by Anthony Accurso

For at least twenty years, the Sheriff’s Office in Rankin County, Mississippi has used coordinated violence against the citizens of the county—both inside and out of the county jail—to terrorize members of the public, particularly anyone suspected of being involved in illegal drugs. Reporting by Mississippi Today and The New York Times has found evidence of this violence, documenting the reign of terror by Sheriff Bryan Bailey and his “Goon Squad,” as well as the notorious trustee program at Rankin County Jail, which involved illegal forced labor and incentivized prisoner-on-prisoner violence as punishment for jail rule violations.

Midnight Raid

On January 24, 2023, a neighbor told Brett McAlpin, who was the chief investigator for the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, of “suspicious behavior” by two Black men (Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins) in Braxton, Mississippi. McAlpin delegated the matter to Christian Dedmon, a narcotics investigator for the department, who assembled members of the “Goon Squad” for a raid that night. The deputies frequently used a Whatsapp group chat to coordinate activities, and that day they decided to “work easy,” which was code for knocking and entering instead of kicking the door in. They were also warned against “bad mugshots,” which was a coded message that the results of their physical violence shouldn’t be visible in a mugshot, so no shots to the head or face. Their planning went sideways, however, as deputies simultaneously kicked in the back and carport doors, apparently in an attempt to avoid a security camera on the front door [According to court documents: Case 3:23-cv-00374-DPJ-ASH, Document 63, Filed 07/24/24.]

What followed seemed straight out of a horrific thriller novel rather than real life. According to The New York Times, “[d]uring the raid, deputies tried to put a sex toy in the mouths of Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Parker, and turned Mr. Jenkins onto his stomach in an attempt to use the sex toy on him ‘from the rear.’” Evidence submitted as part of a court filing against the county by Parker and Jenkins “included photos that showed a sex toy left at the scene.”

The lawsuit also claims that “the deputies, who the complaint says are white, called Jenkins and Parker racial slurs, beat them, fired Taser guns at them several times, made them strip naked and shower together, threw eggs at them and waterboarded them.”

According to the federal court in the Southern U.S. District of Mississippi, “[a]mong the more serious abuses, Elward simulated an execution by making Jenkins kneel, putting a gun in Jenkins’s mouth, and pulling the trigger. The gun clicked but did not discharge. Elward did it again, but this time the gun fired in Jenkins’s mouth.” The bullet fired by Elward lacerated Jenkins’s tongue and shattered his jaw. While he survived this night of terror, Jenkins must occasionally take his food using a syringe, and has had to work with a speech therapist to be able to talk again.

That fateful discharge of a firearm appears to have been accidental, or at least unplanned, and shocked the deputies out of their mode of brutality. According to the court, “The officers then turned to their cover-up. They concocted a false version of events, planted false evidence and removed actual evidence, drafted false reports of what happened, and swore out false affidavits accusing Jenkins of aggravated assault on a police officer, possession of methamphetamine, and disorderly conduct.”

An investigation by the U.S. Justice Department eventually cleared Parker and Jenkins, and they filed suit the following June against the deputies, the county, and Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey. The court noted that it was only after the lawsuit was filed that the deputies in question were terminated from the department by Sheriff Bailey.

“Never in my life did I think it would happen in this department,” Bailey said in a press conference this summer, adding that he was stunned to learn of the “horrendous crimes” committed by his deputies. However, Bailey’s claim runs against two decades of reports of similar violence by sheriff’s deputies in Rankin County recently collected by The New York Times.

A Legacy of Violence

The roots of Rankin County’s pattern of violence stretch back to the Jim Crow era, and America’s history of chattel slavery before that. But a modern antecedent can be traced to Lloyd Jones, a Mississippi State Trooper who would go on to become the sheriff of Simpson County, which is just Southwest of Rankin County. After his death in 1995, an investigation found that Jones had “bragged about fatally shooting a Black man, Benjamin Brown, in the back during a 1967 standoff between police and civil rights protesters.”

