Nate Rosenfield and Mukta Joshi are reporters for Mississippi Today. They examined the power of sheriff’s offices in the state as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
For nearly two years, the embattled sheriff of Rankin County, Mississippi, has tried to distance himself from brutality in his department, saying he was unaware of assaults like those carried out by deputies who called themselves the Goon Squad.
But department records and interviews with a former FBI agent reveal that the sheriff, Bryan Bailey, had evidence of his deputies’ violent acts going back to his earliest days in office.
In 2012, the year Bailey became sheriff, the department and the FBI had reviewed video footage of a deputy ramming his car into a teenager fleeing arrest and threatening to kill him.
Eight years later, a man sued the department claiming that deputies hit him with a metal rod and shoved a gun in his mouth while he was handcuffed.
Then, in 2022, a deputy was caught on video using his Taser to shock a handcuffed man in the back of a patrol car.
The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that it had investigated all three cases, and so had the FBI. One of the deputies involved was suspended and another was reassigned, but none of them were fired, and none faced prosecution. Several were later tied to violent raids by the Goon Squad or were convicted for their roles in torturing two men, Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins, in 2023.
The handling of the three earlier cases reveals how the Sheriff’s Department allowed officers accused of serious violence to remain on the force and that federal authorities chose not to act, despite strong evidence supporting the allegations.
Jason Dare, the lawyer for the Sheriff’s Department, defended its handling of misconduct investigations, saying the cases show that the department worked with federal agencies to promote “constitutionally permissive policing while keeping crime in check.”
He said that each of the cases had been investigated by the FBI and that none of them “resulted in a finding of impropriety.”
The Sheriff’s Department came to national attention in 2023, when five deputies were charged with breaking into a home and then handcuffing, beating and sexually assaulting Parker and Jenkins.
At the time, Sheriff Bailey expressed shock that deputies he trusted could be involved in such brutality. “Never in my life did I think it would happen in this department,” Bailey said during a press conference.
In an article that year, Mississippi Today and The New York Times detailed the allegations of dozens of people who said they had witnessed or experienced similar assaults at the hands of Rankin County deputies, many of them assigned to a patrol shift that called itself the Goon Squad. Months later, the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into the department.
This year, during depositions taken as part of a lawsuit, Sheriff Bailey said he had no reason to think that the violence was widespread, although he acknowledged that the department did not have a centralized system to track the complaints it received. He said the FBI never indicated that there were problems at the department.
But the FBI and Sheriff Bailey were aware of allegations of misconduct by Rankin deputies, including some who would later be sentenced along with members of the Goon Squad.
In two of the three newly revealed cases, video taken by cameras mounted in patrol cars supported allegations of excessive force. In one of those cases, two officers also said in 2012 that they had held down a robbery suspect while another deputy beat him, contradicting their initial reports on the use of force, according to Jeffery Artis, the FBI agent who investigated. Dare said the FBI never informed the department of its findings.
Artis, now retired, had been assigned to civil rights violations in Mississippi for nearly a decade. He said video taken from a patrol car showed Daniel Warren, then a deputy in Rankin County who was not associated with the Goon Squad, ramming his car into Justin Archie, a teenager who had run from the police after committing an armed robbery. Artis said the video also showed Warren shouting that he was going to kill the teenager. He said the video evidence alone showed “100 percent unnecessary, excessive force.”
Two other deputies involved in the arrest told Artis that Warren had used a slapjack — a weapon typically made from leather and filled with metal weights — to beat Archie while they held him down and tried to handcuff him.
In 2013, Archie, who is Black, filed a lawsuit laying out the details of the beating and accusing Warren, who is white, of shouting racial slurs at him during the attack.
Dare said he could not locate the video from Archie’s arrest, which he noted occurred 14 years ago.
Dare said that a previous lawyer for the department was present during two interviews the FBI conducted with the deputies and that the deputies did not admit to misrepresenting facts during any sessions attended by the department’s lawyer.
After Artis turned his case over to federal prosecutors, they did not seek to indict the officers. The U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of Mississippi and the Justice Department declined to comment.
Even without criminal charges, Sheriff Bailey could have fired the deputies involved, but they kept their jobs. Warren was reassigned to animal control, according to Dare.
Warren continued to work for the department for more than a year. Then, in 2013, a jail inmate on work detail found Warren’s car unlocked with the keys and a gun inside and used it to escape, department records show.
Warren, who did not respond to requests for comment, was terminated the next day.
After Warren’s departure — and years before the public first learned of the Goon Squad — Dorothy Johnson said she called the FBI to report that her son, Carvis Johnson, had been beaten by Rankin County deputies in 2019.
