Latest news with #GoonSquad
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
ACLU of Mississippi demands transparency in police oversight cases
RANKIN COUNTY, Miss. (WJTV) – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Mississippi and local partners launched the Seven States Safety Campaign on May 21. According to the ACLU, they filed coordinated public records requests to uncover police misconduct in Rankin County, Mississippi, and six other states where the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), under former President Joe Biden, found police engaged in unconstitutional and racially discriminatory policing. Goon Squad victims reach $2.5 million settlement with Rankin County, sheriff's office In addition to Rankin County, demands were filed over the last 24 hours in Tennessee, Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, Minnesota, and Kentucky. The organization said the Trump administration has begun reversing course, including by attempting to rescind near-final agreements in Minneapolis and Louisville. 'There is no one, regardless of race or political party, who can justify the DOJ's abrupt decision to no longer investigate and hold accountable the Rankin County Sheriff's Department,' said Jarvis Dortch, executive director of the ACLU of Mississippi. 'The Trump administration is essentially giving a green light for police misconduct and unconstitutional policing. If the agency that allowed the goon squad to operate for years doesn't warrant federal investigation, no law enforcement agency does.' The DOJ prosecuted Rankin County deputies, who were known as the 'Goon Squad,' for federal criminal civil rights violations related to the violent assaults of two Black men, Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker. Six former law enforcement officers pled guilty and were sentenced in connection to the Goon Squad case. The DOJ opened an investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff's Department in September 2024. However, the ACLU said the Trump administration ceased the DOJ's civil rights work. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Associated Press
06-05-2025
- Associated Press
Officials in a Mississippi county settle lawsuit filed by 2 Black men tortured by deputies
Rankin County officials announced last week that they had settled a lawsuit filed by Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker—who were brutalized by sheriff's deputies in 2023—for $2.5 million. 'This amount, for Mississippi, is historic,' said Trent Walker, the attorney for the two men. 'I can't think of an excessive force settlement larger than this.' Six Rankin County law enforcement officers handcuffed, beat and shocked Jenkins and Parker with Tasers before shooting Jenkins in the mouth during a warrantless raid of Parker's home. 'This is the ending of the Michael Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker case from the perspective' of the Rankin County Sheriff's Department, said its lawyer, Jason Dare. The county's insurance policy will cover $2 million of that payment, he said. The remaining $500,000 will come from the sheriff's coffers, which is funded by taxpayer dollars, Dare said, but taxpayers won't have to pay for any increase to the department's budget. Last year, a federal judge sentenced the six officers — former deputies Brett McAlpin, Jeffrey Middleton, Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward and Daniel Opdyke and former Richland police officer Joshua Hartfield — to between 10 and 40 years in federal prison for their roles in the 2023 torture of Jenkins and Parker. Middleton's shift called themselves the 'Goon Squad' and created a WhatsApp channel and commemorative coins featuring the moniker and drawings of mobsters. An investigation by Mississippi Today and The New York Times exposed a decades-long reign of terror by nearly two dozen Rankin County deputies, but the six officers are the only ones who have been charged. During the officers' sentencing hearings, former deputies and prosecutors said the torture of Jenkins and Parker was far from isolated. In at least nine incidents over five years, McAlpin brutalized people during arrests, prosecutors said. 'McAlpin is the one who molded these men into what they became,' federal prosecutor Christopher Perras told the judge. 'He modeled that behavior for young impressionable officers, and it's no wonder that they followed his lead.' Dare said the sheriff's office has taken steps to ensure such behavior ceases. 'The compliance director, Captain Wayne Carter, and the (Internal Affairs) investigators, do an excellent job of going through everything now to make sure that something similar to what happened in January 2023 never happens again,' he said. The events in Braxton had impacted not only Mr. Jenkins, 'but also the Rankin County community and the fine, upstanding law enforcement officers who are with the Rankin County Sheriff's Department, who have weathered the storm that has ensued since that day,' Dare said. 'We hope that this resolution brings some sense of finality.' ___ This story was originally published by Mississippi Today and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
State Auditor investigates sheriff for alleged use of inmates on farm
JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – State Auditor Shad White has opened an investigation into Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey. This follows reports that jail inmates worked on his family farm, using taxpayer-funded equipment. The Auditor's Office confirmed on March 28 that White ordered the investigation after a New York Times and Mississippi Today investigation alleged Bailey used trustees to staff his mother's chicken farm in Puckett. The report said the inmates cleaned chicken houses, cleared land and used county-owned equipment. Justice Department opens civil rights probe into Mississippi sheriff's office after torture of 2 Black men Former Rankin County Deputy Christian Dedmon admitted to participating in the work as he serves a federal sentenced linked to the Goon Squad scandal. Bailey has not responded, but his attorney, Jason Dare, issued a statement defending the trustee program. He said inmates receive wages and claimed the chicken supplies were for a jail coop. The State Auditor's Office issued the following statement to WJTV 12 News: The office and Auditor White are aware of the reporting and Auditor White has ordered an investigation to begin. We cannot prosecute anyone, but we will be contacting federal prosecutors to discuss how to proceed in coordination with their previous work on the sheriff's office. State Auditor's Office Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