According to witness testimony, “[i]n 1970, Mr. Jones participated in the beating of the Rev. John Perkins in the Rankin County Jail, which culminated with a deputy jabbing a fork up his nose.” Jones is the man who gave Bailey, the current Sheriff of Rankin County, his first job in law enforcement. “He is on my life’s wall of gratitude and had a huge impact on who I am,” Bailey wrote on Facebook in 2015. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about him or recall something that he taught me.” But while Bailey called Jones “mentor,” residents of Simpson County had another name for him: “Goon.”

Following the shooting of Michael Jenkins, the Department of Justice (DOJ) did its own investigation into that night of terror. It led to the indictment of Lt. Jeffrey Middleton (the nominal leader of the Goon Squad), Hunter Elward, Daniel Opdyke, Brett McAlpin, and a Richland police officer named Joshua Hartfield, who assisted the Rankin deputies on the night Parker and Jenkins were tortured. All six defendants eventually pleaded guilty and were sentenced to between 18 and 40 years for their participation in these acts of violence and terror.

Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins were present at the sentencings in federal court for the deputies. While Parker said he forgave the offenders, Jenkins felt differently. “If he wouldn’t have gotten caught, he would still be doing the same thing,” Jenkins said.

And there’s reason to believe that this was not an isolated incident. The DOJ investigation turned up some disturbing information. For instance, the Goon Squad got its name, at least in part, “because of their willingness to use excessive force and not report it.” They went so far as to design a logo and have commemorative coins made.

The New York Times and Mississippi Today uncovered Goon Squad-related incidents going back to at least 2004. They interviewed “more than 50 people who say they witnessed or experienced torture at the hands of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department.” Based on these interviews and corroborating medical records, photographs, and other documents, the reporters were able to confirm 17 incidents involving 22 victims.

But this is likely an undercounting of the actual brutality inflicted on the population of Rankin County. While nearly every police officer carries a Taser, few people understand that a log is kept of every instance a Taser is used and for how long. Public records requests obtained from the sheriff’s department lined up with witness testimony and “suggested that deputies repeatedly shocked people for longer than is considered safe.” And while the reports could corroborate only 17 incidents from witness testimony, the Taser records showed that, “[a]t least 32 times over the past decade, Rankin deputies fired their Tasers at someone more than five times in under an hour, activating them for at least 30 seconds in total—double the recommended limit.”

The stories of witnesses are gut wrenching. One incident The New York Times described as “a typical pattern described by the accusers” involved Jeremy Travis Paige. The detainee was tortured for nearly an hour by McAlpin and another deputy in 2018. One deputy sat him upright in bed with a knee in his back and a washcloth over his mouth. The other deputy proceeded to pour “gallon after gallon of water over his face.” One deputy pressed a lit cigarette into Paige’s thigh. In addition to using their Tasers on his groin and other areas, the deputies also used smaller, rectangular ones, “suggesting that some deputies used personal stun guns that were not being tracked.”

The deputies wanted information about individuals in the county who were buying or selling drugs, and they forced him to send Facebook messages to his friends asking to buy drugs. When nobody took the bait, the deputies took him to the county jail for kicking one of the deputies during an attempted arrest. Paige was sentenced to five years in prison, and he sued the sheriff’s department. No lawyer would take his case though, and for various reasons inherent in prosecuting a case from behind bars, the judge dismissed the case.

The reporters refer to this case as typical, in part because of the use of waterboarding and torture through electricity, but also because the victims had been filing complaints in courts for years, with almost every case being dismissed for procedural failures and a lack of competent representation. The only thing that is even somewhat exceptional in this picture is that the victims were mostly white.

Many poor whites live in neighborhoods like the area of Rankin County known as Robinhood. Many impoverished residents live in “run-down trailers and makeshift shacks, a few without running water or electricity.” These areas were hit hard in the early 2000s as cheap meth flooded rural America, a problem that has only gotten worse over time. While some residents of Rankin County might have supported the mission of these thugs with badges to rid the community of drugs, these extreme tactics appear to have been met with equally extreme failure.

