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It’s sounds like fiction, or a storyline developed, and produced to capture attention and evoke deep emotions and feelings, but it is not.
Six former White Mississippi (sheriff) police officers were recently indicted with 16 felonies stemming from the torture and abuse of two Black men.
The accused are Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward, Joshua Hartfield, Brett McAlpin, Jeffrey Middleton, and Daniel Opdyke.
WHAT REALLY PROMPTED THE RAID
It has been reported by some major, and credible news journals that 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 officers if they were available for a mission. “Are y’all available for a mission?” Dedmon asked. They were.
They raided a home occupied by Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker earlier this year in January and for at least one and a half hours beat, taziered and violated them with a sex toy after which one of the officers shot Mr. Jenkins in the mouth nearly killing him.
Their efforts to cover up evidence by destroying video footage from their armor did not work. They also and planted false evidence in an effort to implicate their victims with drug offenses.
“The defendants in this case tortured and inflicted unspeakable harm on their victims,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said, adding they “egregiously violated the civil rights of citizens who they were supposed to protect.”
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland
Rankin County Mississippi, a predominantly majority culture is said to be experiencing White flight. This might have rubbed some the wrong way heightening racial tensions.
‘The Goon Squad’ as some of them referred to themselves admitted to felony abuses they were charged with. An investigation by The Associated Press (AP) triggered the Civil Rights charges after the accused officers were linked to at least four violent encounters with Black men in the past four years that left two dead and another with lifelong injuries.
It is reminiscent of Mississippi’s notorious and violent past, racial terror that was unleashed upon Black residents simply because of their skin tone, a past that to this day haunts the state and the country.
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