In 2020, Johnson sued the department. His lawsuit accused a group of deputies, including Brett McAlpin and Christian Dedmon — who became central figures in the Jenkins and Parker case — of beating him with their fists and a metal rod during a traffic stop.
As in several assaults that other victims later described, a deputy put his gun in Johnson’s mouth while he was handcuffed, according to the lawsuit.
“They beat me like a slave,” Johnson wrote in his complaint.
Although deputies did not mention any use of force in their arrest reports, a photo taken of Johnson while he was in jail shows his face bandaged and swollen.
Again, FBI agents got involved. After Johnson’s family reported the incident to the bureau, agents interviewed him in jail in 2020, he and his mother said. The deputies were not charged.
Dare said that the department also investigated and found that Johnson’s statements were contradictory and that the evidence “did not show that discipline was warranted.”
The FBI declined to answer questions about the case. Johnson said in a 2023 letter to a judge that his lawsuit had been settled for $30,000, which Dare disputed without providing further details.
The Johnson family’s lawsuit was one of a string of allegations spanning two decades against McAlpin, a high-ranking detective whom federal prosecutors described as the ringleader of the Goon Squad during his sentencing for the torture of Jenkins and Parker.
In the years leading up to his conviction, McAlpin had been named in at least four lawsuits alleging that he had used excessive force.
Johnson’s lawsuit accused Jamie Perry of sticking a gun in his mouth and James Rayborn of beating him. The deputies were listed in department records as present during multiple arrests, previously reported by Mississippi Today and The Times, where victims said they were waterboarded, shocked with Tasers or beaten while restrained. State records show that Perry resigned in good standing in 2021 and Rayborn still works at the Sheriff’s Department.
Rayborn declined to comment for this article. Perry could not be reached for comment.
Just five months before the Jenkins and Parker incident, department leaders reported a deputy to the FBI after he was caught on tape shocking a handcuffed man.
Records show that the deputy, Hunter Cook, was suspended for two weeks and temporarily reassigned before returning to the same patrol shift alongside members of the Goon Squad. He was not charged.
Cook resigned more than a year later, after the U.S. attorney charged other deputies in his unit with unrelated crimes.
Cook had written in his initial report on the incident that he used his Taser on Ryan Irwin — who had led deputies in a high-speed chase before accidentally striking and killing a motorcyclist — because Irwin was resisting the officers and turned his head “in a very aggressive manner while puckering his lips” as if to spit at him.
Cook was part of a private text thread reviewed by reporters that included more than one department supervisor and several of the deputies later convicted of torture.
When Mr. Cook announced in the chat that he was returning to his patrol shift, a deputy typed, “Man caught a charge and beat it.” Another deputy replied, “About time.”
Weeks before the torture of Jenkins and Parker, the group joked in the text thread about a recent arrest made by Cook. One deputy asked whether he had shocked that suspect in the face. Cook replied that he had tackled the man as if in a football video game, calling it “so fun.” In response, the group’s commanding sergeant said, “Good job guys.”
Dwayne Thornton, the former undersheriff at the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, said during a sworn deposition that the department reported Cook’s conduct to the FBI. Irwin said that no one from the FBI interviewed him, even though his lawyer contacted the bureau.
The FBI declined to comment.
Thornton testified that the department decided to fire Cook after learning about another excessive force incident.
In an interview, Cook said that this second incident occurred before Irwin’s arrest and that the department had not previously taken issue with it.
“I take full responsibility for my actions,” Cook said. But he said he “was singled out just to try to make the department look better.”
He said that he had been promoted a year after the Taser incident, but was suddenly forced to resign when the department came under scrutiny because of the Goon Squad.
In September 2024, when the Justice Department announced a wide-ranging investigation into the Sheriff’s Department, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said federal authorities had received multiple reports that deputies had “overused Tasers, entered homes unlawfully, bandied about shocking racial slurs, and deployed dangerous, cruel tactics to assault people in their custody.”
Months later, the Trump administration withdrew from nearly all of its investigations into civil rights violations at law enforcement agencies. The administration has said that some of the cases had sought overly broad restrictions that would prevent the agencies from aggressively enforcing laws.
The Justice Department declined to respond to questions about whether its investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department had been terminated.
“The Trump administration is essentially giving a green light to police abuse and unconstitutional policing,” Jarvis Dortch, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, said in a statement. “If the agency that allowed the Goon Squad to operate for years doesn’t warrant federal investigation, no law enforcement agency does.”
Jerry Mitchell and Brian Howey contributed reporting.
This article was supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation.