An old, familiar story is unfolding once again in Mississippi, as federal officials gather evidence and consider whether to open a broad investigation or to file charges against the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office for a pattern of civil rights violations that mirrors the lynch mob “justice” seen in the Jim Crow and civil rights eras.
A group of the department’s deputies were sentenced to prison in April for brutally torturing and sexually abusing two innocent Black men, Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, in a racist attack in January 2023 that lasted more than an hour. The police encounter began because a white neighbor phoned Rankin County Deputy Brett McAlpin and complained that a white woman had two Black men as guests in her home, a scenario that recalls a time in Mississippi when any sign of racial solidarity, or simply intermingling, would invite violence and danger (think Emmett Till). Another officer in Rankin County was sentenced on Wednesday to a year in federal prison for forcing a Latino man to lick urine off a jail cell floor.
The fallout started after an investigation last November by The New York Times and Mississippi Today began to uncover a campaign of terror by police in Rankin County that stretches back at least two decades, targeting Black, brown, and poor people for unlawful arrests and gangland-style beatings that typically had no relation to legitimate law enforcement goals. The deputies in fact self-identified as a group of lawless thugs, calling themselves the “Goon Squad” and using violence and even killing as a way to attain status within their group, just like any old criminal street gang.
Rankin County deputies routinely break into residents’ homes in the middle of the night, with or without legal suspicion, and virtually always without a warrant, and then handcuff and torture them for information or evidence of a crime, according to the investigation. Deputies beat people with fists, batons, and pistols, and even waterboard people and subject them to mock executions. Reported incidents include deputies choking people with lamp cords; shocking them in the genitals with Tasers; drawing a swastika on a person’s forehead and leaving it intact for the mug shot; engaging in sexual humiliation and threats of rape; and beating people so severely that they urinated or defecated on themselves.
Although most of the accusers are white—as is Rankin County, whose population is 71 percent white—every Black accuser reported that deputies freely used racial slurs against them, and would routinely tell them to “go back to their side” of the Pearl River. That’s a reference to predominantly Black Jackson, Mississippi. Justice Department prosecutors said the Goon Squad used a “challenge coin” to identify themselves, and that the first draft of the coin displayed a Confederate flag and a noose.
Incidentally, those symbols, along with the phrase “Mississippi Justice,” were printed on a T-shirt worn by a Mississippi voter in a viral photo in 2018. The message, including the underlying threat of racist violence, is clear.
A 2023 United Nations report on policing found that systemic anti-Black racism “pervades America’s police forces and criminal justice system.”
The Goon Squad would have continued to get away with their campaign of terror were it not for the shocking violence of the torture incident involving Jenkins and Parker, during which an officer shot Jenkins in the mouth while attempting a mock execution, and the dubious cover-up the deputies manufactured afterward. Before that, the corrupt and violent operations of the department were carried out openly and with relative impunity for years. Attempts by a number of victims to file formal complaints went ignored, despite the fact that the “pattern of violence … was neither confined to a small group of deputies nor hidden from department leaders,” according to Mississippi Today.
Local civil rights officials, policing and legal experts, and even The New York Times have all pointed out the through line between policing in Rankin County today and past eras of racist Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow violence in the South.
“It’s the hidden shame of Mississippi and America,” and people “are still trying to cover it up,” Priscilla Perkins, co-president of the John & Vera Mae Perkins Foundation, told the Times last November. The foundation works on racial reconciliation in Jackson.
That shameful kind of “justice” was documented throughout the country in a 2023 United Nations report on policing, which found that systemic anti-Black racism “pervades America’s police forces and criminal justice system,” and said “US authorities must urgently step up efforts to reform them.” The report showed not only that the U.S. justice system is pervaded by certain uniquely inhumane practices, but also that the worst abuses are often reserved for nonwhite Americans and especially Black people, as I wrote in a column last October.
Those dynamics can be seen in the stories coming out of Rankin County, and they clearly reflect legacies of our history of slavery and legalized apartheid, as the U.N. panel put it in 2023.
Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey has proudly stated that his mentor was in fact a notorious racist and Jim Crow–era Mississippi lawman: a sheriff known to the Black community as Lloyd “Goon” Jones, due to his brutal tactics and involvement in high-profile incidents of police brutality against Black people and civil rights activists in the 1960s and ’70s. Jones bragged about being the triggerman in the infamous killing of an innocent Black bystander, Benjamin Brown, during a student protest at Jackson State University in 1967, according to an FBI cold case investigation.
The Goon Squad’s operations are even connected to one of the most recent examples of a racial terror killing or lynching in America, when ten white teenagers murdered James Craig Anderson in Jackson in 2011. Christian Dedmon, one of the recently convicted deputies, is reportedly a first cousin to Deryl Dedmon, who is still serving 50 years on a hate crime conviction for lynching and killing Anderson, according to the local NBC affiliate in Jackson.
Despite all this, and a looming federal investigation and potential lawsuit, the sheriff ran unopposed and was actually re-elected last November. He has since made few changes to his department, while also rejecting calls to resign from local activists and the Rankin County NAACP. (The county NAACP chapter is working to petition Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, to remove Bailey from office.)
The stories that people in Rankin County are finally able to tell the world are a glaring reminder that attitudes and policing in many areas across the country have not changed much since the days when other sheriff’s deputies arrested and severely beat up a group of mostly Black boycotters, including Tougaloo College students and two ministers, for no apparent cause; or when another Mississippi sheriff’s deputy in Neshoba County arrested three civil rights workers during “Freedom Summer” in 1964 before joining a group of Klansmen to murder the men. And they demonstrate the continuing need for stronger federal intervention in those states and jurisdictions. Despite what people like Chief Justice John Roberts think, we are still leaps and bounds away from becoming a society in which color doesn’t matter.
