Two state lawmakers in Mississippi have introduced bills to restrict the use of Tasers by police following an investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times that revealed lax oversight and dangerous use of the weapons across the state. 

The bills, both sponsored by Democrats, are likely to face pushback from law enforcement officials and significant hurdles in a legislature controlled by Republicans. 

One, House Bill 1596, proposed by Rep. Omeria Scott of Laurel, would ban police in Mississippi from using Tasers. The other, Senate Bill 2317, introduced by Sen. Bradford Blackmon of Canton, would allow Taser use only in circumstances where deadly force by police officers is justifiable. It would also bar officers from shocking people who are elderly, pregnant, mentally ill or intoxicated.

Sen. Blackmon said he drafted his bill after learning from recent reporting by Mississippi Today and The Times that there are no statewide guidelines for how law enforcement officers use Tasers. 

The news organizations found that departments in Mississippi have developed a patchwork of outdated Taser policies that often do not address whether officers can shock children or people with known medical conditions. Most do not bar officers from using Tasers against someone in handcuffs. 

Few departments aggressively monitor Taser use, even though the devices keep an electronic log of every activation. Reporters used those logs, gathered from departments across the state, to uncover hundreds of suspicious Taser incidents, including some where the person was shocked for far longer than experts consider safe.

In 2023, one of the state’s most extreme examples of Taser abuse was uncovered when Mississippi Today and Tthe New York Times found that a group of sheriff’s deputies in Rankin County, some of whom called themselves the Goon Squad, used their Tasers for years to torture people they suspected of using drugs.

Blackmon said that similar abuses could be prevented by his bill, which requires officers to receive additional training and provide detailed reports of the circumstances that led to each Taser deployment.

“That type of activity could be erased,” Blackmon said. “Or at least caught a whole lot earlier than after you terrorize a whole county for as long as they did.” 

After six former officers associated with the Goon Squad were sentenced to decades in prison for torturing three men last year, the Justice Department announced it was investigating a possible pattern of civil rights abuses at the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. 

However, the new leadership of the Justice Department under President Donald Trump has circulated a memo, obtained by the New York Times, pausing new civil rights investigations into law enforcement agencies, raising doubts about whether the case will proceed. 

Scott said that because Mississippi has neglected to create safety standards around officer Taser use for so long, she drafted a bill that would take the weapon away.

Developing a standard is “the least that should be done,” Scott said. “We’ve had people tortured at the hands of law enforcement using these weapons.” 

Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell said that Tasers are critical tools that help prevent injuries to the public and police. 

“I just think an outright ban would not be good policy,” Tindell said, adding that limiting Taser use to deadly force encounters or banning their use on potentially vulnerable groups would put undue pressure on officers making split-second decisions with limited information. 

However, requiring officers throughout the state to report their Taser use and mandating additional training were ideas Tindell said he thought were worth discussing.

Tindell plans to address the issue at the next meeting of the state’s Board on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Training. He said that if Mississippi law enforcement leaders and community stakeholders thought a statewide Taser standard could be beneficial, he would consider what rules would be helpful to establish. 

Pearl Police Chief Nick McLendon rejected the idea of banning the weapon, saying “Tasers have been one of the best advances in technology in modern-day policing.” 

But he noted that some statewide reforms could be helpful, including requiring all departments to document when their officers use Tasers and providing cadets at the state’s law enforcement academy with Taser training, which individual agencies currently must provide.. 

Beverly Padgett, whose son died after being shocked by Simpson County sheriff’s deputies, said she supports measures to bring more accountability to Taser use by law enforcement. 

In 2023, her 34-year-old son, Jared Padgett, said he was hallucinating, so the family called the Simpson County Sheriff’s Department to help transport him to the hospital. Beverly said that rather than helping Jared, who was unarmed and following commands, one deputy shot him with a Taser, causing Jared to flee. 

Taser logs show deputies deployed their Tasers 17 times for 94 seconds during the incident, which ended in Jared Padgett being fatally shot by police after he drove off in an officer’s vehicle. 

“I hope the bills pass,” Beverly Padgett said. “You can’t just repeatedly put someone through that amount of pain and not help them. Their job is to protect and serve, not to hurt people.” 

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

Mississippi universities scrambled to understand the far-reaching implications of a memo issued by the White House late Monday night that ordered a temporary freeze of all federal grants, specifically those supporting research and programs that do not align with President Donald Trump’s ideology.

The Office of Management and Budget memo, which is set to take effect at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, sparked widespread anxiety in faculty, staff and administrators at Mississippi’s universities where federal dollars fund everything from research into automated blackberry harvesting, medical centers focused on major diseases affecting Mississippians, salaries, and tuition and health insurance for graduate students.

In total, Mississippi’s universities receive more than $530 million in federal funding for research, with the bulk of that going to Mississippi State University and the University of Mississippi. It’s still unclear what will happen to programs at those universities, but likely to be affected is research on topics impacted by Trump’s flurry of executive orders targeting federal grants that support illegal immigrants or promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, abortion and gender ideology.

