Opinion | 'Goon Squad' prison sentences shouldn't be the end of this story of racist assault
Six former law enforcement officers in Mississippi — five of whom were in the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office’s self-titled “Goon Squad” — got sentences ranging from 15-45 years Wednesday for their confessed roles in a 90-minute torture session that included them assaulting two Black men with a sex toy and punching and kicking them as they called them racial slurs. One of the six, Hunter Elward, forced his gun into the mouth of Michael Corey Jenkins and fired a round, lacerating the man’s tongue and breaking his jaw. It seems nothing less than a miracle that the victims — Jenkins in particular — survived and were able to convey their anguish to the court Wednesday.
“They left me to die bleeding on the floor, and they set me up to be imprisoned,” Jenkins said in a statement that, because he still has trouble speaking, was read Wednesday by his attorney. “Your honor, they killed me,” Jenkins said in his statement. “I just didn’t die.” Eddie Parker, who was tortured alongside him that night, said, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to sleep again at night.” He said that “the humiliation and embarrassment from the sexual assault is too great for me to talk about.”
As satisfying as it may have been to see the officers sentenced again — they were sentenced following their guilty pleas to federal charges last month — their being sent to prison should not be where this story ends. That’s why it was only right that after former Rankin County sheriff’s deputies Brett Morris McAlpin, 53; Christian Dedmon, 29; Jeffrey Middleton, 46; 31-year-old Elward; Daniel Opdyke, 28, and former Richland Police Officer Joshua Hartfield, 32, were sentenced Wednesday that the focus returned to demanding the resignation of Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey.
The sheriff said the officers had lied to him about the night they barged into a home without a warrant — responding to a phone call from a white person who said the two Black men were entering a white woman’s home — and sexually tortured the men. (After Elward fired his gun into Jenkins’ mouth — he apparently thought it was unloaded — the officers planted methamphetamine and a gun on the pair and accused them of drug possession.) The sheriff professes to have been shocked to learn of the existence of the Goon Squad. But John C. Barnett, a civil rights attorney who’s demanding the sheriff’s resignation, told the Mississippi Free Press after Wednesday’s sentencing hearing, “We’d be fools to think” Bailey “didn’t know anything about the ‘goon squad.’”
We might also be fools if we think the sheriff will ever be held accountable for atrocities that happened on his watch. He’d already served as sheriff for 12 years and was re-elected in November — that is, almost nine months after the U.S. Justice Department announced that it was investigating a possible civil rights violation by his department and three months after five of his former deputies and the Richland police officer pleaded guilty to 16 federal charges, including civil rights conspiracy, deprivation of rights under color of law, discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence, conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice. Bailey wasn’t just re-elected, he was re-elected without opposition.
“The only thing I’m guilty of is trusting grown men that swore an oath to do their job correctly,” he said after his deputies pleaded guilty to federal charges in August 2023. “I’m guilty of that.” However, about four months after that statement from Bailey, Mississippi Today (as part of a series by The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship) published a story based on interviews with more than 50 people who either experienced or witnessed the Goon Squad’s torture. Many of the people interviewed, the news outlet reported, had filed formal complaints or lawsuits against the Goon Squad’s officers.
The outlet reported that a smaller number of those interviewed, including a sheriff’s deputy from a neighboring county, reported having talked directly to Bailey about the unit’s brutality. That deputy, who was jailed for six months and lost his job (he was never convicted), told Mississippi Today that Bailey accused him of being a dirty cop and of secretly recording the call and then, “He hung up on me.”
How did Bailey miss the challenge coins the Goon Squad had the audacity to create to celebrate itself? They even embossed those coins with the name of Middleton, the now-imprisoned former lieutenant who led them.
When Mississippi Today pointed out that “several high-ranking deputies” had been “involved in arrests that had sparked accusations of brutal treatment,” the outlet says he responded, “I have 240 employees, there’s no way I can be with them each and every day.”
At the same press conference where he said the officers who attacked Jenkins and Parker had lied to him, Bailey said, “I’m going to stay here. I’m not going to resign. I’m going to fix these problems,” and, he said, leave the department “ in better shape than I found it.”
There was a brief moment after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd when it seemed America was mortified at the idea of coldly sadistic police. But maybe the country was just embarrassed that Floyd’s life was snuffed out on camera and in front of so many witnesses. Or maybe the theory that many people were fueled by pent-up pandemic energy is valid. But, clearly, Jenkins, who had a police officer fire a bullet into his mouth, could have been every bit as dead as Floyd. The fact that nobody even ran against a sheriff who had such a perversely violent group of officers on his payroll suggests that too many people are OK with their law enforcement officers acting like outlaws. At least when there isn’t video.
Though Jenkins and Parker are Black and all the officers who’ve been sentenced for assaulting them are white, Mississippi Today found that most of the people who’ve accused the “Goon Squad” of misconduct are white. Still, there’s no way around the fact that they sexually humiliated and tortured the Black men because, as Jenkins put it Wednesday, “we were accused of dating white women.”
It just so happens that, as The Associated Press reported, “Parker was a childhood friend of the homeowner, Kristi Walley, who was at the hospital at the time. She’s been paralyzed since she was 15, and Parker was helping care for her.”
That fact doesn’t make Jenkins and Parker more innocent — because interracial sex isn’t an offense. But one does hope these goons spend the entirety of their confinement not only feeling remorseful for their crimes, but also feeling stupid that there wasn't even a white damsel whose honor needed defending.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
