daniel opdyke – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Now That Six ‘Goon Squad’ Deputies Are Going To Jail For Torturing Two Black Men, The DOJ Says It’s Time To Investigate Their Employer

from the better-late-than-never dept

One of the most horrific acts of police brutality has now resulted in two DOJ investigations. The first concerned the torture of Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker by six white deputies who referred to themselves as the “Goon Squad” for their willingness to break rules and violate rights.

The first investigation involved the incident itself to determine whether or the DOJ would be joining the prosecution of the Rankin County (MS) deputies who engaged in the reprehensible, hours-long torture of two black men. The description of this prolonged brutality can still turn stomachs, even when recounted in the dry wording used in charging documents.

During a search of the house, OPDYKE kicked in the padlocked door to the front bedroom. Inside, he found a white-flesh-toned dildo and a BB gun. OPDYKE mounted the dildo on the end of the BB gun and brought the dildo to the living room, where M.J. and E.P. were handcuffed and seated on the couch. OPDYKE forced the dildo into the mouth of E.P., and attempted to force the dildo into the mouth of M.J.

[…]

DEDMON forced M.J. and E.P. onto their knees with their backs to DEDMON, and DEDMON threatened to anally rape M.J. and E.P. with the dildo. DEDMON grabbed the back of M.J.’s pants and moved the dildo toward M.J.’s backside, but DEDMON stopped when he noticed that M.J. had defecated himself.

[…]

M.J. and E.P., still handcuffed, were forced onto their backs on the floor of the living room. ELWARD held them down, and DEDMON poured milk, alcohol, and chocolate syrup on their faces and into their mouths, forcing M.J. and E.P. to involuntarily ingest [these fluids]; and DEDMON poured cooking grease on E.P.’s head.

On top of that, the men were tased 17 times and Jenkins was shot in the mouth. The deputies wrapped up the night by generating bogus GPS data, throwing the house’s security camera hard drive into a nearby lake, concocting a story about a controlled drug buy gone wrong, and destroyed whatever other physical evidence they thought might tie them to the scene.

With six deputies heading to jail, the sheriff who ignored the Goon Squad and their tactics for years promised to root out any remaining bad apples from his barrel. Of course, Sheriff Bryan Bailey is hardly the man for the job. He has his own ethical issues (to put it lightly), ranging from abusing the subpoena process to secure his girlfriend’s phone records to performing some very questionable dismissals of DUI cases.

A man like that can’t be trusted to clean up his own backyard. Fortunately, the DOJ has returned to the scene to announce its own investigation of the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. It may have already looked into the six officers who are now incarcerated, but something as horrible as this doesn’t form in a vacuum. It happens because more minor violations and acts of violence were ignored repeatedly, emboldening the Goon Squad to the point of engaging in the literal torture of two black men.

The Justice Department will investigate whether the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department has engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force and unlawful stops, searches and arrests, and whether it has used racially discriminatory policing practices, according to Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke.

[…]

“The concerns about the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department did not end with the demise of the Goon Squad,” Clarke said Thursday.

The Justice Department has received information about other troubling incidents, including deputies overusing stun guns, entering homes unlawfully, using “shocking racial slurs” and employing “dangerous, cruel tactics to assault people in their custody,” Clarke said.

There’s no need to use the word “whether.” The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department is definitely “engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force” and other rights violations. That much was made clear by these deputies’ actions, which are a trailing indicator of patterns of rights violations. The only question the DOJ’s investigation will answer is just how bad things are. The other certainty is that some high-profile resignations will be filed in the very near future as department supervisors and county officials hurriedly try to put some time and distance between them and this miserable excuse for a law enforcement agency they helped cultivate.

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

With Multiple Deputies Headed To Jail, Sheriff Vows To Get To Bottom Of ‘Goon Squad’ Horror Show He Ignored For Years

from the fox-to-henhouse:-what-up dept

Reminding everyone that racism is just a thing we do in the United States, six Rankin County deputies were indicated on criminal charges related to the literal torture of two black men. All six pleaded guilty. Deputy Hunter Elward was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison. The other officers are also currently serving prison time.

