‘Goon Squad’ Deputies Headed To Jail For Torturing Black Men For The Crime Of Being Black

Legal Issues

from the it's-like-we've-gone-back-a-century dept

They called themselves the “Goon Squad.” Six Mississippi deputies bestowed this name upon themselves, perhaps hoping to invoke the more violent era of the National Hockey League — an era overseen by “enforcers” fueled by cocaine and testosterone who gave the home crowd what they wanted: blood on the ice in return for any perceived slight during the game.

That these deputies would align themselves with violence isn’t unusual. To this day, cops still adorn themselves, their personal vehicles, and their social media accounts with signifiers of violence, beginning (and often, ending [because cops have no imagination]) with the logo of the Punisher, a comic book creation who personifies vigilantism. The irony is completely lost on these officers, who seem to feel they should be not only above the law, but beyond the retributive forces of their employers (the general public) and the agencies they work for.

The agencies they work for are largely to blame. The “Goon Squad” would never have felt comfortable rising to this level of violence if its members didn’t believe they’d never be held accountable for it.

The details of the case are sickening and horrifying. And it clearly indicates it takes a certain culture to breed this sort of specific violence — violence that was ushered into existence by a call from a white woman complaining about black men in a nearby residence.

The 1950s haven’t ended. For that matter, neither have the 1850s — not when biased cops are free to roam the streets. In 1955, black man Emmett Till was tortured to death because a white woman claimed he “whistled” at her. In 2023, two black men were tortured and sexually assaulted by the “Goon Squad” because someone complained that these two were currently in the residence of a white woman.

Brace yourself. It gets ugly.

The defendants admitted that on Jan. 24, without a warrant or any exigent circumstances, they kicked in the door and entered a home in Braxton, Rankin County, Mississippi where two Black men, M.J. and E.P., were residing.  The defendants handcuffed and arrested the men without probable cause to believe they had committed any crime, called them racial slurs, and warned them to stay out of Rankin County. Further, the defendants punched and kicked the men, tased them 17 times, forced them to ingest liquids, and assaulted them with a dildo. During the incident, Dedmon fired his gun twice to intimidate the men.

At the conclusion of the incident, Elward surreptitiously removed a bullet from the chamber of his gun, forced the gun into M.J.’s mouth and pulled the trigger. The unloaded gun clicked but did not fire. Elward racked the slide, intending to dry-fire a second time. When Elward pulled the trigger, the gun discharged. The bullet lacerated M.J.’s tongue, broke his jaw and exited out of his neck.

As M.J. was bleeding on the floor, the defendants did not provide medical aid, but instead gathered outside the home to devise a false cover story and took steps to corroborate it, including: planting a gun on M.J.; destroying surveillance video, spent shell casings, and taser cartridges; submitting fraudulent drug evidence to the crime lab; filing false reports; charging M.J. with crimes he did not commit; making false statements to investigators; and pressuring witnesses to stick to the cover story. Three of the defendants admitted in court that they were members of “The Goon Squad,” a group of RCSO officers who were known for using excessive force and not reporting it.

And that’s the “just the facts” reporting by the DOJ, which investigated this incident and, ultimately, filed criminal charges against the six “Goon Squad” deputies. What’s not noted in this recounting is that the dildo was attached to the end of a BB gun before being used to sexually assault the men. What’s also shown in this recounting is that the men were tased 17 times during this ordeal.

The good news is that these officers appear to be headed to prison.

Hunter Elward, 31, was sentenced to about 20 years in prison, while Jeffrey Middleton, the leader of the so-called “Goon Squad” that abused the men, was given a 17.5-year prison sentence. Four other former law enforcement officers who admitted to torturing Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker are set to be sentenced later this week.

It takes a lot to make a court throw the book at a law enforcement officer, but the “Goon Squad” managed to make this happen.

Before sentencing Elward, U.S. District Judge Tom Lee called the former deputy’s actions “egregious and despicable,” and said a “sentence at the top of the guidelines range is justified — is more than justified.” He continued: “It’s what the defendant deserves. It’s what the community and the defendant’s victims deserve.”

Here are the names of all the officers involved:

The officers included Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Brett McAlpin, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department and Joshua Hartfield, a Richland police officer. 

Hopefully, all six will be imprisoned for years and never given the chance to hold a government position for the rest of their lives. This event sounds like the sort of thing that went out of style more than 70 years ago. But racism never goes out of style, and some of the nation’s most violent racists are employed by US law enforcement agencies.

As I stated earlier, no one on the “Goon Squad” would have felt comfortable torturing two black men in response to a “black men in a house with a white woman omg” that deserved no response, if they hadn’t spent years being assured tacitly or explicitly that they could do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.

The New York Times has the backstory on the “Goon Squad.” The long, detailed article by Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield shows how this sort of abuse is allowed to become just another part of the thing we call “police work” by agencies and officials who honestly couldn’t care less what happens to minorities, women, or pretty much anyone who doesn’t wear a badge.

