On the night of January 24, 2023, six Mississippi law enforcement officers — five deputies from the Rankin County Sheriff's Department and one officer from the Richland Police Department — entered the home of Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker, two Black men, in Braxton, Mississippi. They did not have a valid search warrant authorizing the entry. They had received a complaint about a white woman allegedly being on the property. What followed over the next several hours was a systematic act of torture — one of the most thoroughly documented cases of law enforcement brutality in recent American history, captured in part on the officers' own recordings and ultimately admitted to in open federal court by each of the six men who participated.

The officers entered, separated the two men, and proceeded to beat them over an extended period. They used their fists, their boots, a gun, a Taser, and a dildo as an instrument of assault and sexual humiliation. They poured milk down the men's throats to simulate the sensation of drowning. They used slurs throughout — the word that has stood for four centuries as the verbal symbol of Black dehumanization in America, deployed by men wearing the badges of state authority. At the end of it, one of the officers placed his service pistol into Michael Jenkins's mouth and fired. The bullet traveled through Jenkins's jaw and exited through his cheek. He survived, but was left with permanent devastating injuries, including damage to his tongue that left him unable to speak normally.

The six officers then falsified their reports. They filed paperwork claiming that Jenkins had shot himself, that the injuries were self-inflicted, that what they had done was lawful and appropriate. They conspired, immediately and systematically, to obstruct justice, destroy evidence, and cover up what they had done. They operated with the casual confidence of men who had reason to believe they would get away with it — men who had, in all probability, operated in exactly this fashion before.

They were wrong about getting away with it. But only barely. And what made the difference was not the state of Mississippi, whose law enforcement accountability infrastructure might have allowed the cover-up to succeed. What made the difference was federal intervention — a Department of Justice Civil Rights Division investigation and prosecution that stripped away the false reports, extracted guilty pleas from all six officers, and secured sentences ranging from over a decade to more than forty years in federal prison. It was one of the most significant law enforcement accountability outcomes in the recent history of the American South.

The story of the Rankin County Goon Squad is, on its surface, a story of law enforcement accountability eventually working. But the surface conceals the more important story: it is a story of how state systems — the Rankin County Sheriff's Department, the Rankin County District Attorney's office, and the broader Mississippi law enforcement accountability infrastructure — failed for years to address a documented culture of systematic violence and racial terror that these officers had practiced long before January 24, 2023. The federal intervention that finally held them accountable was not a triumph of the system. It was evidence of how completely the system had failed.

The Goon Squad: A Culture of Violence with a Name and a History

The six officers who tortured Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker on January 24, 2023 were not strangers acting in isolation. They were members of — and by their own admissions in federal court, practitioners of — an informal group within the Rankin County Sheriff's Department that other officers called the "Goon Squad." The name was not assigned by critics or prosecutors. It was used internally. It described a culture, a practice, and a set of relationships within the department that normalized violence, racial terror, and the abuse of law enforcement authority as instruments of extrajudicial punishment.

Federal prosecutors, in their sentencing memoranda and in the factual bases for the guilty pleas, described prior instances in which members of the Goon Squad had engaged in similar conduct — unauthorized entries, beatings, the use of racial slurs, and violence that went beyond anything that could be characterized as lawful force. These were not isolated incidents. They were a pattern, extending over years, in which the officers had operated with the apparent understanding that their department — and, by extension, the prosecutorial and judicial institutions of Rankin County — would not hold them accountable for what they did.

That understanding was well-founded. Prior to the January 2023 incident, Rankin County had paid civil judgments in cases arising from complaints against its officers. Civil judgments — the financial consequence that arrives when a municipality's insurance coverage kicks in to resolve a lawsuit — are, in the American law enforcement accountability system, one of the primary mechanisms through which evidence of a pattern of abuse accumulates. When a county pays multiple civil judgments arising from similar allegations against similar officers, it creates a public record of a pattern. It also creates an obligation, under the legal framework established in Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978), to reform the practices that produced the liability.

