Mississippi 'Goon Squad' Police Officers Sentenced to Prison

Facts

• After pleading guilty to their crimes in August, six White Mississippi police officers on Thursday were sentenced to between 10 and 40 years in prison for committing extrajudicial targeting and torturing of two Black men.¹
• After receiving a call about two Black men staying in a house with a White woman in Jan. 2023, the officers broke into the home of Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Parker without a warrant. They then used racial slurs, brandished stun guns, and performed degrading acts on the victims.²
• The officers, who called themselves the 'Goon Squad,' were publicly known in Rankin County, Miss., to use violent tactics. They were also found to have sexually assaulted the victims and shot one of them in the mouth during a mock execution.³
• After the incident, the officers — who pleaded guilty to the crimes — destroyed the evidence and attempted to cover it up by planting drugs on the victims, filing false reports against the two men, and pressuring witnesses to maintain the cover-up.⁴
• The one officer who was not from Rankin's sheriff's department, Joshua Hartfield, was sentenced to 10 years. Although he didn't stop the crimes, he had no history of using excessive force and was found to have been forced to participate in the cover-up.⁵
• During sentencing, one of the high-ranking former deputies, Brett McAlpin, who was sentenced to 27 years, said his actions were 'not how people should treat each other,' adding that he's 'really sorry' for making 'law enforcement look so bad.'¹

Sources: ¹CBS, ²Washington Post, ³NPR Online News, ⁴United States Department of Justice and ⁵FOX13 Memphis.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by The Clarion. This is the latest example of law enforcement's longstanding culture of discrimination in Mississippi and throughout the US. These officers should have been fired long ago, but their boss, allowed it to go on. While these individual officers were rightly convicted and sentenced, those at the top should be held accountable for the role they played by turning a blind eye to racism and violence.
• Narrative B, as provided by The New York Times. Everyone agrees these officers' crimes were horrific, which is why they're going to jail for a long time. But their acts weren't necessarily racist alone. Currently, the country is dealing with a subsection of law enforcement that's over-aggressive and victimizes people of all races — giving law enforcement as a profession a bad name. This is a broadly systemic issue that must be addressed.

Predictions