“I’m just baffled and shocked,” Sheriff Bryan Bailey of Rankin County, Mississippi, said last August, after five of his former deputies admitted punching, kicking, tasing, torturing and humiliating two men during an illegal home invasion the previous January. “This is a perfect example of why people don’t trust the police, and never in my life did I think that would happen in this department.”
According to an investigation by The New York Times AND Mississippi todayHowever, Bailey had many reasons to think something like this would happen in his department. Similar things have been happening in Rankin County “for nearly two decades,” the says Times reported in November.
“Narcotics detectives and patrol officers, some [of whom] Calling themselves the Goon Squad, they broke into homes in the middle of the night, accusing the people inside of dealing drugs,” the paper says. “Then they handcuffed them or held them at gunpoint and tortured them into confessing or providing information.”
THE Times AND Mississippi today they confirmed “17 incidents involving 22 victims based on witness interviews, medical records, photographs of injuries, and other documents.” Those cases almost always involved “small drug busts” and prosecutors “described similar tactics.” Officers “restrained people while punching and kicking them or repeatedly shocking them with Tasers.” They “stuck the barrels of guns into people’s mouths.” Three people “said deputies waterboarded them until they thought they would suffocate,” while “five said deputies told them to leave the county.”
Even though federal charges that brought national attention to police brutality in Rankin County involved two black victims, Bailey’s deputies abused equal opportunity rights. “It appears they targeted people based on suspected drug use, not race,” he said Times She said. “Most of their accusers were white.”
The pattern of abuse of deputies has been reflected in complaints and lawsuits. “More than a dozen people directly confronted Sheriff Bailey and his command staff about the officers’ brutal methods,” the statement read. Times noted, and “at least five people have sued the department alleging beatings, choking, and other abuse by deputies associated with the Goon Squad.”
Bailey said he had never heard of the Goon Squad and had no reason to think his deputies were abusing their authority. “No one ever told me something like this,” he said in August, and “never, never could have imagined” that the five convicted deputies, including a man he said he knew “well” and had chosen as the detective’s investigator, year in 2013, they were capable of “these horrendous crimes”.
Bailey, who was re-elected in November after running unopposed, has rejected calls to resign. “I’ll fix this,” he promised. “I will make everyone much more responsible.”