Rankin County paid the judgments. It did not reform the practices. The Goon Squad continued to operate. The officers continued to enter homes, beat people, deploy racial terror as an enforcement tool, and file false reports. The system that was supposed to respond to the evidence of a pattern — the Sheriff's internal affairs function, the Rankin County DA's office, the Mississippi Attorney General, the Mississippi Department of Public Safety — did not respond with anything that disrupted the pattern's continuation.

Brett McAlpin, who was among the most senior members of the group and who pleaded guilty to conspiring in the Jenkins-Parker assault, had been with the Rankin County Sheriff's Department for years. His seniority did not mean he was an outlier who had escaped detection. It meant he had operated within a culture that accommodated, encouraged, and protected the kind of conduct for which he eventually pleaded guilty to federal charges. His continued employment — his advancement within the department — was itself an institutional statement about what the department was and what it tolerated.

The Night of January 24: What the Evidence Showed

The factual record of what happened on January 24, 2023 was established through a combination of the officers' own admissions in their guilty pleas, recordings made by the officers themselves, forensic evidence, and the testimony of the victims. It is one of the most thoroughly documented instances of law enforcement torture in recent American legal history, and its documentation — the officers' own words and recordings memorializing what they did — made the federal case overwhelming even before any defendant decided to cooperate.

The officers arrived at the property in Braxton in response to a complaint that a white woman was on the premises. The racial character of the complaint — white woman, Black men — was not incidental to what followed. Federal prosecutors characterized the officers' conduct as motivated in part by racial animus, and the use of racial slurs throughout the encounter was documented in the officers' own recordings and admitted in their guilty pleas. The slurs were not incidental. They were integral to the manner in which the officers understood their relationship to the men they were brutalizing.

Inside the home, the officers separated Jenkins and Parker and subjected each to prolonged physical violence. The assault included beating with fists and boots — the kind of violence that leaves specific, documentable physical injuries. It included the deployment of a Taser against men who were already subdued and in no position to threaten the officers. It included the use of a sex toy as an instrument of sexual assault and humiliation — an act whose specific purpose was degradation, the reduction of the victims to objects of contempt.

The simulated drowning — pouring milk into the men's mouths, forcing it down their throats while they could not resist — was a technique of psychological and physical torture. It was not a law enforcement tool. It was not a defensive measure. It was a gratuitous act of cruelty, performed by officers who had by that point already thoroughly established physical control over two men who posed no threat to anyone.

The shooting of Michael Jenkins was the act that made the cover-up necessary and, ultimately, impossible. Deputy Hunter Elward placed his service pistol into Jenkins's mouth and fired. The bullet entered through Jenkins's mouth and exited through his cheek. Jenkins survived, but the injury was catastrophic — damage to his jaw, his tongue, his ability to speak and eat in the way he had before January 24, 2023. The physical evidence of a gunshot wound to the face — the entry and exit trajectories, the wound characteristics — was not consistent with the self-inflicted shooting that the officers' false reports described. The forensic evidence of the shooting alone was sufficient to begin unraveling the cover-up, because the trajectory of the wound was inconsistent with a self-inflicted injury in the position the officers claimed Jenkins had been in when he supposedly shot himself.

“The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

The Cover-Up: Official Documents as Instruments of Obstruction

The officers' decision to file false reports after the assault was not a panicked improvisation. It was a practiced institutional reflex — the kind of cover story that officers who have operated within a culture of protected violence learn to construct because they have seen, or participated in, similar cover stories before. The false narrative — Jenkins shot himself; the injuries were self-inflicted; what the officers did was lawful — was not credible under forensic scrutiny, but it was the kind of narrative that, in a jurisdiction where law enforcement accountability depended entirely on state actors who were institutionally inclined to accept officers' accounts, might have succeeded.

The false reports were filed. The false narrative was the initial framing of the incident. The Rankin County Sheriff's Department did not immediately identify the officers' accounts as false and initiate an internal investigation. The Mississippi Attorney General's office did not immediately step in to conduct an independent investigation. What happened was that the federal government — specifically, the FBI and the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division — received information about the incident and initiated its own investigation, operating outside the institutional framework of Mississippi law enforcement accountability.

The federal investigation moved quickly and produced results that the state apparatus, if left to its own devices, might never have produced. Investigators examined the physical evidence, reviewed the officers' communications, interviewed witnesses, and assembled a factual record that demolished the false narrative. By the time federal prosecutors presented the evidence to the six officers, the choice between pleading guilty and going to trial on evidence that included the officers' own recordings of what they had done was not a close call. All six pleaded guilty in August 2023.

The speed and comprehensiveness of the federal investigation stood in stark contrast to the state's response. Mississippi had, at the time of the January 2023 incident, all of the legal tools necessary to investigate and prosecute the officers under state law. Mississippi has criminal statutes addressing assault, battery, sexual assault, and official misconduct. The Rankin County District Attorney's office had jurisdiction over crimes committed in Rankin County. The Mississippi Attorney General had authority to investigate statewide patterns of law enforcement misconduct. None of these state mechanisms produced an investigation, an indictment, or a prosecution of any of the six officers on any state charge before the federal case resolved the matter entirely.

The absence of any state prosecution was not an oversight. It was a statement about the priorities and the institutional culture of Mississippi's law enforcement accountability apparatus. The Rankin County DA's office — which would have been the institution responsible for prosecuting the officers under state law — operated in the same county as the Sheriff's Department that employed five of the six officers. The working relationship between the DA's office and the Sheriff's Department — the relationship that every local DA has with the local law enforcement agencies whose cases it prosecutes — creates structural pressure against aggressive prosecution of those same agencies' officers. It is not impossible for local prosecutors to investigate and charge the officers who work beside them every day. It is rare. And in Rankin County, Mississippi, in a case involving an internal culture of racial violence that had operated for years, it did not happen.

Federal Sentences: A Measure of What Was Done

The federal sentences imposed on the six officers — entered in the Southern District of Mississippi in August 2023 and finalized in the months following the guilty pleas — were, by the standards of law enforcement prosecution, extraordinary. They reflected the severity of the conduct, the multiplicity of the charges, the duration of the cover-up, and, in the cases of the most senior and most culpable officers, the evidence of a pattern of prior conduct that made the January 2023 assault not an aberration but a culmination.

Christian Dedmon received the longest sentence: 40 years in federal prison. Dedmon, a deputy who played a central role in organizing and directing the assault, was described by prosecutors as a leader within the Goon Squad culture — someone whose conduct over time reflected not just individual violence but the institutional transmission of a culture of racial terror within the department. The 40-year sentence reflected the full weight of the charges against him, including conspiracy against rights, deprivation of rights under color of law, obstruction of justice, and firearm offenses.

Brett McAlpin, whose seniority within the department gave him particular significance as an indicator of the depth of the institutional culture, received 27 years. Hunter Elward — the officer who pulled the trigger and fired a bullet through Michael Jenkins's face — received 20 years. Gareth Grayson received 17.5 years. Daniel Opdyke received 17 years. Joshua Hartfield of the Richland Police Department, who was treated as a somewhat less culpable participant in the conspiracy, received 10 years.

These are real sentences — not the time-served plea agreements and suspended sentences that characterize the overwhelming majority of law enforcement misconduct prosecutions in the United States. They represent a federal criminal justice system operating at something closer to its statutory potential in a case of law enforcement accountability. They also represent, precisely because they are so far above the norm, an indictment of the norm. The fact that 40-year and 27-year federal sentences for law enforcement officers who committed acts of torture and racial violence are extraordinary — that they stand out so dramatically against the background rate of law enforcement accountability — tells us everything about how rarely the system produces accountability of this kind.

The Victims' Lives After January 24

Michael Jenkins survived the shooting, but his survival was not a return to the life he had before. The bullet that Hunter Elward fired through his mouth caused permanent damage to his jaw and tongue that affected his ability to speak, to eat, and to function in the ordinary ways that people whose faces have not been shot take for granted. Jenkins has spoken publicly about the ongoing physical consequences of his injuries — the surgeries, the rehabilitation, the permanent disabilities that no medical intervention has fully resolved.

