‘The Goon Squad’: How rogue Mississippi officers tried to cover up their torture of 2 Black men

By MICHAEL GOLDBERG
Associated Press/Report for America

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Six white former law enforcement officers in Mississippi have pleaded guilty to a racist assault on Michael Corey Jenkins and his friend Eddie Terrell Parker, who are Black. A roughly 90-minute period of terror began late on Jan. 24 after a white neighbor called a Rankin County Deputy and complained two Black men were staying with a white woman. A rogue group of deputies who called themselves “The Goon Squad” burst into the home without a warrant and abused the men before shooting Jenkins. Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division says the trauma of the case “is magnified because the misconduct was fueled by racial bias and hatred.”