers are designed to make it easy for departments to monitor when officers violate rules like these. Each device electronically logs when it is triggered and for how long, creating a digital trail that can be used to flag excessive Taser use.

But dozens of departments across Mississippi remain in the dark about whether officers use the weapons properly because they do not examine their Taser logs, the news organizations found.

Several Mississippi agencies said they did not know they had access to the logs; at least six did not have the cable needed to extract data from a Taser, until The Times purchased a cable so those departments could provide reporters with copies of the logs.

The Times and Mississippi Today spent months gathering logs from across the state to do what these departments had not — a systematic review to identify excessive Taser incidents. Reporters analyzed more than 100,000 Taser log entries from 36 departments.

The logs alone do not show definitive cases of abuse, but they reveal serious red flags that departments could use to determine when officers fire their Tasers for longer than is considered safe. Over the past four years, Tasers across the state recorded more than 15 seconds of shock at least 600 times.

The logs, combined with thousands of pages of police and court records and interviews with nearly 30 people who were shocked by the police, also revealed dozens of instances where officers shocked people in ways that violated widely accepted Taser use standards.

Some were lying on the ground or sitting in their cars at the time. At least 11 people have accused officers of shocking them while they were pinned down or handcuffed. None of them were armed.

Officers fired their Tasers — sometimes more than 10 times — at people who were slow to follow orders or who argued about why they were being arrested. They shocked at least 12 people who were in the midst of a mental health crisis and who had become irrational or unresponsive.

Often, the people they shocked had been accused of petty crimes, including trespassing and traffic violations.

In 2021, Leake County deputies shocked 49-year-old Kevin Turner for refusing to put his hands behind his back even after he warned them that he had a defibrillator installed in his heart. He was arrested for disturbing the peace, a charge that was later dismissed.

The same year in Lee County, home to Tupelo, sheriff’s deputies fired their Tasers for more than two minutes in total while they arrested Christopher Thomas, who was hallucinating and fighting with deputies.

Keith Murriel died in 2022 after Jackson police officers shocked him at least 40 times while they were trying to arrest him because he refused to leave a motel parking lot. He is one of at least 22 people to die in Mississippi shortly after being shocked by the police, according to news reports and state investigative records. It is unclear whether Tasers caused most of these deaths.

The actual number of excessive Taser activations is almost certainly far greater than The Times and Mississippi Today could tally. Dozens of agencies ignored public records requests for their logs or said they could not provide them. Among them were two of the state’s largest policing agencies — the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol and the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department, which includes Jackson.

In the absence of regular monitoring of the logs, many police agencies must trust accounts given by their officers.

As in many states, Mississippi law enforcement agencies generally require officers to file paperwork describing the details of any encounter where they use force. Many administrators said they do not compare those reports with the officers’ Taser logs to ensure their accuracy.

This lack of oversight has led to serious abuse by some officers. The Times and Mississippi Today reported in 2023 that a group of Rankin County sheriff’s deputies who called themselves the Goon Squad used their Tasers to torture suspected drug users for decades.

Several former Rankin County deputies said that all they needed to do to keep their Taser use secret was to leave it out of their official reports. Department supervisors almost never compared the details in their reports to Taser logs, they said.

This lack of scrutiny also allowed deputies to invent false justifications for using their stun guns and to downplay how many times they shocked people without fear of being caught, according to the deputies.

“Nothing has ever been said to me about a Taser log, and I have never heard of anyone else being questioned about one,” said Christian Dedmon, a former deputy at the department who participated in many Goon Squad raids before being charged with the torture of two Black men in 2023.

Mr. Dedmon was one of six officers sent to prison for shocking the two men with Tasers, beating them and shooting one of them in the mouth. He said departments could prevent similar abuses by randomly auditing their officers’ Taser logs.

Using the logs, reporters found at least 16 incidents at nine other departments where officers failed to accurately report their Taser use.

After reporters shared what they found in the logs with agencies across the state, officials in several departments said they would reconsider how they monitor Taser use. In Magee, Chief Denis Borges updated his department’s policies to require Taser log audits every six months.

Top officials in many other departments, including Chief Billy McMillan of the Carthage police, whose officers shocked Ms. Burks, did not respond to requests for comment or said they were unable to explain their officers’ Taser deployments.

Some guessed that excessive Taser incidents could be officers fiddling with the weapons out of boredom or sparking them as a practical joke. Other department representatives said deputies had shocked aggressive dogs without filing a report. One deputy in Attala County said he used his Taser to kill spiders.