The psychological dimensions of what Jenkins and Parker experienced are not fully captured in any court record. The experience of being beaten, sexually assaulted, forced to submit to simulated drowning, and shot by officers of the state — by people wearing badges and carrying the authority of law — is not merely a physical event. It is a comprehensive violation of everything that law enforcement, in its constitutional design, is supposed to represent. Officers derive their authority from the public they serve. When they turn that authority into an instrument of torture directed at the people they are supposed to protect, they do not merely harm those specific individuals. They demonstrate that the badge and the uniform can be instruments of terror, that the state's monopoly on coercive force can be turned against the very people whose safety it is supposed to guarantee.

Eddie Parker has also spoken publicly about the experience and its aftermath. His account, like Jenkins's, describes not just the physical assault but the profound institutional betrayal it represented — the recognition, made viscerally real in a way that no abstract knowledge of American racial history could fully convey, that the law enforcement apparatus could visit exactly this kind of violence on him and his home and then lie about it in official documents, and that without federal intervention, the lie might well have stood.

The civil lawsuit filed by Jenkins and Parker against Rankin County, the individual officers, and the City of Richland was pending as of the time of this writing. The lawsuit sought compensatory and punitive damages for the constitutional violations the officers committed. It also sought findings that would establish, for the public record, the institutional liability of the county for maintaining a culture — embodied in the Goon Squad — that made the assault not an aberration but a foreseeable consequence of the policies and practices the county had permitted to operate for years.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

The Prior Pattern: What Rankin County Knew and Ignored

The Rankin County Sheriff's Department's history prior to January 24, 2023 is the most damning element of the institutional accountability failure the Goon Squad case represents. Federal prosecutors and civil rights attorneys who investigated the case identified a pattern of prior complaints, civil settlements, and documented abuses that had accumulated over years without producing any meaningful institutional response from the department, the county government, or the state.

Civil rights advocacy organizations and journalists who investigated the Rankin County Sheriff's Department after the January 2023 assault documented a history of civil judgments paid in cases involving allegations of excessive force, racial abuse, and unconstitutional conduct by department officers. The civil judgment mechanism — in which the county's insurance carrier pays a settlement, the case closes, and no officer is criminally charged or formally disciplined — is the standard American response to documented law enforcement misconduct. It generates a financial cost that is borne by taxpayers, not by the officers whose conduct generated the liability. It creates no individual accountability. It changes no institutional behavior. And it generates a public record that, if examined, reveals the pattern that the individual settlement is designed to resolve without acknowledging.

In Rankin County, the pattern was there. The settlements were there. The civil rights complaints were there. What was not there was any institutional actor willing to look at the pattern, draw the obvious inference — that the department had an embedded culture of violence — and act on that inference before the January 2023 assault made action unavoidable.

The Rankin County District Attorney at the time, Bubba Bramlett, has not been charged with any crime in connection with the Goon Squad case. But the absence of any state prosecution for the pre-2023 conduct — and the absence of any state prosecution for the January 2023 assault itself before the federal case resolved everything — raises serious questions about how the DA's office understood its responsibility when confronted with evidence of systematic law enforcement misconduct by officers whose arrests and prosecutions it depended on for its own case workload. That question has not been fully answered in any public proceeding.

The Role of Race: Why This Happened Where It Did

The Rankin County Goon Squad case cannot be understood outside its racial context. Mississippi is not like other states in its relationship to the history of racial violence conducted under the color of law. The history of law enforcement in Mississippi — the use of sheriffs, deputies, and local police as instruments of racial terror through the era of slavery, through Reconstruction, through the decades of Jim Crow, through the Civil Rights era and beyond — is not ancient history. It is living memory, in some cases literally: there are people alive in Mississippi today who personally experienced, or personally witnessed, law enforcement violence motivated by racial animus and carried out by officers acting in exactly the manner that the Goon Squad operated on January 24, 2023.