The details are just as horrific as those in this case that’s currently generating prison time for these badge-sporting criminals.

In the pursuit of drug arrests, deputies of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department shocked Robert Jones with a Taser in 2018 while he lay submerged in a flooded ditch, then rammed a stick down his throat until he vomited blood, he said.

During a raid the same year, deputies choked Mitchell Hobson with a lamp cord and waterboarded him to simulate drowning, he said, then beat him until the walls were spattered with his blood. That raid took place at the home of Rick Loveday, a sheriff’s deputy in a neighboring county, who said he was dragged half-naked from his bed at gunpoint, before deputies jabbed a flashlight threateningly at his buttocks and then pummeled him relentlessly.

It wasn’t just the six officers facing charges. Public records and complaints filed against the sheriff’s office show at least 20 deputies have been involved in acts of violence like these. That number includes high-ranking supervisors, including a former undersheriff, detectives, and a deputy who has since moved on to become the police chief of another department.

Here’s the CV on one of the deputies pleading guilty to federal charges for the torture of these two black men:

Brett McAlpin, former chief investigator for the department, was involved in at least 13 of the arrests and was repeatedly described by witnesses as leading the raids. He was named in at least four lawsuits and six complaints going back to 2004. Even so, Sheriff Bailey named him investigator of the year in 2013. 

Getting sued and named in complaints? Apparently, that sort of thing deserves a raise, at least in Sheriff Bailey’s department.

And say what you will about Axon/Taser (and there’s plenty to be said!), but at least its products gather tons of data. Taser deployment records generated by deputies show they routinely exceed the recommended deployment limits, both in terms of length and frequency. It’s difficult to determine whether these excessive deployments are linked to any of the cases described above because the paperwork filed by these officers almost always conveniently “forgot” Tasers were deployed.

This racist strain of policing runs deep in Mississippi. Officer Lloyd Jones was accused by the DOJ of beating black residents in the 1960s, something that didn’t prevent him from being elected sheriff of Simpson County. He also bragged about shooting a black protester in the back during a 1967 civil rights protest and participated in the jailhouse beating of black reverend in the Rankin County jail in 1970. (Unsurprisingly, cops love him.)

The current sheriff of Rankin County — the one employing the criminally-charged members of the “Goon Squad” — claims Lloyd Jones is one of his mentors.

“He is on my life’s wall of gratitude and had a huge impact on who I am,” Sheriff 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.”

These are the acts the racist-inspired Sheriff Bailey allowed to happen under his watch:

Deputies held people down while punching and kicking them or shocked them repeatedly with Tasers. They shoved gun barrels into people’s mouths. Three people said deputies had waterboarded them until they thought they would suffocate. Five said deputies had told them to move out of the county.

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.

There’s nothing that was considered too far to go in this sheriff’s war on drugs:

As the deputies ransacked his home looking for drugs, Mr. Manning said, they wrapped a pair of jeans around his head and punched him repeatedly in the face before using a blowtorch to melt a metal nutcracker handle onto his bare leg as he screamed. On Mr. McAlpin’s orders, Mr. Manning said, a deputy then forced him to sit, pulled a belt around his neck and yanked it upward, choking him until he believed he would suffocate.

[…]

In interviews, Mr. Paige said the deputies pulled him into his roommate’s bedroom and sat him upright on the bed, where he felt someone press a knee into his back and stretch a washcloth across his mouth. Then, he said, deputies poured gallon after gallon of water over his face. As he struggled to breathe, he said, one of them pressed a lit cigarette into his thigh.

All the while, they shocked his groin intermittently with Tasers, Mr. Paige said. Taser logs show that one of the four deputies who reported being at the scene triggered his Taser during the arrest.

These are not the actions of law enforcement officers. These are the actions of sadists who’ve somehow found a way to get paid for indulging their worst impulses. This may now be coming to an end, but for years this abuse was ignored by a sheriff who openly claims to be inspired by another bigoted sadist who left his mark (in all senses of the word) while battling back against integration.

The list of horrendous abuses of power goes on and on. If you have the stomach for it, I strongly suggest you read the entire NYT article. What’s detailed here shocks the conscience. Unfortunately, I doubt it’s an outlier. Deep-seated racism is a problem anywhere cops do business. But in the deep South, it’s probably a little bit easier to get away with, what with heirs of plantation owners still possessing some of the deepest pockets.

Years of supervisory indifference have led officers to believe they’re a law unto themselves. The jailing of six deputies ultimately won’t make much of a difference. What it will do is force violent bigots to be a little more subtle.

Filed Under: brett mcalpin, christian dedmon, daniel opdyke, goon squad, hunter elward, jeffrey middleton, joshua hartfield, mississippi, police, police violence