Despite violent interrogations, torture, and the general harassment of suspected drug dealers in Rankin County, the “largest bust among the incidents examined was for a $420 heroin sale.” According to The New York Times, “Many of the targets teetered on the edge of homelessness and were caught with a few grams of meth or with only drug paraphernalia—a glass pipe or used syringe. Several people sat in jail for days or weeks only to have their charges dropped.”

Despite finding little or no drugs during these violent raids, many of the victims were taken into custody at the Rankin County Jail. And testimony from Christian Dedmon, and some former prisoners, has led to a whole other scandal in Rankin County involving the sheriff’s department: the trustee program at the jail.

“Violence as a Weekly Occurrence”

Reporters interviewed more than 70 former prisoners and several former guards of the Rankin County Jail to create a portrait of its inhumanity. For one, jailers have been accused of routine physical and mental abuses of the detainees under their care. Most of the people interviewed spoke of “violence as a weekly occurrence.” Former detainees recounted being beaten for nonviolent infractions, like talking back to guards or getting caught with contraband. Detainees singled out for such beatings were dragged “into blind corners, where cameras couldn’t capture acts of violence,” or beaten “behind closed doors.”

“Since 2013, at least 11 inmates from the jail have sued the department, alleging that they had been assaulted,” The New York Times noted. Most litigants “represented themselves, and most of the lawsuits were dismissed because of missed deadlines and court fees, or other technicalities.” The attacks, described in lawsuits and in interviews, “ranged in severity from slaps and whippings to brutal beatings that left inmates with bloody wounds and broken bones.”

Over ten months, reporters investigated “69 alleged incidents of violence against inmates at the jail that occurred from 2012 to 2024,” including “21 encounters in which guards documented that they had used force against inmates, and why, in incident reports.” Those reports, much like the reports filed after the Goon Squad shot Michael Jenkins while torturing him in his own home, have little in common with the testimony provided by the detainees who experienced the violence. “In several cases,” according to The New York Times, “medical records corroborated the injuries that inmates described.”

One violent incident, involving a prisoner who was intellectually disabled, was filmed by a guard. Larry Buckhalter was known as “Crying Larry” because “he had a habit of pestering jail staff with small requests.” Buckhalter began serving a one-year sentence in 2018 for possessing a small amount of cocaine. At some point during that time, he asked for a Coca-Cola. The video shows Buckhalter sitting quietly in a chair, strapped to a stun vest, a device “that is typically used to control violent inmates during court hearings.” One off-camera guard jokes that Buckhalter is going to bite off his tongue, and another asks him to “give his consent.”

“My name Larry and I volunteer to this,” he says as the stun vest is activated. Buckhalter screamed as his body convulsed. “Now you get a Coke,” the woman says. “It’s all over! I’m so proud of you, Larry!”

Jason Dare, an attorney for the sheriff’s department, refused to acknowledge the allegations of abuse, instead criticizing reporters who used “alleged rumors by unnamed sources who have no personal, first-hand knowledge of events,” and pointed out they had not spoken to Buckhalter, who died in 2021.

“Larry celebrated countless birthdays and life achievements at the Rankin County Jail,” Dare wrote. “He never went hungry and was never brutalized, both of which he claimed were regular occurrences in the free world.” Dare continued: “Although Larry could not give his side of the story for your article, these videos perfectly show his genuine affection for the RCSD. The fact you try to spin it as mockery is shameful.”

Laquanda Anderson and Derrick Shoto are Buckhalter’s niece and nephew. They say he never mentioned these specific incidents, but that he told them he was afraid to return to the jail, saying that guards there called him “Crying Larry.”

“He hated it at the jail,” Shoto said, adding that in the videos, “they’re clearly treating him like a puppet.” Shoto added, “When you have authority over people, you have a responsibility to take care of them. No matter who you’re over, you’ve got to treat them with respect.”