The memo does not apply to federal assistance to students, such as student loans or Pell Grants for low-income students, the Trump administration clarified on Tuesday.

As of press time, little information was available about what that will look like or if the universities are putting any programs on pause. The Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees released a statement that it was monitoring the OMB directive.

“We are aware of the temporary pause on federal financial assistance programs and its potential impact on the state’s public universities,” John Sewell, the IHL spokesperson, wrote in a statement.

Sid Salter, Mississippi State’s vice president for strategic communications, said any further comment beyond IHL’s statement was premature.

“Because of the size of our research enterprise, it’s a lot to review, so we’re going to review before we speak,” Salter said.

In a statement, State Auditor Shad White, who has repeatedly called for Mississippi lawmakers to ban state funding for DEI initiatives, applauded the memo.

“President Trump’s decision to freeze federal dollars going towards DEI and other racial social engineering policies is 100% the right move,” White said.

At the University of Mississippi, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences called a 9:30 a.m. emergency meeting, but administrators were not able to answer questions from the handful of faculty who showed up.

“They’re in triage but also not really knowing like, what they can triage,” said James Thomas, a sociology professor who attended the meeting.

Thomas said the administrator who led the meeting told faculty that the college was prioritizing financial support for student researchers who are funded with federal dollars, but the plan for how that would happen was unclear. The university receives federal funds in the form of reimbursements.

Any other spending that was not “mission critical” should be paused, Thomas said the faculty were told.

This led a biology professor to ask what would happen to their animals.

“We have live animals and they need to get fed and we feed them with these federal dollars,” Thomas recalled the biology professor saying, to which the administrator responded, “Don’t charge anything to your grants today. We can’t guarantee you that we would be able to reimburse for any cost.”

The sociology department has two graduate students with federal funding, Thomas said. He was just about to send acceptance letters to students for a 10-week summer fellowship focused on preparing for a STEM career.

But since the fellowship has the word “race” in the title, Thomas said he thinks his National Science Foundation grant will likely be canceled. He tried checking the NSF website to confirm the title, but it wasn’t working as of Tuesday morning.

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

Mississippi earned low marks for preventable deaths related to heart disease, hypertension, obesity, and diabetes, and high marks for declining opioid overdose deaths and school-aged vaccination rates on its public health report card for 2024. 

The state has moved to being ranked 49th in the country – up from 54th last year – in America’s Health Rankings, which were released Tuesday, said State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney at a press conference at the State Capitol in Jackson. 

“The number is not what’s important, it’s the lives that have been saved that this number represents,” he said. 

The annual report, which reviews the state’s health indicators and highlights areas of progress and those in need of improvement, is produced by the Mississippi Department of Health and the Mississippi State Medical Association. 

Mississippi has high rates of preventable deaths from heart disease, hypertension, obesity, and diabetes. The report estimates that over 195,000 years of life were lost before age 75 in Mississippi due to preventable deaths in 2024. 

Mississippi has long led the country in child vaccination rates, but slipped to third in 2024 following a federal ruling that decreed parents can opt out of vaccinating their children for school due to religious beliefs. 

There has been a “modest improvement” in maternal and infant mortality rates in the state, though Mississippi is ranked 45th and 50th, respectively, in those categories. Edney called the state’s high infant mortality rates “absolutely unacceptable.” 

There has been a reduction in opioid related overdose deaths in the state for the past two years, Edney reported, and the state had the 14th lowest opioid overdose rate in the nation in 2023. HIV and tuberculosis rates have also declined. 

Dr. Jennifer Bryan, the president of the Mississippi State Medical Association, said the report is “a call to action for physicians, lawmakers, and community leaders to work together to reduce preventable deaths and invest in long-term health solutions for our state.”

Bryan said she hoped to see lawmakers pass legislation addressing consumption of kratom, an herbal substance that can be bought at gas stations and produces effects similar to opioids and stimulants and can be addictive.

Bryan and Edney both declined to publicly call for Medicaid expansion but said health insurance coverage and access to primary care physicians and routine screenings are essential to ensuring the health of Mississippians. Bryan said she hopes legislators will “get creative” and find a way to ensure more Mississippians have access to health coverage. 

Lawmakers came close but did not succeed in passing Medicaid expansion during last year’s session. The state remains one of 10 to not expand Medicaid. 

Edney said that the Department of Health will focus on school-aged health promotion, obesity, diabetes and a new obstetric system of care – a not-yet-implemented program that would designate hospitals’ level of obstetric care to serve patients with varying levels of risk – in the coming year. 

The Department of Health made a small request for increased appropriations from the state Legislature for the coming year, focusing on several new programs to train early-career doctors and help Mississippians enroll in health insurance coverage. 

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