This all began because a “helpful” Mississippi resident called the cops because they had witnessed the most Mississippi of crimes: black men hanging out with a white woman. What went on from there not only chills the blood, but triggers the gag reflex:

During a search of the house, OPDYKE kicked in the padlocked door to the front bedroom. Inside, he found a white-flesh-toned dildo and a BB gun. OPDYKE mounted the dildo on the end of the BB gun and brought the dildo to the living room, where M.J. and E.P. were handcuffed and seated on the couch. OPDYKE forced the dildo into the mouth of E.P., and attempted to force the dildo into the mouth of M.J.

[…]

DEDMON forced M.J. and E.P. onto their knees with their backs to DEDMON, and DEDMON threatened to anally rape M.J. and E.P. with the dildo. DEDMON grabbed the back of M.J.’s pants and moved the dildo toward M.J.’s backside, but DEDMON stopped when he noticed that M.J. had defecated himself.

[…]

M.J. and E.P., still handcuffed, were forced onto their backs on the floor of the living room. ELWARD held them down, and DEDMON poured milk, alcohol, and chocolate syrup on their faces and into their mouths, forcing M.J. and E.P. to involuntarily ingest [these fluids]; and DEDMON poured cooking grease on E.P.’s head.

[…]

Pointing out that M.J. and E.P. had been tased by both RCSO-issued tasers and an RPD-issued taser, the defendants decided to test their tasers on M.J. and E.P. to see which one was more powerful.

At this point, DEDMON, MIDDLETON, HARTFIELD, and ELWARD tased M.J. and E.P. repeatedly: ELWARD’s taser was discharged 8 times, HARTFIELD’s taser was discharged 5 times, and DEDMON’s taser was discharged 4 times.

[…]

ELWARD surreptitiously removed a bullet from the chamber of his gun.

ELWARD forced M.J. onto his knees, stuck the gun in M.J.’s mouth, and pulled the trigger. The unloaded gun clicked but did not discharge.

ELWARD racked the slide, intending to dry-fire a second time. When ELWARD put the gun back into M.J’s mouth and pulled the trigger, the gun discharged. The bullet lacerated M.J.’s tongue, broke his jaw and exited out of his neck.

I want to set the scene for what’s been happening since then. The six members of the self-proclaimed “Goon Squad” are all now facing jail time. The sheriff who oversaw this group (and by “oversaw,” I mean “ignored”) has not only received a raise that makes him the highest paid law enforcement official in the state, but is now pretending he’s capable of cleaning this mess up.

And who better to do this than the sheriff who, in 2014, abused the subpoena process to dig up info on his girlfriend. He presented a subpoena for phone records to the local DA under the pretense that he was requesting general info to present to a grand jury. But the phone records request targeted his girlfriend (who was cuurently married to someone else) and the school employee the sheriff believed she was romantically involved with. An investigation was opened, but it dead-ended after the chairman of the (LOL) House Committee on Ethics recused himself because of his “years-long friendship” with the sheriff. It was then passed on to the state attorney general who simply decided not to pursue it.

Another bombshell of bad press has rocked the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department still run by ethically-challenged sheriff Bryan Bailey. A collaborative report produced by the New York Times and Mississippi Today uncovered messages sent between deputies in the “Goon Squad” WhatsApp group.

As can be assumed from the description of the atrocities committed by Goon Squad members in the only case they’re currently facing prison time for, the contents of these messages is more of the same:

Some of the messages discuss brutalizing and demeaning suspects, as well as exchanging disturbing crime scene photos and pictures of “rotting corpses,” the report said.

In one exchange from a 2022 domestic violence arrest, then-Deputy Hunter Elward wrote, “Did you Tase him in the face!?”

Fellow Goon Squad member Daniel Opdyke asked if they had shocked the man in the anus.

Another deputy said the suspect would have “gotten more lovings,” seeming to indicate they held back because of potential witnesses, saying, “All the neighbors were outside watching.”

Chat members also “discussed taking nude pictures of a woman they had arrested,” the Times reported.

Another exchange discusses deputies getting “points” for shooting someone.

One member of this chat group has already opted for the “locker room talk” defense popularized by convicted felon Donald Trump:

One member of the group chat, who no longer works for the sheriff’s department, called his messages “absolutely all jokes,” in an interview with the New York Times.