To be clear, the law allows the use of a stun vest if a prisoner “poses a threat,” or in other narrowly defined circumstances. This incident was clearly not one of them, since the amusement of custody staff is never a justification for inflicting corporal punishment.

Supervisory staff were allegedly involved in the use of unsanctioned violence. Captain Barry Vaughn used to run the jail, though he has since been promoted to the position of undersheriff: “According to a former deputy, a former guard and 14 former inmates, Mr. Vaughn often beat inmates who broke the rules, slapping and whipping them during interrogations in his office.”

“When you walked through his door, he had a shelf. And on the side of the shelf, he had like a wooden stick, a wooden baseball bat, two or three antennas,” said Cameron Kennedy, a former detainee who said Vaughn had questioned him on several occasions. A few months after he failed a drug test, Kennedy was caught with a cellphone, an incident report shows. Vaughn handcuffed him to a chair and struck his shins and thighs with a car antenna, he said. “He never did stop,” Kennedy recounted. “I’m talking about, like, 10 or 15 minutes, rapping me with it.”

“It Turned My Life Around”

The Rankin County Jail runs a “trustee” program where some prisoners are given special privileges in exchange for “special work opportunities,” but this program is more akin to a forced labor scheme than most other modern trustee programs.

Many jails operate programs where some prisoners, usually those with few or no disciplinary issues, are “allowed” to work in exchange for “preferred housing.” Usually this means several prisoners who live only with other working prisoners, and sometimes get slightly better accommodations like extra televisions or access to better food, in exchange for maintaining basic jail operations like cleaning of common areas or food preparation. Some jails will take trustees out on work details to work on other county-owned properties, and these can be an avenue for prisoners to learn “on-the-job” skills.

The best side of the Rankin County Jail program was that it provided similar benefits to its trustees, and many former trustees interviewed “spoke glowingly about the program, crediting it with turning their lives around.”

“It was the biggest blessing in my life,” said Cameron McKenzie, a former trustee. “I’ve been out now 20 months. I’m married, got full custody of both my kids, just bought a house, good job, you name it.”

The trustee program is somewhat unique in that some trustees can opt to spend their entire sentence at the Rankin County Jail instead of being sent to the Mississippi Department of Corrections once they have been sentenced. Some trustees stay there for years, at the disposal of Sheriff Bailey.

Anthony Burt was one such prisoner when he was sent to the jail in 2017 for methamphetamine possession. He started out as a “red suit,” a lower-level trustee, assigned to wire cards in the department’s auto shop. After an acquaintance told him he could earn a position as one of the top-level trustees—known by their distinct blue suits—he worked hard to achieve that. During an interview, Burt teared up remembering how proud he felt when some of the blue suits pulled him aside and told him, “You’re going blue today.”

“I wanted it, and I accomplished it,” Burt said. “I accomplished something for the first time in my life.” Blue suits have far better living conditions than other prisoners. Former trustees said they slept in their own cellblock, in unlocked cells, and sometimes got passes to visit their families. Many could roam the facility freely, play video games and work outside the jail. One former trustee, Cameron McCaskill, said he was allowed to keep a pet dog and order pizza.

“A blue suit is unrestricted,” Bailey said during a 2020 interview with a Mississippi lobbying group. “Once they get a blue suit status, that is almost like being an employee here.”

Kandis Nations was a trustee from 2020 to 2022. After serving several terms in the jail on drug-related charges, she begged Kristi Pennington Shanks—an administrative assistant in the sheriff’s office whom the sheriff wed in 2023—for a trustee position. She was denied several times, with Pennington saying Nations “needed to grow up a little.”

All of the former women trustees said they were supervised by Shanks, and that she was instrumental in their becoming trustees, though a response to a public records request “indicated no documentation outlining Shanks’ role in the female trusty program existed.”

“It was all based on if Kristi likes you or not,” said a female former trusty. “Whether you stay at the lowest level or whether you actually move up.”