Rick Myers, former executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a professional organization for law enforcement leaders, said a department’s reluctance to track Taser use leaves it vulnerable to excessive force claims and misuse by officers.

“This is a massive leadership failure,” Mr. Myers said.

Taser’s Promise

Tasers were first marketed to police departments thirty years ago as a tool that would revolutionize law enforcement. They promised to allow officers to subdue a suspect without injury, at the touch of a button.

The devices use pressurized gas to fire two small darts connected to wires that deliver an excruciating shock that debilitates most people.

“It feels like fire running across your body,” said Seth Stoughton, a law enforcement instructor and former officer who has been voluntarily shocked by a Taser.

Taser International, which later changed its name to Axon Enterprise Inc., has become a global force in law enforcement equipment valued at nearly $50 billion. Today, Axon says that close to 20,000 police agencies around the world use its Tasers. The company promotes its line of weapons as a critical way to reduce deadly police encounters and has claimed credit for saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

But as police agencies adopted Tasers in huge numbers in the early 2000s, doubts emerged about whether the devices were as safe as the company had claimed.

Several medical studies determined that repeated Taser shocks or shocks near the heart could cause cardiac arrest and other life-threatening conditions. Journalists found that a growing number of people were dying after being shocked, and human rights groups raised concerns that the weapons could be used for torture. Because Tasers can cause a person’s muscles to spasm uncontrollably, there is also a risk of injuries caused by falling.

In response, Axon advised police agencies in 2009 to avoid aiming at people’s chests. Two years later, the Justice Department and the Police Executive Research Forum, an influential law enforcement policy group, published more extensive recommendations for safer use.

The guidelines said officers should avoid shocking anyone who is not an immediate threat. They also advised officers to avoid shocking children and people who are elderly, pregnant or have a known heart condition.

Although the recommendations are not binding, law enforcement agencies across the country have incorporated them into their Taser policies. Federal courts in some parts of the United States have ruled that shocking someone who is not a clear threat can be a civil rights violation.

Many department policies across the country say that Tasers should be used only to incapacitate dangerous people so officers can quickly handcuff them while they’re down, and that officers should avoid shocking people for longer than 15 seconds over the course of an entire incident.

Unsafe Taser use occurs in many places, but Mississippi has fallen behind because many police agencies in the state have not adopted these guidelines, and because its courts have been less stringent. In 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, whose rulings govern Mississippi, contradicted rulings handed down by other courts and decided that officers can shock someone simply for walking away against an officer’s orders.

The Scale of Abuse

What happened to Vivian Burks is exactly the kind of incident that law enforcement officers are supposed to avoid.

Two experts who reviewed the encounter said that when Ms. Burks — an unarmed woman suspected of nonviolent offenses — did not put her hands behind her back, officers should not have escalated the confrontation, especially after she said she was ill.

“Because the Taser is a relatively high-level use of force, it has to correspond with a relatively significant threat or significant interference with a law enforcement objective,” said Ashley Heiberger, a former officer and use of force expert.

Mr. Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s Excellence in Policing & Public Safety Program, said that when Ms. Burks tried to climb into her car, the officers may have been concerned about her grabbing a weapon, but they should have stopped shocking her once she was on the ground.

Instead, the officers used the Taser like a cattle prod to force Ms. Burks to comply, Mr. Stoughton said.

Ms. Burks, who was charged with driving under intoxication, marijuana possession and resisting arrest, exemplifies a troubling pattern of officers firing Tasers when their authority was challenged. The Times and Mississippi Today found similar cases across the state.

Because Taser incidents seldom cause major injury, the public rarely learns about them, but the allegations have occasionally shown up in lawsuits.

In 2021, Darius Harris argued with Lexington police officers when they threatened to arrest him for lighting fireworks on New Year’s Eve, so they shocked him in the chest with a Taser, according to a lawsuit he filed in federal court.

The same year, a Jackson police officer shocked Aquinta Palmer three times while she was handcuffed after she argued with him, Ms. Palmer claimed in a federal lawsuit.

In 2016, a Lamar County sheriff’s deputy testified in court that he handcuffed Rusty Holloway and then shocked him repeatedly after he walked away from a car accident against the deputy’s orders.

In court filings, the three agencies denied wrongdoing by their officers. Two of the lawsuits have not been resolved; Mr. Holloway’s claim was eventually dropped.