Huh. Well, they don’t look like “jokes.” Jokes are supposed to be funny. Were these messages only funny because they were true? Because, given what’s reported, the “jokes” referenced acts of violence Goon Squad members actually committed. If these were jokes, they were in-jokes that were only funny in the context of habitual acts of torture and violence committed by members of the Goon Squad group.

The state should be jumping in here to take the lead on an independent investigation of the members of this chat group. But it hasn’t done that, which has allowed none other than Sheriff Bryan Bailey to get a head start on exonerating himself, if not the rest of chat group participants not currently serving federal prison time.

The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office says it will conduct a review and analysis after a Wednesday report from The New York Times and Mississippi Today detailed messages in an encrypted WhatsApp group chat between known “Goon Squad” members and other law enforcement officers, some of whom are still employed by the county.

[…]

Neither the department nor Sheriff Bryan Bailey “knew of the existence of ‘a shift of officers who called themselves the ‘Goon Squad’ until a bill of information was filed in federal court,” the sheriff’s office statement said.

Bullshit. If the sheriff was truly unaware of the existence of a “Goon Squad” or the violent tactics of its members, he’s either incompetent or a liar. The acts committed by these officers were not the acts of officers who went a little off the rails when dealing with violent or extremely hostile arrestees. These are the acts of officers who felt truly comfortable torturing their fellow human beings, secure in the knowledge they would most likely get away with it — either because their boss was bad at his job or was willing to ignore their criminal acts. Neither is a good look for the person who’s supposed to be on top of everything happening in his department.

If Sheriff Bailey actually cared about this, he would have asked for an outside law enforcement agency to handle this “review and analysis.” If the state cared at all about this, it would have already initiated an independent investigation utilizing its Inspector General’s office or, at the very least, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. Although the latter is still a law enforcement agency and just as prone to look for reasons to exonerate fellow officers, it still wouldn’t be the extremely compromised Sheriff Bailey pretending he can provide a competent investigation of stuff he was either too stupid or too corrupt to notice despite running this department for more than a decade.

Filed Under: brett mcalpin, christian dedmon, daniel opdyke, goon squad, hunter elward, jeffrey middleton, mississippi, police, police brutality, police violence, rankin county

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

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-nakedfrom hisbed 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

Emmett Till All Over Again: Six White Mississippi Cops Plead Guilty To Beating, Torturing Two Black Men

from the crime-of-being-black-while-existing dept

The more things change, etc. We’ll never fully reject this country’s racist history if we insist on stocking our police departments with racists. The horrific events described here do not exist in a vacuum. The officers who felt comfortable doing these things felt comfortable for several reasons.

First, there’s the long history of racist policing, which means cops who oppress minorities seldom suffer the consequences of their actions. Then there’s qualified immunity, which means cops have to veer far over constitutional lines to even be held responsible for their actions. And, in most cases, cops who do these things are indemnified, which means they’re never actually personally responsible for their actions. It’s the people they’re supposed to serve who actually foot the bill.

Then there’s cop culture in general, which teaches cops that every person who isn’t a cop is a potential threat and that everyone who isn’t a cop isn’t qualified to opine on, much less alter, standard cop behavior.

Beyond that, there are police unions: powerful entities capable of persuading legislators to leave cops alone, no matter how much abusive behavior they’ve engaged in.

On top of this discordant, useless mess is the DOJ, which can open investigations, secure consent decrees, and expose years of unconstitutional practices. But, in the end, the targets of DOJ investigations have to want to change to actually effect any changes. Almost none of them do.

Welcome to Mississippi, 1955. Emmett Till was accused by a white woman of whistling at her and grabbing her hand while she shopped in a local store. Because of this (unverified) claim, locals took it upon themselves to do this to Emmett Till:

In the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, sometime between 2 and 3:30 a.m., Bryant and Milam drove to Mose Wright’s house. Milam was armed with a pistol and a flashlight. He asked Wright if he had three boys in the house from Chicago. Till was sharing a bed with another cousin and there were a total of eight people in the cabin. Milam asked Wright to take them to “the nigger who did the talking”. Till’s great-aunt offered the men money, but Milam refused as he rushed Emmett to put on his clothes.