Once Nations was eventually chosen though, she did very well. She participated in the department’s work release program, putting in hours at a local restaurant known as Genna Benna’s. She earned more than $20,000—enough to pay off all her fines. In addition to regular work at the restaurant, Nations was “invited” to “puppy-sit and cook HelloFresh meal kits” at Shanks’ house, sometimes alone with just the two of them. “It made me feel really special,” Nations said.

Jail Enforcers

During the Holocaust, the structure of concentration camps included Funktionshäftlinge (“functionaries”), or prisoners who were “assigned to supervisory or administrative positions in the camps.” The most notorious of these were the Kapos. They were overseers on prison work details who “often whipped, beat, and even killed prisoners under their command.”

Kapos, like other functionaries, were given special privileges, including “better accommodations, food, and clothing; access to luxury goods, like alcohol and cigarettes; access to information about camp news; less physically demanding work; and the ability to avoid physical harm.”

While Sheriff Bailey and his staff love to promote the positive impacts the trustee program has had, including a higher rate of GED graduates and many prisoners learning skills while earning more money, there is a darker side.

Blue suits were expected to act as enforcers in the jail, giving out brutal beatings to prisoners who earned the wrath of the staff. Morgan Curtis, a former trustee who has been in and out of the jail since 2015, said the way guards would order trustees to attack fellow detainees was “like a command to a pack of dogs.” The trustees’ distinctive clothing and the way they would descend upon other prisoners to mete out punishment earned the group the name “The Blue Wave.”

Nine former trustees, most of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said “the highest-ranking [trustees] were expected to back up guards during volatile situations or attack inmates so that guards would not have to do so themselves.” Former trustees also told reporters that staff expected the blue suits to “pay” for their privileges through violence, not merely by working hard and staying out of trouble.

“If something is going on with the officer and they need assistance, you need to be there,” said Woodrow Lamont Lewis, a former trustee. “If you ain’t there to help them, whether they are winning or losing, then you already know you’re next.”

Other trustees said that staff would reward the blue suits with other perks, such as free-world food after they beat other prisoners. “People would do just about anything for a cigarette, or a box of Church’s chicken with a honey biscuit,” said Phillip Smith, a former trustee. “That was the motivation of the Blue Wave.”

But because of the trust accorded to the blue suits, punishment could be swift and fierce when one of their own abused that trust. William Keith Richards walked out of the jail on a Friday in September 2019, and staff did not realize he had absconded until he missed church the following Sunday. When he was apprehended, Bailey called a meeting of trustees to let them know who was responsible for them losing their privileges for a time.

According to two former trustees and a former guard, Richards was then lifted into the air by Deputy Wes Shivers, a 6-foot-8 former U.F.C. fighter, who held Richards by the neck. Those who told the story do not recall whether the sheriff was still there when Richards was lifted, but they do recall “[a] group of guards and trusties dragg[ing] Mr. Richards into the jail’s dressing room, which was known to not have cameras, and beat[ing] him, according to four former inmates familiar with the incident.”

Christian Dedmon, the investigator involved in the torture raid on Jenkins and Parker, told reporters that Bailey would brag “about how Mr. Shivers had choked an inmate who had escaped.” According to Dedmon, “Bailey used to talk about it. I can just remember Bailey saying, ‘Wes held him up against the wall with one hand.’”

“You’re His Property”

As if the organized violence and abuse of prisoners wasn’t enough, Bailey is implicated in a long-running scheme to use county funds and prisoner labor to benefit his family. These accusations are backed by a review of more than a thousand pages of county financial records, interviews with those affected, and records of text messages from a staff member involved, all collected and reported by Mississippi Today.

Once he was convicted as part of the conspiracy to deprive Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker of their rights, Dedmon began sharing information with reporters about his former employer, the Rankin County Sheriff’s department. “I hid everything for him; I done everything for him,” Dedmon said of Bailey. “I know now I was just a tool to be used during a certain time like everyone else.”

