Nate Rosenfield and Mukta Joshi are reporters for Mississippi Today. They examined the power of sheriff’s offices in the state as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
For nearly two years, the embattled sheriff of Rankin County, Mississippi, has tried to distance himself from brutality in his department, saying he was unaware of assaults like those carried out by deputies who called themselves the Goon Squad.
But department records and interviews with a former FBI agent reveal that the sheriff, Bryan Bailey, had evidence of his deputies’ violent acts going back to his earliest days in office.
In 2012, the year Bailey became sheriff, the department and the FBI had reviewed video footage of a deputy ramming his car into a teenager fleeing arrest and threatening to kill him.
Eight years later, a man sued the department claiming that deputies hit him with a metal rod and shoved a gun in his mouth while he was handcuffed.
Then, in 2022, a deputy was caught on video using his Taser to shock a handcuffed man in the back of a patrol car.
The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that it had investigated all three cases, and so had the FBI. One of the deputies involved was suspended and another was reassigned, but none of them were fired, and none faced prosecution. Several were later tied to violent raids by the Goon Squad or were convicted for their roles in torturing two men, Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins, in 2023.
Eddie Parker, (second left) with attorney Malik Shabazz, attorney Trent Walker (center) and Michael Jenkins (right), during a press conference held at the law offices of attorney Trent Walker, to address the upcoming sentencing of the “Goon Squad,” Monday, March 18, 2024 in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi TodayThe handling of the three earlier cases reveals how the Sheriff’s Department allowed officers accused of serious violence to remain on the force and that federal authorities chose not to act, despite strong evidence supporting the allegations.
Jason Dare, the lawyer for the Sheriff’s Department, defended its handling of misconduct investigations, saying the cases show that the department worked with federal agencies to promote “constitutionally permissive policing while keeping crime in check.”
He said that each of the cases had been investigated by the FBI and that none of them “resulted in a finding of impropriety.”
The Sheriff’s Department came to national attention in 2023, when five deputies were charged with breaking into a home and then handcuffing, beating and sexually assaulting Parker and Jenkins.
At the time, Sheriff Bailey expressed shock that deputies he trusted could be involved in such brutality. “Never in my life did I think it would happen in this department,” Bailey said during a press conference.
In an article that year, Mississippi Today and The New York Times detailed the allegations of dozens of people who said they had witnessed or experienced similar assaults at the hands of Rankin County deputies, many of them assigned to a patrol shift that called itself the Goon Squad. Months later, the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into the department.
This year, during depositions taken as part of a lawsuit, Sheriff Bailey said he had no reason to think that the violence was widespread, although he acknowledged that the department did not have a centralized system to track the complaints it received. He said the FBI never indicated that there were problems at the department.
But the FBI and Sheriff Bailey were aware of allegations of misconduct by Rankin deputies, including some who would later be sentenced along with members of the Goon Squad.
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