27-03-2025
- New York Times
‘You're His Property': How One Sheriff Used Inmate Labor on His Family Farm
Bryan Bailey, the Mississippi sheriff whose department had been under federal investigation for torturing people, staffed his mother's commercial chicken farm with inmates from the county jail and used taxpayer-purchased equipment to improve the grounds, according to four former inmates and a former deputy who said they had worked on the farm. They said inmates with special privileges, known as trusties, were repeatedly driven to the farm — sometimes by Sheriff Bailey himself — to perform various tasks on top of their daily work duties for Rankin County. Former trusties and others who worked on Sheriff Bailey's family farm said inmates had received cash or meals in exchange for the work. The former deputy, Christian Dedmon, who is currently serving a federal prison sentence, said he had worked on the farm while he was on the clock at the sheriff's department. Over six months, reporters for Mississippi Today interviewed several former Rankin County sheriff's deputies and 20 former trusties. The trusties who said they had worked on the farm asked that their names not be used because they feared retribution. The reporters also reviewed more than 1,000 pages of county financial records, as well as text messages Mr. Dedmon sent while working on the farm. The reporting revealed that for most of his 13 years in office, Sheriff Bailey used his position as the highest paid and most powerful public figure in his suburban county in ways that financially benefited himself and his family. Through his department's attorney, Sheriff Bailey declined to comment for this article. For years, people familiar with the sheriff's activities kept quiet, out of a sense of loyalty or because they feared crossing a popular sheriff with political connections across Mississippi. But that began to change in 2023, when five Rankin County sheriff's deputies were charged with civil rights offenses for torturing two Black men in their home and shooting one of them in the mouth. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today revealed that deputies in the department, including those who called themselves the Goon Squad, had used similar brutality for nearly two decades against those they suspected of using or dealing drugs. Dozens of victims have since shared their accounts of the violence and some community leaders have demanded that Sheriff Bailey resign. Mr. Dedmon, one of the five Rankin deputies who pleaded guilty in the torture case, has begun speaking openly about his time at the department. 'I hid everything for him,' Mr. Dedmon said of the sheriff. 'I done everything for him. I know now I was just a tool to be used during a certain time like everyone else.' In a series of interviews, Mr. Dedmon described how he had transported inmates from the Rankin County Pre-Trial Detention Trusty Work Program to the farm and worked alongside them. Mr. Dedmon said the sheriff had instructed him to use a construction vehicle, bought by the department in 2019 for $97,000, to till soil for corn and clear wooded areas on the farm. The vehicle, called a skid steer by those who used it, was sometimes stored there, he said. Mr. Dedmon said workers on the farm also used other items that had been purchased by the department, including weed killer. County financial records show that since 2018, the sheriff's department has purchased skid steer attachments worth more than $50,000, nearly $10,000 worth of weed killer, as well as supplies designed to care for poultry. Reporters provided officials with a detailed list of purchases, along with specific descriptions of the duties detailed by trusties. Neither department officials nor county leaders would explain the purchases or answer questions for this article. Jason Dare, the attorney for the sheriff's department, said officials would no longer answer questions from Mississippi Today or The Times because a previous article from the publications had summarized a written statement by Mr. Dare instead of running it in full. That article quoted much of Mr. Dare's statement, but did not include his complaints that the news organizations had not written positive stories about the department. In addition to the farm work, former trusties said Sheriff Bailey had directed them to craft cabinets, install flooring or do other work for him and his associates. Several former trusties said they had worked on vehicles owned by deputies or by the sheriff, who earns nearly $120,000 a year, making him one of the highest paid elected officials in Mississippi. Mr. Dedmon said that in 2020, he paid trusties to build the back deck of his home, at Sheriff Bailey's suggestion. A photograph shared by Mr. Dedmon's ex-wife and dated Feb. 29, 2020, shows Mr. Dedmon and three other men, all in civilian clothing, working on the deck. Several people familiar with the men identified two of them as former trusties who, records show, were serving jail time when the picture was taken. Mississippi law prohibits the use of public money or property by elected officials for their own use. Violations are punishable by fines or up to 20 years in prison. And the Mississippi Code of Ethics in Government bars public servants from using their positions for the economic gain of businesses with which they or their relatives are associated. 