[…]

They tied up Till in the back of a green pickup truck and drove toward Money, Mississippi. According to some witnesses, they took Till back to Bryant’s Groceries and recruited two black men. The men then drove to a barn in Drew. They pistol-whipped him on the way and reportedly knocked him unconscious.

[…]

Three days after his abduction and murder, Till’s swollen and disfigured body was found by two boys who were fishing in the Tallahatchie River. His head was very badly mutilated, he had been shot above the right ear, an eye was dislodged from the socket, there was evidence that he had been beaten on the back and the hips, and his body weighted by a fan blade, which was fastened around his neck with barbed wire. He was nude, but wearing a silver ring with the initials “L. T.” and “May 25, 1943” carved in it. His face was unrecognizable due to trauma and having been submerged in water.

Welcome to Mississippi, 2023. Little has changed other than the year. Till was abducted, beaten, tortured, and killed for the crime of existing in the vicinity of white women. The victims of this latest round of brutality were guilty of the same thing: existing in the vicinity of a white woman.

A white neighbor phoned Rankin County Deputy Brett McAlpin and complained that two Black men were staying with a white woman inside a Braxton home. McAlpin told Deputy Christian Dedmon, who texted a group of white deputies so willing to use excessive force they called themselves “The Goon Squad.”

“Are y’all available for a mission?” Dedmon asked. They were.

What you’re about to read is highly disturbing. The most disturbing thing about this is that US police culture led directly to the horrific violations described rather dryly by this DOJ press release:

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.

This describes the actions of five former officers of the Rankin County, Mississippi Sheriff’s Office. These are the names of the culprits: Chief Investigator Brett McAlpin, Narcotics Investigator Christian Dedmon, Lt. Jeffrey Middleton, Deputy Hunter Elward, and Deputy Daniel Opdyke. All of these officers pled guilty to the charges against them.

The charging document [PDF] sheds more light on the disturbing details behind the horrific act, including the fact that these officers had formed their own (publicly acknowledged) “Goon Squad” for the sole purpose of engaging in constitutional violations.

DEDMON reached out to a shift of officers who called themselves “The Goon Squad” because of their willingness to use excessive force and not report it.

This group knew their actions were illegal. That’s why they took steps to avoid being caught by anything that might undercut their narrative following their illegal acts.

DEDMON messaged the group that they were going to the property on Conerly Road, and warned them: “There is a chance [of] cameras… let’s approach east and work eas[y].” The defendants understood “work easy” to mean knock on the door, rather than kick it down. ELWARD texted back an eyeroll emoji, and OPDYKE texted a .gif of a baby crying.

More communication about cameras ensued. So did a discussion about “no bad mugshots,” which was understood to mean any violence perpetrated on the black men should avoid their faces.

Arriving at the property, the officers avoided the visible surveillance camera at the front of the house. Two officers kicked in the carport door, while another walked around to the back door, which did not have a camera observing it. Officers enter through these doors. No one had a warrant. Once inside, the violence began.

Both black men were handcuffed. While handcuffed, they were tased multiple times. E.P. was kicked in the ribs by Opdyke. Dedmon brandished his weapon, asked about the location of drugs, and fired a round into the wall of the home where both M.J. and E.P. (the initials given to the men brutalized by these inhuman officers) were being held captive by the “Goon Squad,” apparently for their failure to immediately provide evidence that would support the ongoing brutality.

Both men were moved to the living room by the self-proclaimed “Goon Squad.” The violence continued.

The defendants, all of whom are white, called M.J. and E.P. racial slurs, including “nigger,” “monkey,” and “boy;” accused them of taking advantage of the white woman who owned the house; and warned them to stay out of Rankin County and go back to Jackson or to “their side” of the Pearl River — areas with higher concentrations of Black residents.

It gets so much worse.

During a search of the house, OPDYKE kicked in the padlocked door to the front bedroom. Inside, he found a white-flesh-toned dildo and a BB gun. OPDYKE mounted the dildo on the end of the BB gun and brought the dildo to the living room, where M.J. and E.P. were handcuffed and seated on the couch. OPDYKE forced the dildo into the mouth of E.P., and attempted to force the dildo into the mouth of M.J.