Dedmon detailed how he was responsible for transporting detainees from the jail to McLain Farms, a 38-acre farm owned by the Bailey family and run by the sheriff’s mother. The farm houses approximately 10,000 chickens for Tyson Foods, which harvests the eggs, though the farm also produces corn and other produce as well.

According to Dedmon, he would regularly transport detainees in an unmarked vehicle to the farm to spray weeds, sort tools, and cut grass. Some were also tasked with crafting and installing cabinets and flooring. Once per year, Tyson Foods would pick up the chickens to allow McLain Farms to thoroughly clean the facility, which “generates almost 300 tons of waste a year, a mixture of feces, feathers, uneaten feed and bedding.” During the annual mucking of the chicken houses, “the sheriff would have about six trusties on the farm every day,” Dedmon said.

“I’m covered in chicken shit,” Dedmon texted his then-wife at 9:29 the night before Halloween in 2020, a text reviewed by Mississippi Today shows. He said that work would sometimes last until 3 a.m. One former trustee recalled he worked “12-hour days every Saturday and Sunday for a month, in addition to several weekday evenings that lasted into the early morning hours,” and he was never paid for his labor. The detainee did say the sheriff once took him and about a dozen other prisoners to Boots & More in Jackson, where he purchased replacement boots for them since theirs were ruined during the cleaning.

One former trustee recalled the sheriff admonishing the workers into secrecy during the annual mucking by saying, “We’re not here. This ain’t happening.” While it was the men who cleaned the farm during that time, the women trustees were used for other tasks on the farm.

“Once the corn was ready, they would load the female trusties in a van, take them to the farm, pick the corn and then come back to the jail and shuck it,” Dedmon said. A former female trustee also recalled picking corn “at the sheriff’s mama’s house.”

Dedmon also said the sheriff instructed him to use a skid steer, purchased by the department in 2019 for $97,000, “to till soil for corn and clear wooded areas on the farm.” It was sometimes stored at the farm, along with “weed killer, attachments for the skid steer and power tools,” all of which were purchased with department funds. In April 2019, the department used $36,000 in drug-bust money to purchase a mulching head for the skid steer, which Dedmon claimed Bailey used to clear land on the farm.

According to Mississippi Today, “County financial records show that since 2018, the sheriff’s department has purchased skid steer attachments worth more than $50,000 and more than 600 gallons of weed killer worth about $10,000,” and that “in 2022 and 2023, the department spent hundreds of dollars on heat lamps and other supplies designed to care for poultry.”

In response to these allegations, the Sheriff’s Department added some information to the department’s web site including the following statement: “Sheriff Bailey owns a skid steer that is all-but identical to and commonly confused for the one owned by Rankin County.”

Dedmon said that he also hauled a lot of gravel from the Rankin County government’s stockpile and took it to McLain Farms. “I can’t tell you how many loads of county gravel I’ve hauled down there on the weekends or at night with his dump trailer, or rode with him to do so,” Dedmon said.

Sometimes Demon and the sheriff used department vehicles to haul the gravel to the farm, but for such times they had vehicle magnets to cover the sheriff’s star. The magnets, Dedmon said, were marked with the name of a nonexistent business derived from the name of a former trustee: “Cazell’s Welding.”

The department’s website also mentioned the gravel: “Sheriff Bailey purchased ~25 loads of gravel from a local business and was given recycled, crushed concrete from a private demolition company that was used to cover roads at McLain Farms.” The website also has a rebuttal about the claims of prisoner labor, which states “Regardless of which governmental or private entity a Trustee works for, they are paid pursuant to statute and keep wages earned by them according to statute,” and that “[d]espite being authorized by statute to keep 15% of all wages earned by Trustees as an administrative fee, the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department keeps none of their money and allows them to use or save that additional money in their own private bank accounts.”

Justice, Late or Never?

After the investigation into the midnight raid of the home of Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, the DOJ announced in September 2024 that it had opened a civil pattern or practice investigation into Rankin County and its Sheriff’s Department.