'That's broader than just using inmate labor, but it certainly includes using inmate labor,' said Roun McNeal, an instructional assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Mississippi who serves on the board overseeing a state work program for prison inmates. Nearly all the former inmates interviewed by Mississippi Today praised the trusty program, saying it had helped them beat addiction and build skills for life after release. Several said they had no complaints about the work they did, including their duties at the farm. But other trusties said they had felt intense pressure to do whatever was asked of them without complaint. Rankin County's trusty program enables defendants to serve time in the county jail instead of going to a state prison. The program grants trusties special privileges and assigns them duties to help run the jail, all without pay, a common practice in trusty work programs across the nation. To become a trusty, some inmates signed documents agreeing to accept the maximum sentence for their crimes if they were 'removed from the program for any reason.' Trusties entered the program at Sheriff Bailey's recommendation, and department officials decided if and when trusties had violated the terms of their agreements, according to Andy Sumrall, a criminal defense attorney based in Jackson, Miss., who has represented a number of former trusties. 'The way the sheriff's trusty program is, you're his property,' one former trusty said. 'This ain't happening.' McLain Farms sits beside a two-lane road that snakes through the patchwork of farmland and forest south of Puckett, a quiet town in Rankin County with a welcome sign that reads: '300 good friendly folks and a few old soreheads.' The 38-acre farm came into Sheriff Bailey's family when his mother remarried in 1997. The farm yields corn and other produce, but its primary focus is raising chickens. In recent years, McLain has housed about 10,000 chickens annually for Tyson Foods, which harvests the eggs. Several former inmates who worked on the farm, all interviewed separately, said they were told by other trusties to keep the work secret. One recalled Sheriff Bailey warning trusties at the farm: 'We're not here. This ain't happening.' According to Mr. Dedmon, the sheriff often took two or more trusties to the farm in the afternoons to complete small tasks, like spraying weeds, sorting tools or cutting grass. The farm generates almost 300 tons of waste a year, a mixture of feces, feathers, uneaten feed and bedding. During the annual mucking of the chicken houses, the sheriff would have about six trusties on the farm every day, Mr. Dedmon said. At 9:29 the night before Halloween in 2020, Mr. Dedmon messaged his then-wife and told her he was covered in chicken waste, a text reviewed by Mississippi Today shows. She told reporters that work would sometimes last until 3 a.m. After one cleaning, a former trusty recalled, the sheriff took a dozen or so inmates in civilian clothes to Boots & More in Jackson, where he bought them replacements for their ruined boots. That former trusty said he worked 12-hour days every Saturday and Sunday for a month, in addition to several weekday evenings that lasted into the early morning hours. He said he was never paid. Dan Pacholke, a corrections consultant and co-founder of the Sustainability in Prisons Project, called the use of inmate labor for personal profit 'a huge ethical violation,' because the sheriff 'has the ability to control their destiny.' Even if inmates were paid, working on the sheriff's family farm could raise ethical concerns, according to Mr. Pacholke and other experts. 'Every decision you make about inmates, their agency is conflicted in some way, because they don't voluntarily live at that jail,' said Mr. McNeal, the criminal justice professor. Trusties gave different descriptions about their pay, which often depended on the kind of work they performed. But none of them described a formal process in which checks were issued or money was deposited into any account. Experts said that cash payments raised concerns about transparency, as they are impossible to track. The sheriff's department did not fulfill a records request made early this month seeking any documents related to payments to trusties. Taxpayer-funded chicken supplies In addition to relying on inmate labor to supplement the work force at his mother's chicken farm, Sheriff Bailey also used county funds and supplies at the farm, according to Mr. Dedmon, another former deputy and others familiar with the work. Mr. Dedmon and another person who worked on the farm told Mississippi Today that the sheriff had instructed them to take truckloads of gravel from the Rankin County government's stockpile and use it to resurface roads on the farm. Mr. Dedmon said he would sneak onto county property at night, sometimes with Sheriff Bailey, to take the gravel. 'I can't tell you how many loads of county gravel I've hauled down there on the weekends or at night with his dump trailer, or rode with him to do so,' Mr. Dedmon said. According to Mr. Dedmon, the sheriff had magnets made to conceal the sheriff's star on the department vehicle Mr. Dedmon used to pick up the gravel. The magnets, Mr. Dedmon said, were marked with the name of a nonexistent business, derived from the name of a former trusty: 'Cazell's Welding.' A photo taken last month shows gray gravel on the roads where Mr. Dedmon said the county gravel had been placed. The skid steer that Mr. Dedmon described using on the farm had been purchased by the department for search and rescue teams with money seized during drug raids, county documents show. Deputies said it was intended to help with storm cleanup. Mr. Dedmon mentioned the skid steer in a text message to his then-wife on Sept. 16, 2020: 'I just wanted to come home, but damn sheriff just came in here and asked me to run the skid steer to pucket for him.' County records show that in April 2019, the sheriff's department used $36,000 seized from drug busts to buy a mulching head. Mr. Dedmon said Sheriff Bailey had used it to clear land on the farm. The sheriff's department also spent about $600 on items typically used in poultry farming. Among them: poultry netting, brooder lamps, which keep chicks warm, and an 'angled house brooder' to house chicks. Angela English, president of the Rankin County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., which had called for Sheriff Bailey's resignation over the torture case, said more should be done to hold the sheriff accountable. 'When you provide someone with that much authority and they don't have to answer to anyone,' she said, 'you're asking for trouble.' Mississippi Today's reporting for this article was supported by a grant from Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures, a nonprofit research foundation that supports journalism.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Law and disorder: Police oversight and training confront a changing landscape