Reporters identified 44 allegations of Taser abuse over the past decade from lawsuits and department records. They found hundreds more incidents that raise red flags by examining Taser logs across the state.

On their own, the logs cannot show whether a Taser incident violated safety protocols. But the time stamps in the logs can help determine if an officer fired excessively and can flag suspicious events that deserve closer scrutiny.

The logs led reporters to the case of Dyquavis Graham, who was shocked in the chest by a Magee police officer in 2020 after Mr. Graham argued with him about a traffic ticket, a police report shows. That same year, Simpson County sheriff’s deputies triggered their Taser for at least 35 seconds when Joshua Hall fought with them during his arrest, the logs showed.

Denis Borges, who was not Magee’s police chief at the time of the incident, said Mr. Graham’s arrest would have prompted an internal investigation under his watch. The Simpson County Sheriff’s Department did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

One of the most extreme Taser events captured in the logs involved the 2020 arrest of a former Army medic in Pearl, just outside Jackson.

Skylor Pruitt said he took drugs one night and began hallucinating that he was being chased. During the episode, he smashed his neighbor’s window, and she called the police.

Pearl police reports show that the officers arrived to find Mr. Pruitt screaming and slamming his head into the asphalt.

After Mr. Pruitt failed to obey commands to stay put, five officers fought with him as Mr. Pruitt thrashed on the ground. Logs obtained from the department show that three officers triggered their Tasers a total of 24 times, for a combined 136 seconds — nine times the generally accepted limit.

Chief Nick McLendon of the Pearl police declined to say whether he considered the officers’ Taser use reasonable because he could not be sure how many times they successfully shocked Mr. Pruitt. In their reports, the officers stated that their first deployment misfired.

Mr. McLendon, who was not chief at the time of the incident, said limiting how many times his officers can deploy their Tasers could hamstring them in unpredictable situations. Instead, he requires officers to “make sure it’s reasonable.”

But policing experts said they struggled to imagine a scenario in which officers could justify deploying their Tasers for so long.

Marc Brown, lead instructor at the University of South Carolina Excellence in Policing & Public Safety Program, said officers should be prepared to handcuff someone immediately after the first successful Taser deployment to avoid risking officer safety and shocking someone longer than necessary.

“When you’re tasing someone that many times, especially if you have multiple officers, that to me is a problem,” he said.

A Lack of Accountability

In some states, including Massachusetts, Minnesota and Georgia, legislators have enacted laws that regulate Taser use and training for law enforcement officers statewide.

In others, state agencies or police associations have created model polices to help guide local departments in setting their own rules.

Mississippi has neither.

If a police department in Mississippi seeks advice from state officials, the board that oversees police training in the state refers them to Axon.

The company provides general policy guidelines on its website as well as materials that departments use to train their officers. Both incorporate some of the best practices published by the Justice Department. But a company spokesperson said Axon leaves decisions on how to use Tasers up to local agencies.

The spokesperson did not respond to requests for additional comment.

In the absence of statewide regulations, departments in Mississippi have developed a patchwork of Taser policies that vary wildly, often straying from what experts consider to be the basic legal standards. Many are outdated.

A review of polices from 44 departments showed that while a few say officers can shock someone only in response to a violent attack, most agencies rely on vague definitions that are open to interpretation. Typical language states that officers should fire their Tasers only when they meet resistance, but the level of resistance is often unclear.

For example, many agencies do not bar officers from shocking someone for walking away against orders.

More than half of the departments also do not address whether officers can shock children or people with medical conditions. Most do not bar officers from using Tasers against someone in handcuffs.

Only two agencies have guidelines for how long officers can shock someone. The Walthall Sheriff’s Department policy defines the Taser as a type of knife.

The lack of clear rules extends to how departments monitor Taser use, leaving most of them in the dark if officers fail to mention shocking people in their reports.

There was no way to know what occurred during hundreds of the suspicious Taser triggers reporters found in the logs because department officials could not provide incident reports that explained why the Taser was fired.

Agencies that require officers to download Taser logs do not always enforce the policy. When a Taser is fired, each device records the event on the Taser itself. To review the logs, a department must connect each device to a computer and download the information. Several said they did not have the software required to do so. Jackson police officers are supposed to connect their weapons to a computer every month. But the department, when asked for copies of all its logs, could not locate the data for more than two-thirds of its Tasers. Agency officials said they would investigate why the files were missing.