According to the DOJ’s press release, “[t]he investigation will seek to determine whether RCSD engages in patterns or practices that violate the Constitution and federal law,” and “will evaluate all types of force used by RCSD officers, including deadly force… It will also assess whether RCSD engages in unlawful stops, searches, and arrests in violation of the Fourth Amendment and whether RCSD conducts discriminatory policing in violation of the 14th Amendment, Title VI, and Safe Streets Act.”

“The public is now well aware of the heinous attack inflicted on two Black men by Rankin County deputies who called themselves the ‘Goon Squad,’” said then-Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “Those officers have since been convicted and sentenced, but we are launching this civil pattern or practice 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. These include allegations that Rankin County deputies have overused tasers, entered homes unlawfully, used racial slurs, and deployed dangerous, cruel tactics to assault people in their custody. We are committed to working with local officials, deputies, and the community to conduct a comprehensive investigation.”

“The information we have learned to date about the conduct of some members of the Rankin County Sheriff’s office calls back to some of the worst periods of Mississippi’s history,” said U.S. Attorney Todd W. Gee for the Southern District of Mississippi. “We do not have to accept the old hatreds and abuse of the past. And we do not have to accept the false claim that safety comes at the price of illegal force and abuse of power. We will conduct an impartial and thorough review of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office, and if we find violations, we will take necessary action to address them.” Also, as of March 2025, Mississippi State Auditor Shad White announced an investigation into the “sheriff’s alleged use of inmates [and] county resources for personal benefit.”

“We’re all aware of the reporting,” said Jacob Walters, communications director for the state auditor. “We read the article, and Auditor White has ordered an investigation to begin yesterday morning, when we became aware of the story.” However, nearly a year later, the Auditor’s Office has made no further public statements or published reports about the investigation. Also, Todd W. Gee, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, announced his resignation from that post on January 6, 2025, a mere two weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump’s second term as president.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “[t]he Trump administration has pledged to halt federal oversight and has begun reversing course, including by attempting to rescind near-final agreements in Minneapolis and Louisville, leaving communities at risk of continued misconduct.”

“There is no one, regardless of race or political party, who can justify the DOJ’s abrupt decision to no longer investigate and hold accountable the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department,” said Jarvis Dortch, executive director of the ACLU of Mississippi. “The Trump administration is essentially giving a green light to police abuse and unconstitutional policing. If the agency that allowed the goon squad to operate for years doesn’t warrant federal investigation, no law enforcement agency does.”

“The DOJ under Biden found police were wantonly assaulting people and that it wasn’t a problem of ‘bad apples’ but of avoidable, department-wide failures,” said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the ACLU. “By turning its back on police abuse, Trump’s DOJ is putting communities at risk, and the ACLU is stepping in because people are not safe when police can ignore their civil rights.”

As of the publishing of this article, Bailey is still serving a four-year term as the Sheriff of Rankin County, and will likely continue to do so until December 31, 2027. The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department’s website has this to say about the “Trusty Inmate Program”:

“The Trusty Inmate Program at the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department is designed to help non-violent offenders improve mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, thus being able to succeed in life without crime. Individuals come to the Program after having voluntarily pleaded guilty to a crime. But before being sentenced, the individual, their defense attorney, the prosecuting attorney, and the judge enter a memorandum of understanding whereby the Trusty agrees to serve time through the Trusty Inmate Program instead of in the Mississippi Department of Corrections system.” And “[o]nce in the Program, a Trusty agrees to follow all rules and regulations at the Rankin County Jail …”

The website also hosts the department’s Policy & Procedure Manual, which states that “RCSD deputies / employees will abide by the laws of the United States, the State of Mississippi, and the ordinances of Rankin County.”

By now, however, it should be clear that the words of the RCSD are worth very little, as all the available evidence vividly illustrates.  

Sources: The New York Times, Mississippi Today, DOJ, ACLU 

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