A community in Alabama may soon be forced to close its local police department. At the end of February, a grand jury recommended disbanding the Hanceville Police Department, concluding that it "recently operated as more of a criminal enterprise than a law enforcement agency." City officials have said they are considering the recommendation, but for now, the department is, in effect, shuttered. Five officers have been arrested, and the entire force has been placed on leave. One state away, a former Rankin County sheriff's deputy came clean to Mississippi Today in early March about his role in a two-decade reign of terror by the department's "Goon Squad." The former deputy, Christian Dedmon, said that he and his colleagues regularly brutalized and humiliated suspects, lied in official reports, and frequently seized and destroyed evidence without a warrant during drug raids. Dedmon, like several former deputies from Rankin County, is serving prison time after being convicted last year in the brutal assault and torture of two Black men. Neither case will be shocking to regular readers of The Marshall Project. Previous editions have highlighted similarly extreme—even cartoonish—instances of police misconduct, corruption and brutality. We have also covered how some of those cases have triggered efforts at reform and accountability. But as the federal government, and to a lesser extent, public opinion, increasingly turns away from concerns over policing—more than four years since protests over police violence overtook the national discourse—the future of police accountability looks uncertain. Deadly police violence has increased slightly since 2020. Statistics on police killings per capita show a slight but durable increase since the pandemic and George Floyd protests, according to a The Marshall Project analysis of the Mapping Police Database. Numbers released at the beginning of March suggest this trend continued through 2024, even as violent crime rates have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Justice has insinuated that it will no longer pursue the kinds of federal investigations that regularly followed high profile acts of police violence during the Obama and Biden era. President Trump also rescinded an executive order signed by former President Biden in 2022 that established use-of-force restrictions for federal law enforcement and created a national database for tracking misconduct, which all federal law enforcement agencies were required to submit to. In February, the Trump administration took that database offline, The Washington Post reported. Because of its short lifespan, it's difficult to assess how effective the database was, or could have been, at its stated goal: preventing officers with a history of serious misconduct from finding new jobs in law enforcement. The single report released about the database in December 2024 found that despite nearly 10,000 queries run by officials in the first eight months of 2024, only 25 searches were made by agencies seeking information on an officer from outside their own department. The vast majority of misconduct incidents captured in the database were generated by border enforcement agents and corrections officers in federal prisons, The Appeal reported in February. The executive branch isn't the only part of the federal government to sidestep a role in police accountability. In early March, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case that could have increased the legal responsibility police have to ensure they have the correct address when conducting raids on the homes of crime suspects. These "wrong home" raids can create lasting trauma for the people they ensnare. A lawsuit filed on Feb. 25 in Denver, for example, alleged that police looking for a man in apartment 307, instead raided apartment 306, and wound up locking a mother and her 5-year-old and 6-year-old daughters in a police car for an hour. In March, Anjanette Young marked the six-year anniversary of a wrong-home raid that made national news in Chicago. Young was handcuffed and left naked despite explaining to officers that they were in the wrong place. She has since become an advocate for changing the way police approach these kinds of arrests. "Six years since I stood before officers—crying, pleading, afraid—only to be ignored," Young said at a news conference outside City Hall at the end of February, WBEZ Chicago reported. "And yet I stand here again, afraid and demanding for justice, accountability, still demanding that those in power would keep their promise." Beyond changes in how law enforcement is (and isn't) subject to oversight and accountability, developments in late February have also raised some questions about who enters the profession and how they are trained. In New York City, the NYPD announced that it's lowering its educational hiring standards in response to what officials describe as a recruitment crisis. With new applications down by more than half since 2017, the department is reducing its college credit requirements from 60 to 24 credits—while also reinstating a timed 1.5-mile run requirement that the department dropped in 2023, partly based on the belief it would help more women meet the qualifications. The return of that requirement comes just days after The Associated Press published an investigation which found that at least 29 police recruits have died in training over the past decade, often from heatstroke, excessive physical stress, or underlying medical conditions that were exacerbated by training activities. A disproportionate number of the deaths occurred in Black trainees with the sickle cell trait, a genetic condition which can cause fatal complications under high physical stress in otherwise healthy people. This story was produced by The Marshall Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
