JACKSON, Madam. — Lawyers for two black men who tortured by Mississippi police officers said Monday that they expect to file more lawsuits on behalf of other people who claim they were abused by officers from the same sheriff’s office.
The Justice Department said Thursday that it opening a civil rights investigation in the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. The announcement came months after five former Rankin County deputies and a former Richland police officer were convicted on federal criminal charges in the racist attack that involved beatings, repeated use of stun guns and attacks with a sex toy, before one of the victims was shot in the mouth.
Attorneys Malik Shabazz and Trent Walker sued the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department last year on behalf of the two victims, Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker. The lawsuit is still pending and is seeking $400 million.
“We continue to believe that the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department has been one of the worst run sheriff’s departments in the country for the last decade or more, and that is why the Department of Justice is moving forward and there will be more revelations,” Shabazz said at a news conference Monday. “There will be more lawsuits. The fight for justice will continue.”
Shabazz and Walker have called on Sheriff Bryan Bailey to resign, as have some local residents.
The two attorneys said Monday that county supervisors should reprimand Bailey. They also said they believe the brutality in the department began before Bailey became sheriff in 2012. And they said Rankin County’s $2.5 million-a-year insurance coverage is far below what the county should be paying to victims of brutality.
“The sheriff, Bailey and the county need to recognize that allowing these officers and the department to operate for so long has taken a negative toll on the citizens of the county,” Walker said.
The Justice Department will investigate whether the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force and unlawful stops, frisks and arrests, and whether there was racially discriminatory police practices, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said last week.
The sheriff’s department said it will fully cooperate with the federal investigation and has increased transparency by publishing its policies and procedures online.
The five former officers and the former police officer pleaded guilty in 2023 to breaking into a home without a warrant and carrying out an hours-long assault on Jenkins and Parker. Some officers were part of a group so willing to use excessive force that they called themselves the Goon Squad. All six were convicted in March and received sentences ranging from 10 to 40 years.
The charges followed an Associated Press investigation in March 2023, in which several officers were linked to at least four violent confrontations since 2019, which left two black men dead.
The Department of Justice has received information about other disturbing incidents, including excessive use of stun guns by officers, unlawful home invasions, the use of “shocking racial slurs” and the use of “dangerous, cruel tactics to attack people in their custody,” Clarke said.
The attacks on Jenkins and Parker began on Jan. 24, 2023, with a racist call for extrajudicial violence, federal prosecutors said. A white person called Sheriff’s Deputy Brett McAlpin and complained that two black men were staying with a white woman at a home in Braxton.
Once inside the home, officers handcuffed Jenkins and Parker and poured milk, alcohol, and chocolate syrup on their faces while taunting them with racial slurs. They forced them to undress and shower together to cover up the mess. They taunted the victims with racial slurs and assaulted them with sex objects.
In addition to McAlpin, former officers Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke and former Richland police officer Joshua Hartfield were also convicted.
Locals saw echoes of Mississippi history in the gruesome details of the case. racist atrocities by people in authority. The difference this time is that those who abused their power paid a high price for their crimes, according to advocates for the victims.
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Associated Press editor Michael Goldberg contributed.