Senatobia fired its police chief tonight.
Harold Vanderford tried to resign first. The Board of Aldermen refused the resignation and voted him out instead. There is a difference. One lets a man walk. The other puts it on the record.
Sixty years old, twenty-nine years in law enforcement. Brought in last October to “clean up” a department that had already forced out its previous chief, after one of his officers arrested a 10-year-old Black boy for urinating in public. Vanderford was hired and was supposed to bring “something new.”
Then Mississippi Today, Verite News and the New York Times got his texts. “N—-“ more than a dozen times across ten conversations. He said he was “having a racist moment.” 10 times? He bragged about nearly beating a Black man and a white woman. The messages kept going after he was sworn in. Three months before a Senatobia officer killed a baby, he was texting that slur about a college athlete.
When it broke on August 25, the mayor and aldermen met him behind closed doors and announced they had confidence in him. They called his answers sincere.
The people of Senatobia did not accept that. They emptied that Walmart parking lot for days. Patrick Lumumba and the Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency kept the demand in the city’s face until the board moved. That vote was not a change of heart. It was pressure.
Now hold all of it against June 14.
Kohen Wiley was one year old. Police came to that Walmart over a box of diapers. The woman accused was never charged. An officer fired. Kohen died in the front seat.
Police said the car drove at officers and nearly struck one. Dr. Roger Mitchell’s independent autopsy ruled it a homicide and found the shot entered the right side of his chest and exited the left, with glass consistent with the passenger window, not the windshield.
Shot from the side. Not head on.
That department’s chief was writing what he was writing. That department trained those officers. That department wrote the first account of what happened. And the video is still sealed.
This is why we do not take their word for it.
Firing him is not justice. It is a start.
Release the video. Say his name: Kohen Wiley.