At several departments, high-ranking administrators said that while they could access their logs, they did not use them to monitor officer Taser use.

Chief McLendon, of the Pearl police, said it could undercut the morale of his staff. “We give them badges and guns,” he said, “so there’s a level of trust there.”

But among the cases reporters found of officers failing to accurately report their Taser use was an incident involving the Pearl police.

In 2021, two Pearl officers reported triggering their Tasers once each while arresting a man who had taken drugs and resisted their attempts to keep him in an ambulance, but the Taser logs show they fired their weapons a total of 10 times.

When presented with this information, Mr. McLendon, who was not the chief at the time, said it would have prompted further review under his watch. But the department was unable to locate body camera footage of the incident, so it is unclear how he would have identified the discrepancy without checking the logs.

During a violent struggle with Danny Ray McElroy Jr., who was suffering from drug-induced hallucinations, Simpson County sheriff’s deputies reported firing their Tasers four times, but their logs show 13 Taser triggers for a total of 65 seconds.

In Lee County, a deputy wrote in his report that he fired his Taser twice while arresting Christopher Thomas, who was fighting deputies, but Taser logs show the deputy fired his weapon 11 times.

Neither department responded to requests for comment.

Representatives from several other agencies said they were troubled by the failure to account for unexplained Taser deployments by their officers.

“I don’t like it. It makes me feel very uncomfortable as an instructor,” said Sgt. Daniel Mathis, Taser trainer for the George County Sheriff’s Department, who said he would start conducting regular audits after reporters informed him of 40 unexplained incidents in his department’s logs where Tasers were fired for a combined 15 seconds or more.

“How do you hold someone accountable if you don’t know?”

The Consequences

Most people walk away from Taser incidents without serious injuries, even after being shocked many times.

But the encounters can cause trauma that ripples through people’s lives and occasionally can have tragic consequences.

In 2022, a retired officer named Darryl Norwood was helping Jackson police restrain a violent neighbor when an officer shocked Mr. Norwood instead of the suspect. Mr. Norwood fell and struck his head on the curb, causing permanent nerve damage that limited his mobility on one side of his body, costing him his job.

At least 22 people have died in Mississippi after being shocked by law enforcement officers, according to previous reporting and state investigative records. In many of the cases, Tasers were not definitively determined to have caused the deaths and departments disputed that their officers were to blame.

One of them was Mr. Murriel, who died after Jackson police officers shocked him at least 40 times in 2022. His sister, Ebony Johnson, said the loss has devastated her family.

“He left two children here without a father,” she said. “There is no reason to justify what they did.”

The three officers involved in Mr. Murriel’s death were indicted on charges ranging from manslaughter to second degree murder. They have all pleaded not guilty.

Taser shocks also can escalate encounters, putting people’s lives at risk.

In September 2023, Jared Padgett, a 34-year-old oil rig worker, told his family he was hallucinating, so they called 911.

When two Simpson County sheriff’s deputies arrived, Mr. Padgett’s mother, Beverly, asked them to help her take her son to the hospital, but the deputies refused because he had not committed a crime, according to two family members who were present.

Mr. Padgett’s family said he was unarmed and wearing only gym shorts as he approached the deputies, who drew their Tasers and ordered him to the ground. Mr. Padgett fell to his knees, hands tucked behind his head, and begged officers not to shoot him.

Deputy Billy Seghini fired his Taser, the family said, but it did not incapacitate Mr. Padgett, who took off running.

Deputies pursued him to a nearby church, where his family lost sight of him for several minutes.

The next time they saw him, Mr. Padgett was kneeling in the road, covered in blood, his brother, Jacob, said.

What happened outside the church remains a mystery. Sheriff Paul Mullins did not reply to questions about the encounter and the department declined to provide copies of the deputies’ reports, citing the ongoing investigation into the incident.

But department Taser logs show the deputies fired their devices for a total of 94 seconds during the encounter.

During the struggle, Mr. Padgett climbed into a patrol car and drove away, according to a news release from the Simpson County Sheriff’s Department. A deputy chased Mr. Padgett to a nearby gas station and fatally shot him as he opened the car door holding a deputy’s rifle.

Ms. Padgett traced her son’s death back to the officers’ excessive Taser use — they fired 17 times in all — which she said terrified him and caused him to flee.

“Seventeen times,” Ms. Padgett said, repeating the phrase over and over after reporters showed her the logs. “Seventeen times.”