[…]

DEDMON forced M.J. and E.P. onto their knees with their backs to DEDMON, and DEDMON threatened to anally rape M.J. and E.P. with the dildo. DEDMON grabbed the back of M.J.’s pants and moved the dildo toward M.J.’s backside, but DEDMON stopped when he noticed that M.J. had defecated himself.

Inhumanity, personified by a handful of “law enforcement officers,” a phrase I’m forced to put in quotes because nothing that happened here indicated they’re actually in the law enforcement business, much less deserving of this title.

M.J. and E.P., still handcuffed, were forced onto their backs on the floor of the living room. ELWARD held them down, and DEDMON poured milk, alcohol, and chocolate syrup on their faces and into their mouths, forcing M.J. and E.P. to involuntarily ingest [these fluids]; and DEDMON poured cooking grease on E.P.’s head.

After this assault, which included Elward throwing eggs at both Black men, they were ordered to shower to rid themselves of evidence of this abuse before being taken to jail.

But the abuse didn’t end there. Opdyke struck E.P. with a wooden spoon. Middleton hit E.P with a metal sword. Dedmon and McAlpin struck E.P. in the back with pieces of wood.

Sadism at every turn.

Pointing out that M.J. and E.P. had been tased by both RCSO-issued tasers and an RPD-issued taser, the defendants decided to test their tasers on M.J. and E.P. to see which one was more powerful.

At this point, DEDMON, MIDDLETON, HARTFIELD, and ELWARD tased M.J. and E.P. repeatedly: ELWARD’s taser was discharged 8 times, HARTFIELD’s taser was discharged 5 times, and DEDMON’s taser was discharged 4 times.

Two of the officers wandered off to steal stuff from the house, only to be interrupted by the sound of gunfire. This wasn’t the two men assaulting officers or escaping. This was only further torture perpetrated by armed officers of the law.

ELWARD surreptitiously removed a bullet from the chamber of his gun.

ELWARD forced M.J. onto his knees, stuck the gun in M.J.’s mouth, and pulled the trigger. The unloaded gun clicked but did not discharge.

ELWARD racked the slide, intending to dry-fire a second time. When ELWARD put the gun back into M.J’s mouth and pulled the trigger, the gun discharged. The bullet lacerated M.J.’s tongue, broke his jaw and exited out of his neck.

So much for “no bad mugshots.” While M.J. continued to bleed from this wound, the officers gathered on the porch and concocted a cover story. The officers agreed to say they had spotted M.J. outside the house, patted him down, and discovered baggies of meth. Then M.J. had run into the house, forcing the officers to pursue him.

Once inside the house, officers asked M.J. to perform a controlled drug buy over the phone. When M.J.’s handcuffs were removed to perform the call to purchase drugs, he had reached for a gun, forcing Elward to shoot him in the mouth.

The dildo was removed from the BB gun. This gun was placed next to M.J., who still wasn’t receiving any medical attention after being shot in the mouth by Elward. The officers then went to work on E.P., stating that he would be immediately released from jail if he was willing to corroborate the massive pile of lies the officers had concocted.

McAlpin left the scene to create GPS data that would corroborate the cover story. The clothes originally worn by the tortured men were thrown into the woods after proving to be too wet to be burned. Hartfield removed the hard drive storage for the home surveillance system and threw it into a nearby creek. Shell casings were removed from the house. Drugs in the possession of Dedmon were planted in the house. And McAlpin and Middleton threatened to kill any of the other officers who had willingly participated in this violence and torture if they suddenly had a crisis of conscience and ratted the others out.

These officers will all be going to jail. But it’s naïve to believe this means the worst of the worst has been rooted out. These are just the ones that got caught. And those who haven’t been caught likely feel just as comfortable regularly violating rights, even if they’re not quite as willing to go to these extremes. Cops have always protected cops, providing their tacit approval of constitutional violations. Every so often, though, officers go too far and end up paying the price. But the root problem still exists: a toxic combination of insularity and opacity that inevitably leads to horrific rights abuses even the worst of worst can’t openly condone.

Filed Under: braxton, brett mcalpin, christian dedmon, daniel opdyke, goon squad, hunter elward, jeffrey middleton, missippi, police, police brutality, rankin county