The Justice Department announced Thursday that it is opening a civil rights investigation into Rankin County, Mississippi, and the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. A group of former officers from the agency — who have dubbed themselves the “Goon Squad” — pleaded guilty last year to a series of accusations for torture two black men.
“The public is now well aware of the heinous attack on two black men by Rankin County police officers who called themselves the ‘Goon Squad,’” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement. “Those officers have since been convicted and sentenced, but we are launching this civil practice or pattern investigation to examine serious allegations that the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department systematically violates people’s constitutional rights through excessive use of force, unlawful stops, searches and arrests, and discriminatory policing practices.”
Garland said the allegations against the sheriff’s department include excessive use of tasers, use of racial slurs, illegal entry into homes and accusations that deputies “deployed dangerous and cruel tactics to assault individuals in their custody.”
The Justice Department said Rankin County officials have said they will cooperate with the investigation.
The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department made national headlines when five former deputies, along with a former Richland, Mississippi, police officer, were charged with torturing two Black men — Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker — in January 2023.
Rogelio V. Solis / AP
The six former officers pleaded guilty to a series of federal and state charges, admitting to breaking into a home without a warrant and torturing Jenkins and Parker for hours, including shooting one of them in the mouth. The men were also beaten, repeatedly shocked and assaulted with a sex toy, prosecutors said.
The group of former police officers had arrived at the Braxton, Mississippi, home after a white man called Rankin County Sheriff’s Deputy Brett McAlpin to complain about two black men staying with a white woman. McAlpin notified Christian Dedmon, another deputy sheriff, who then texted a group of white officers known internally for their excessive use of force who called themselves the “Goon Squad,” prosecutors said.
McAlpin, Dedmon and fellow former deputies Hunter Elward, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke, as well as former Richland police officer Joshua Hartfield, were all sentenced to decades in prison on both state and federal charges earlier this year.