Reporting was contributed by Mukta Joshi, Chelsea Long, Justin Mayo, Jerry Mitchell, Steph Quinn and Irene Casado Sanchez. Christina Kelso contributed video production.

About the Analysis

The New York Times and Mississippi Today collected Taser log documents from 36 departments, which were converted into data form by Big Local News at Stanford University. These responses were often incomplete. One department supplied only two months of data, while others omitted some of their weapons or provided corrupt files that could not be processed.

About 108,000 uses of the Tasers since 2020 were extracted from the 1.4 million rows of data logged. Each use represents one instance of pulling the trigger or pressing a button to generate electricity.

Taser logs do not indicate why the weapon was used, and many of these entries represent training sessions and test firings. The most modern Tasers make identifying these easier, and more than 80 percent of them were removed from the analysis. Firings that occurred within an hour of updating the weapon’s time or software, or a burst of short events in a five-minute period, were also removed. This reduced the number of firings by almost half, to 63,000.

This set was collapsed into 44,000 incidents in which one or more Tasers were triggered for at least one second each over the course of an hour. Recorded shocks of less than one second were not included because of the likelihood that they were misfires. Events that would have fallen into multiple incidents were counted in the longest one. Of those, reporters manually reviewed the nearly 1,000 cases that lasted at least 15 seconds. About 400 were either identified by the departments as training and testing, or showed patterns typical of training operations, and were removed. Once the list was edited, the review found 611 incidents that lasted at least 15 seconds.

Sarah Cohen is an assistant editor for computer-assisted reporting. She joined The Times as a reporter in August 2012. She previously worked at The Washington Post and shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. More about Sarah Cohen.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Officials say a new law to decrease the number of people being jailed solely because they need mental health treatment has led to fewer people with serious mental illness detained in jails – but the data is contradictory and incomplete. 

A state agency, counties and community mental health centers – all of which have roles in carrying out the new law – reported vastly different numbers of people who spent time in jail during the civil commitment process during the first three months the law was effective. 

Community mental health centers reported that 43 people were jailed from July to September 2024, less than half the number the Department of Mental Health reported: 102 people. And the department’s figure is likely an underrepresentation, because it only documents people who were later admitted to a state hospital – meaning the figure does not include people who were jailed before they were released or received treatment elsewhere. 

Department of Mental Health spokesperson Adam Moore told Mississippi Today he couldn’t explain the discrepancy.

Counties’ reporting of commitment data has been patchy since lawmakers mandated chancery courts to report psychiatric commitment data to the state in 2023. Only 43 of Mississippi’s 82 chancery court clerks complied and submitted the most recent report. Those counties reported a total of 25 people being held in jail during the same period while in the civil commitment process. 

Six counties – Alcorn, Choctaw, Holmes, Issaquena, Kemper and Sharkey – have never reported the data to the state. Only Choctaw County Chancery Clerk Steve Montgomery responded to Mississippi Today’s inquiries as to why, saying he was not aware the court had not reported the data. 

“It’s been inconsistent. It’s been sometimes just absent in different parts of the state,” said Rep. Sam Creekmore IV, a Republican from New Albany who chairs the Public Health and Human Services Committee. “And so it’s really hard for us to evaluate how well or how bad we’re doing when the numbers aren’t consistent.” 

Creekmore sponsored changes to Mississippi’s civil commitment law in 2024 and reporting requirements in 2023. He said he plans to propose legislation this year that would ensure more counties submit mandatory data. 

“It really makes it impossible to legislate changes to (the new civil commitment laws) when our data is not complete,” he said. 

After changes to the civil commitment law passed last year, Creekmore said the Department of Mental Health would “police” counties to ensure compliance. But the agency told Mississippi Today and ProPublica it would educate county officials and mental health workers on the new law, but wouldn’t enforce it.

The Department of Mental Health sends quarterly reminders to clerks about reporting deadlines, has provided access to training videos, written instructions and established a help desk for technical questions, said Moore, the agency’s spokesperson.

The state Legislature approved changes to the state’s civil commitment law in May after Mississippi Today and ProPublica reporting revealed that hundreds of people with no criminal charges were held in Mississippi jails each year as they awaited involuntary mental health evaluation and treatment. They frequently received no mental health care in jail and were treated like criminal defendants.