The use of racial slurs by the officers throughout the assault was not incidental decoration on a crime that would have occurred regardless of the victims' race. Federal prosecutors found, and the factual basis of the guilty pleas established, that racial animus was a motivating factor in the assault. The specific character of the violence — including the sexual degradation, the simulated drowning, the shooting — bore the marks of violence designed not merely to punish or subdue but to humiliate, to reduce, to demonstrate to the victims and any witnesses the officers' contempt for their personhood.

This is not an accusation that requires inference. It is a finding documented in federal court records. The officers used the language of racial hatred. They committed acts whose purpose was racial humiliation. They did so wearing badges issued by the government of the State of Mississippi. And they did so in the apparent confidence that the institutional machinery of Rankin County would protect them — a confidence that was, based on the prior history of the department, entirely rational given everything they had seen and done before.

The question of why the state apparatus failed to interrupt this culture before January 24, 2023 — why the civil judgments did not produce discipline, why the complaints did not produce investigation, why the pattern did not produce prosecution — is inseparable from the racial context in which the pattern operated. Law enforcement accountability systems that fail to interrupt documented patterns of racial violence are not failing in the same way that systems that fail to detect random misconduct fail. They are failing in a way that has a specific historical character — the character of institutions that are structured, staffed, and politically accountable to communities that have historically not treated the protection of Black residents as a priority equal to the protection of white residents.

Why Federal Intervention Was Both Necessary and Insufficient

The federal prosecution of the six Rankin County Goon Squad officers was one of the most successful law enforcement accountability outcomes in recent American history. The guilty pleas of all six officers, the sentences ranging from 10 to 40 years, the comprehensive factual record established in federal court — these represent the federal civil rights enforcement apparatus operating at something approaching full effectiveness in a case of undeniable severity.

And it was necessary precisely because the state apparatus failed. The FBI and DOJ Civil Rights Division did what the Rankin County Sheriff's Department, the Rankin County DA's office, and the Mississippi Attorney General did not. They investigated seriously, they gathered evidence comprehensively, and they prosecuted aggressively. The fact that they succeeded does not vindicate the system. It vindicates the federal component of the system while exposing the complete failure of every state component.

The reliance on federal intervention as the ultimate backstop for state law enforcement accountability failures is itself a structural problem. Federal civil rights prosecutions are resource-intensive. The DOJ Civil Rights Division is not staffed or funded to investigate every instance of law enforcement misconduct in every county in every state. Its capacity to intervene depends on cases rising to a level of severity and documentation that makes them federal priorities — a standard that, by definition, allows a substantial volume of misconduct that falls below that level to go unaddressed. For every Rankin County case that produces federal indictments and 40-year sentences, there are dozens of similar patterns in other counties that have not yet produced the specific incident severe enough to trigger federal scrutiny.

Moreover, federal intervention addresses individual criminal liability for specific incidents. It does not, and cannot, fully address the institutional culture that produced those incidents. The Rankin County Sheriff's Department as an institution — its hiring practices, its supervision, its accountability culture, its relationship to the county government that funds and oversees it — was not the subject of the federal criminal prosecution. Individual officers went to prison. The department continues to operate. The institutional conditions that produced the Goon Squad have not been systematically dismantled by any federal or state intervention.

The Broader Crisis of Local Law Enforcement Accountability

The Rankin County case is extraordinary in its severity and in the accountability outcome it eventually produced. It is not extraordinary as a pattern. The elements that made it possible — a local law enforcement culture of protected violence; a prosecutorial apparatus institutionally disinclined to pursue officers from partnering agencies; civil judgments that monetized misconduct without producing accountability; racial animus operating as a force multiplier for violence against Black residents; and a federal intervention that was necessary precisely because state mechanisms had failed — are present, in various combinations and concentrations, in law enforcement agencies across the country.

