Only months before last year's Presidential election, then-DOJ Civil Rights Division head, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, announced the news that some Rankin Countians had been awaiting for years: an investigation into police abuses and harassment alleged to have taken place over more than a decade.
Many of those abuses in the Rankin County Sheriff's Department came to light in the aftermath of the Jan. 2023 beating, torture and near-murder of Michael Corey Jenkins and his friend, Eddie Parker, two African American men from Braxton.
The involvement of five RCSD deputies ranged from the department's fourth in command, then-lead investigator Brett McAlpin, who directed the so-called "Goon Squad" during their assault, to the department's lead narcotics detective, Christian Dedmon, as well as patrol deputies Hunter Elward and Daniel Opdyke. Joshua Hartfield, an officer with the neighboring Richland Police Department, was also involved in the no-warrant raid and assault.
According to Justice Department officials, the attack happened during a no-warrant home raid, when the officers descended on a home east of Braxton, in rural Rankin County, to respond to a neighbor’s complaint that two Black men were staying in a neighboring home with a White woman.
What followed was a nearly two-hour torture session where officers handcuffed Eddie Parker and Michael Corey Jenkins before beating, torturing and sexually assaulting them in the home.
The officers then forced Parker and Jenkins to strip and shower together to wash off the evidence of their torture, which included being waterboarded with milk, cooking grease, alcohol and syrup.
The officers also racially abused the men throughout the assault, frequently using slurs and telling them to "go back to their side of the [Pearl] River" in Jackson, home to the nation's largest concentration of Black residents in any major city.
After removing a chambered round from his service weapon and “dry firing” into Michael Corey Jenkins’ mouth in a mock execution, then-Rankin County Sheriff’s Deputy Hunter Elward fired again, this time with a live round.
The bullet tore through his tongue and exited out of the side of his neck, but Jenkins, a singer and drummer in his now-past life, miraculously survived.
Under the orders of former RCSD Lieutenant Jeffery Middleton, officers then planted evidence on the two men, including a bag of methamphetamine seized from a previous, unrelated raid and a ‘throw down’ gun, to set the cover up in motion.
In March 2024, each officer received a concurrent federal and state sentence ranging from 15 to 45 years.
Later that September, the Justice Department announced it was formally opening a civil pattern and practice investigation into the county’s primary law enforcement agency.
But only weeks into the Trump administration, all of the DOJ’s investigations, and previous agreements with law enforcement agencies, are now under an indefinite freeze.
“I believe that there is a bunch of chaos and confusion that is being talked about to throw us off our mission. I think it's like a smoke cloud, and I know that, as for the NAACP, we are going to stay focused on the mission,” said Angela English, President of the Rankin County chapter of the NAACP, and one of the first to call for a federal pattern and practice investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff's Department.
“Our mission has not changed -- we demand criminal justice reform and police reform, and we are not going to let the rhetoric deter us from what we have to do. Like my mother used to say, while he's running his mouth, we're going to run our business. And it will be business as usual for the NAACP.”
The civil investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff's Department was one of 12 federal civil rights probes launched into police departments across the country under former Attorney General Merrick Garland. But in announcing it, former Civil Rights Division head Kristen Clarke said the investigation would be "separate and independent" from the federal prosecution of the so-called Goon Squad officers.
Rather, it would look into the RCSD as a whole, evaluating all types of force used by officers -- including deadly force -- and whether the department engages in unlawful stops, searches, and arrests in violation of Fourth Amendment protections, as well as if the department implements discriminatory policing in violation of 14th Amendment protections.
The emphasis on investigating those possible violations is based on dozens of reports from residents of Rankin and nearby counties, and extend back years beyond the night of terror inflicted on Eddie Parker and Michael Corey Jenkins in Jan. 2023.
DOJ officials also expressed their desire to examine what, if any, accountability measures are enforced by RCSD leadership.
“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 Todd W. Gee, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, who resigned from his post shortly after President Trump's re-ascension to the White House was confirmed.
“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.”
First elected in 2012, Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey ran unopposed in Nov. 2023 for another four year term in office. He also received a more than $20,000 raise within days of the attack on Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Parker, voted on and passed by the Rankin County Board of Supervisors, making him higher paid than Gov. Tate Reeves.
Bailey has since attempted to distance himself from ongoing civil litigation related to the Jan. 2023 attack.
But Angela English and the Rankin County chapter of the NAACP have pushed for accountability regardless. The Florence native began circulating a petition before federal sentencing last March, attempting to utilize a state statute which allows for the Governor to remove a Sheriff if 30% of the county's registered voters sign a petition in support of their removal.
Gov. Reeves, from Rankin County himself, has yet to indicate whether he would support that effort should the minimum amount of signatures be met.
"We want a person who's going to be accountable, who's going to be transparent, who's going to hold his officers to a higher standard. And if he's not the one to do it, he will be removed," said English, who has yet to receive any response or other communication from Rankin County officials, including the Board of Supervisors.