The new law went into effect in July 2024. Now, local community mental health center staffers screen people who are reported to be a potential danger to themself or others before they are taken into state custody and must note why a less restrictive treatment is not an option. A person cannot be held in jail unless all other options for care have been exhausted, they are “actively violent” and never for more than 48 hours. 

The new law also requires that people in crisis see mental health professionals first. The screeners can recommend commitment or suggest voluntary treatment options that are more suitable, avoiding the civil commitment process entirely. 

Over 500 people were diverted to a less restrictive treatment than civil commitment, and 1,330 screenings for commitment by mental health professionals were conducted statewide during the first three months after the new law took effect, according to community mental health center reports. 

Wait times in jail for people who have been ordered to be admitted to a state hospital by a judge decreased by a day and a half in a year, said Moore, but the agency does not know how long people wait in jail before a judge orders commitment. 

“I think this was the most sweeping change they’ve made since I’ve been in office,” said Butch Scipper, who has served as the chancery clerk of Quitman County since 1992, of the new law. 

He, like many other chancery court judges, sheriffs and mental health professionals, have lauded the policy for weaning Mississippi off its longstanding dependence on jails to house people with severe mental illness awaiting treatment at the state hospital.

Most states do not regularly hold people in jail without charges during the psychiatric civil commitment process. At least 12 states and the District of Columbia prohibit the practice entirely. And only one Mississippi jail was certified by the state to house people awaiting court-ordered psychiatric treatment in 2023. 

Sheriffs, who have long decried the burden of housing people with mental health concerns in jails as inappropriate and unsafe, have been largely supportive of changes to the law. 

“It’s fantastic for the sheriffs, because the sheriffs don’t want people that are sick in the jail,” said Will Allen, the attorney for the Mississippi Sheriffs Association. “They certainly don’t want people who have not committed a crime in the jail.”

Challenges with implementation

Implementing the law has proved challenging for areas of the state with limited resources, particularly those without nearby crisis stabilization units, which provide short-term treatment to people in psychiatric crises.

And even in well-resourced areas, limited crisis beds can force counties to transport patients or house them in a nearby private treatment facility at their own expense. 

Community mental health centers, which run the state’s crisis stabilization units, reported this happening 114 times due to limited bed or staffing capacity between July and September 2024. 

There are 14 state-funded crisis stabilization units with 204 beds – up from 180 last year – across the state. 

The restrictions on housing people in jail have proved to be a “nightmare” for Calhoun County, which is more than 30 miles away from the nearest crisis stabilization unit, said Chancery Clerk Kathy Poyner. 

“We don’t have anywhere else to put them,” she said. “We can’t afford a psychiatric cell. Rural counties just can’t meet the financial obligations.” 

Law enforcement officers are legally responsible for transporting patients. But some counties argue this can be costly and time consuming for their officers. 

The state’s crisis stabilization unit beds were never all full during fiscal year 2024, said Adam Moore, spokesperson for the Department of Mental Health. “There is always an open CSU bed somewhere in the state if a sheriff is willing to transport a person,” he said. 

Creekmore said he also hopes to introduce a bill for a pilot transportation program that would offset the costs of transporting patients to mental health treatment. The program would be modeled after a similar one in Tennessee.

The Department of Mental Health has provided additional funding to community health centers for mental health screening, crisis stabilization units, mobile crisis response teams and court liaisons, but does not fund transportation by law enforcement officers.

Being responsible for transportation rather than jailing people is a good deal for sheriffs, said Allen, because the costs of transportation pale in comparison to the liability risks of holding someone experiencing an acute mental health crisis in jail. 

“That was sort of the tradeoff,” he said. “They’re not going to be in jail, but (law enforcement is) going to have to take them places.”

Some counties have explored other solutions, like establishing crisis stabilization units closer to home. 

DeSoto County will open a 16-bed stabilization unit in Hernando this year, said County Supervisor Lee Caldwell. Funding the new facility quickly in the wake of the new law was challenging but necessary because the county is a significant distance from the nearest crisis centers, she said. 

Some advocates say the law’s stipulations should be more stringently supervised by the state. 

The law includes no provisions to ensure that counties detain only people who meet the law’s stringent requirements – there are no other options and the person is “actively violent” – and do not hold people longer than 48 hours. 

Greta Martin, the litigation director for Disability Rights Mississippi, said the lack of oversight in the law is concerning. 

“If you are enacting legislation with a 48-hour cap on people being held in county jail and you do not provide any oversight ensuring that county jails are adhering to that, what’s the point of the legislation?” she said. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.