The statistical record of law enforcement accountability in the United States is damning in its consistency. Studies by the Cato Institute's National Police Misconduct Reporting Project, the Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database at Bowling Green State University, and the work of investigative journalists at ProPublica, the Marshall Project, and local newsrooms across the country have collectively documented that officers who commit acts of misconduct — including serious physical violence against citizens — face criminal prosecution in a small fraction of cases, face departmental discipline in a minority of cases, and continue their employment in a majority of cases. The accountability rate for law enforcement misconduct is, by any reasonable measure, far below what the constitutional framework of rights enforcement requires.

The qualified immunity doctrine — which provides individual officers with civil immunity unless they violated a "clearly established" constitutional right — has contributed to this accountability gap by making it extremely difficult for victims of law enforcement misconduct to obtain civil remedies through the federal courts. The Supreme Court's qualified immunity jurisprudence has been extensively criticized by legal scholars across the ideological spectrum, including in a remarkable series of dissents by Justice Clarence Thomas calling for the doctrine's reconsideration, on the ground that it has no basis in the text or history of 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Whatever qualified immunity's original justification, its effect has been to insulate individual officers from the civil liability that would otherwise create financial accountability for their conduct and financial pressure on their departments to change the practices that produce the misconduct.

Reform Blueprint: Ending the Culture of Protected Violence

The Rankin County Goon Squad case, and the broader crisis of law enforcement accountability it represents, demands structural responses that go beyond the prosecution of individual officers in cases severe enough to attract federal attention. The following reforms are necessary:

1. Create state-level independent law enforcement accountability prosecutors in every state. The structural conflict between local district attorneys and the law enforcement agencies they depend on for case investigations makes local prosecution of officer misconduct systematically difficult. Every state should establish an independent office — separate from the attorney general's office if the AG has similar structural conflicts — with dedicated authority and resources to investigate and prosecute law enforcement misconduct. This office should have subpoena power, forensic resources, and staffing independent of the law enforcement agencies it oversees. Mississippi's failure to investigate the Rankin County pattern before the January 2023 incident is a failure that an independent accountability office, structured and funded to investigate regardless of institutional relationships, could have prevented.
2. Mandate public reporting of civil judgments in law enforcement misconduct cases and require remediation plans. Every civil judgment or settlement paid by a county, city, or state in a case alleging law enforcement misconduct should be publicly reported, in a searchable database, within 30 days of payment. Jurisdictions that pay two or more civil judgments arising from similar allegations against the same officer or the same unit within a five-year period should be required to submit a remediation plan to a state oversight body documenting the policy changes, disciplinary actions, and training interventions the jurisdiction is implementing to address the pattern. Failure to submit or implement a remediation plan should trigger a mandatory state investigation. The civil judgment mechanism as currently structured provides zero institutional accountability — it settles liability while leaving the underlying practices intact.
3. Abolish qualified immunity for state and local law enforcement officers in civil rights cases. Congress should amend 42 U.S.C. § 1983 to provide expressly that qualified immunity is not a defense to claims of constitutional violation by law enforcement officers. Qualified immunity as currently applied by federal courts effectively immunizes officers who commit serious constitutional violations so long as the specific conduct has not been previously declared unconstitutional in an almost identical prior case. This circularity — officers are immune because the specific violation hasn't been declared unconstitutional, and the specific violation hasn't been declared unconstitutional because cases keep being dismissed on qualified immunity grounds — is irreconcilable with the text of Section 1983 and with the constitutional rights the statute was designed to enforce. The Goon Squad officers were held accountable through federal criminal prosecution. Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker deserve the full scope of civil remedies that Section 1983 was designed to provide, without the barriers that qualified immunity imposes.
4. Create a national law enforcement misconduct registry with mandatory reporting by all agencies. No comprehensive national database of law enforcement officer misconduct currently exists. Officers who are terminated or forced to resign for misconduct in one jurisdiction can and do obtain employment in law enforcement agencies in other jurisdictions, bringing their histories of violence with them. A national registry — modeled on existing sex offender registries or the National Practitioners Data Bank for medical misconduct — should require every law enforcement agency to report officer terminations, resignations in lieu of termination, civil judgments arising from individual officer misconduct, and criminal convictions. The registry should be mandatory, publicly accessible, and should require hiring agencies to review an applicant's history before extending an offer of employment in law enforcement.
5. Require body camera footage to be preserved and made available in all cases involving use of force. The Rankin County Goon Squad case was ultimately proven in part through recordings made by the officers themselves. In jurisdictions with body camera requirements — requirements that were absent in Rankin County at the time of the January 2023 assault — footage preservation and access policies vary dramatically. Every law enforcement agency in the United States should be required, as a condition of federal law enforcement funding under the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, to operate a body camera program with standardized footage preservation requirements of at least three years, mandatory activation requirements for all use-of-force encounters, and public access provisions that allow victims, their attorneys, and credentialed journalists to obtain footage within 30 days of a documented use-of-force incident.
6. Strengthen 18 U.S.C. § 242 to require mandatory federal prosecution referral when state charges are not filed within 180 days of a documented use-of-force incident resulting in serious injury. The current framework for federal civil rights prosecution of law enforcement officers under Section 242 depends on federal prosecutorial discretion — the DOJ Civil Rights Division's decision, case by case, to prioritize federal resources for particular incidents. In cases involving documented serious injury from law enforcement use of force — including gunshot wounds, fractured bones, or other injuries requiring hospitalization — where state prosecutors have not filed charges within 180 days of the incident, Congress should require mandatory review by the DOJ Civil Rights Division and a public written explanation if the Division declines to prosecute federally. This does not mandate federal prosecution, but it ensures that the accountability gap between state inaction and federal oversight is subject to mandatory review rather than discretionary attention.
7. Establish federal consent decree authority for sheriff's departments and municipal police agencies with documented patterns of racial violence. Under the existing framework of 34 U.S.C. § 12601, the DOJ has authority to investigate law enforcement agencies and negotiate consent decrees requiring reforms as a condition of avoiding federal enforcement action. This authority has been used effectively in cities including Baltimore, Chicago, and Seattle. It should be extended explicitly to county sheriff's departments — which have historically been less subject to federal pattern-or-practice investigations than municipal police departments — and should include specific provisions addressing documented racial disparities in use-of-force incidents.

