JACKSON, Miss. — The Mississippi Capitol Police, which has shot four people since it began patrolling parts of Jackson last summer, will adopt an updated use-of-force policy soon that better reflects modern standards and the agency’s expanded role, a state official said Thursday.
The Capitol Police hasn’t changed its policy manual since 2006, when the department was primarily responsible for providing security for government buildings. The current manual also predates a decade-old reform movement that sparked changes at police departments across the country, such as barring chokeholds and requiring officers to use de-escalation techniques.
Sean Tindell, commissioner of the state Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Capitol Police, said the agency has been working on updating its policies for months. Tindell said he was under the impression that some new policies had already gone into effect.
But after NBC News received heavily redacted copies of the agency’s use-of-force and car chase policies through a public records request, and asked why those policies had not been updated since 2006, Tindell said he asked staff for an update. He said that new versions of those policies would be enacted “very soon, probably within the next week or so.”
“Times have changed and expectations have changed so we needed to be reviewing and updating those policies anyway,” Tindell said.
The updated use-of-force policy will include more restrictions on the use of chokeholds, Tindell said. He declined to discuss other changes to that policy, saying he had not yet compared the two documents closely. The revisions are part of a broader effort to update policies for all 11 divisions under the Department of Public Safety, which also oversees the Highway Patrol, Bureau of Narcotics and the Bureau of Investigation, Tindell said.
“Would it have been better to have all that updated in the first month of my tenure as commissioner? Absolutely. Is that practical? I…
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