"We need to make sure that we put people in place that are going to make decisions that are in the best interest of Rankin County -- all of Rankin County.Not just people of color, but even the white community, are sick and tired of the way justice is being carried out. All the injustices that they have seen leaves a bad mark and leaves a dark stain on Rankin County. So they are ready for Bryan Bailey to go also, and they are ready for criminal reform and police reform to take place so that they won't be looked down on," English told MPB News.
'A culture of abuse and harassment'
As the long process of police reform in Rankin County develops, the news of the Justice Department's freeze on Civil Rights litigation also resounds in the town of Lexington, about an hour north of Rankin County.
The seat of rural Holmes County, where the poverty rateexceeds 35 percent and is one of the highest in the nation, Lexington has long been a locus of civil rights activism and racial reckoning in Mississippi. In early 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, best known as SNCC, established a citizenship school where African American residents were provided lessons on interpreting sections of the state's constitution, which at the time were part of a literacy test required when Black residents registered to vote.
Later that year, more than a dozen residents of nearby Mileston marched into Lexington to register, and were soon met by a mob on the courthouse steps comprised of the deputy sheriff, 30 auxiliary policemen and other White officials. Weeks later, the home of Hartman Turnbow, who led the group to Lexington, was firebombed, and he and his family were shot at.
That history was fresh in the minds of many Lexington residents when, in the early 2020's, policing in the town shifted toward targeting Black residents.
Several say that issues began in 2022, when former Lexington Police Chief Sam Dobbins was appointed to the position by the town's Board of Aldermen. Only a year into his term, a recording surfaced of Dobbins bragging to a colleague about the number of people he’d killed in the line of duty, while using racial epithets when referring to the victims, all of whom were African American.
That summer, residents and local activists began organizing for change.
Weekly meetings at a local church then turned into a closed-door meeting with former Civil Rights Division head Kristen Clarke and other Justice Department officials, where many described violent interactions with police, false charges and extortion.
“It's ridiculous what our race has to go through. If you look around, you see no white people out here and this is every week,” said a Lexington resident at a July, 2023 protest who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution by police.
“And so people of color really are having a hard time here. One thing I'm always asking myself is if there’s concern about the citizens of Lexington, because we have been through so much with the police officers,” she said.
Only months after the closed-door meeting, in early November 2023, Clarke and former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, Todd Gee, announced they would begin an investigation into both the city itself and the Lexington Police Department.
Clarke and the Civil Rights Division have led investigations into systemic police misconduct in large cities like Phoenix and Baltimore, where they closely observed institutional practices and recommended changes.
The 2021 appointee has also handled cases with national profiles, such as the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in 2020, the killing of Breonna Taylor by officers in Louisville, Kentucky only a month prior, and the beating and murder of Memphis resident Tyre Nichols in January 2023.
She said those departments dwarf Lexington’s – a force of fewer than 10 officers – in size, but the importance of the work remains.
“Residents of rural and underserved communities have the same rights and deserve the same protection as people who live in downtown Baltimore or the suburbs of Louisville. Police misconduct in smaller communities may not always garner national attention, but rest assured, the Justice Department is watching,” said Clarke at the Nov. 2023 announcement.
Shortly after, DOJ officials began their investigation, which involved an extensive review of both LPD and Lexington's Municipal Court records, hundreds of hours of body-worn camera footage, interviews with city and Police leadership and accompanying officers on ride-alongs.
But despite the close proximity of Justice Department officials over nearly a full year, Lexington residents said the culture of abuse and harassment persisted.
That led to the Department issuing a rare letter as the investigation was ongoing that raised concerns with the city's practice of jailing people for unpaid fines without first determining they could afford to pay them.
When the full findings report was announced last September, that practice was only part of what the DOJ described as a system that deprives residents of their rights under both the U.S. Constitution and federal law.
Investigators found that, in addition to the illegal 'stop and fine' policy, Lexington Police routinely uses excessive force, conducts stops, searches and arrests without probable cause, jails people without prompt access to court, violates the right of free speech of those criticizing the police and discriminates against Black people. Officials also determined that in connecting the revenue generated from Lexington PD's enforcement of these practices to their own funding, both the city and the police department operates under an unconstitutional conflict of interest.
Justice officials determined the total sum of outstanding fines and fees owed to the city's police department to exceed $1.7 million. In a town of about 1,200 in one of the country's poorest counties, that's an average of more than $1,400 per resident. Former Civil Rights Division head Kristen Clarke said the two parties agreed to work on implementing needed reforms.
But now, investigations into both the Rankin County Sheriff's Department and Lexington Police and city government are paused as President Trump's pick to lead the Division, Harmeet Dhillon, awaits Senate confirmation.
The attorney and former vice chair of the California Republican Party has long been an ally of Trump, and her firm Dhillon Law Group has been involved in dozens of anti-voting lawsuits since its founding in 2006.
Neither Dhillon nor acting DOJ officials have clarified whether the temporary freeze on all Civil Rights Division work will be extended, or lifted, following her likely-confirmation.
The NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, one of the nation's pre-eminent civil rights litigation groups, released a statement condemning the appointment.