The Constitutional Promise and the Rankin County Reality

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution provides that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. It was ratified in 1868, in the specific historical context of Reconstruction — of an effort to guarantee, through constitutional text, that the violence and deprivation that had characterized the lives of Black Americans under slavery and under the Black Codes could not be replicated under the authority of any state.

The officers who tortured Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker in Braxton, Mississippi, on January 24, 2023 — who beat them, sexually assaulted them, forced milk into their throats, and shot one of them in the face — were operating 155 years after that amendment was ratified. They were operating in a state that is a signatory to the Constitution of the United States, bound by the Fourteenth Amendment, subject to federal civil rights statutes that have been on the books since the Reconstruction era. They were operating in a county whose District Attorney was charged with enforcing the laws of Mississippi, including the laws that prohibited exactly what the Goon Squad did on that night.

And they did it anyway. They did it in the confidence — justified by years of institutional experience — that the systems designed to hold them accountable would not. That the false reports would stand. That the cover story would hold. That Rankin County would pay whatever civil judgment came from whatever lawsuit, and the officers would remain employed, and the culture would continue.

They were wrong. But they were wrong for reasons that had nothing to do with the state of Mississippi performing its constitutional function. They were wrong because the federal government intervened. And the federal government cannot intervene everywhere, all the time, in every county where a Goon Squad operates in the confident assumption that the local system will protect them.

That is the accountability crisis the Rankin County case exposes. Not just that six officers committed acts of torture. Not just that they were eventually held accountable. But that the system designed to catch this kind of conduct, at the state and local level, failed completely — and that its failure was not an aberration but an expression of how the system actually works in the places where it is most needed.

The constitutional promise of equal protection and due process is not self-executing. It requires institutions — courts, prosecutors, accountability bodies, civil servants — that take its enforcement seriously as a professional and institutional obligation. When those institutions fail, the promise fails with them. And the people who pay the price of that failure are, with a consistency that is not coincidental, the same people for whom the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in the first place.