“Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam”
—Nina Simone
On Thursday, August 3, six white former Mississippi pigs pled guilty in federal court to 16 felonies. Let’s back up the tape to see what led up to this: On January 24 of this year, six white cops kicked in the door of a home in Braxton, Mississippi, without a warrant. They called themselves the Goon Squad, according to court documents, “because of their willingness to use excessive force and not report it.” They quickly shackled the two Black men inside—Eddie Terrell Parker, 35, who lived there, and his friend Michael Corey Jenkins, 32. One pig fired his gun into the wall and demanded they tell him “where the drugs” were.
For the next 90 minutes, these pigs acted as a mob—carrying out the most sick and degrading torture, abuse and terror.
The two men were repeatedly punched and kicked, tased 17 times, and sexually assaulted. The cops shoved Parker and Jenkins on to their backs and then waterboarded them, pouring eggs, milk, alcohol, grease and chocolate syrup over their faces. They were beaten with pieces of wood and a metal sword.
They were forced to strip naked, shower together and assaulted with a sex toy. The two men were forced to their knees and, with guns to their heads, threatened with execution. After firing multiple rounds into the air, one of these pigs stuck his gun in Michael Jenkins' mouth and pulled the trigger.
The bullet tore through Jenkins's tongue, fractured his jaw, and came out his neck. While Jenkins lay bleeding on the floor, the pigs went to the back porch to concoct a story to cover their tracks. They decided to plant drugs; steal the surveillance footage from the house; and plant a gun. They took Jenkins into a side room and staged a drug bust over the phone, claiming Jenkins reached for a gun when his handcuffs were removed.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigations issued a press release the next day, repeating the same lies. They claimed that during a narcotics investigation, Rankin County (where Braxton is located) deputies “encountered a subject that displayed a gun towards the deputies.”
The Real “Crime”? Two Black Men on the Wrong Side of Town
Eddie Parker had been living at the home in Braxton occasionally to help the owner, a white woman who is paralyzed, take care of the house. The two had been friends for 20 years. The Goon Squad went to the home because a white neighbor of one of the pigs called him and complained that Black people were staying with a white woman who owned the house. That pig called another member of the squad and asked, “Are y'all available for a mission?” They were. The squad was mobilized, telling themselves “no bad mugshots”—meaning using brutal force was fine but avoid parts of the body of victims that might be captured in a mug shot.
According to court documents, the cops hurled racist slurs at Parker and Jenkins during the raid and “warned them to stay out of Rankin County and go back to Jackson or ‘their side’ of the Pearl River.”1 A lawyer for the victims, Malik Shabazz, said the cops accused them of selling drugs and “dating white women.” Michael Jenkins, fighting for his life in intensive care after being shot during the raid, was charged with aggravated assault and possession of a controlled substance. Eddie Parker was charged with possession of paraphernalia and obstruction of justice.
“Michael is our property, and we can hold him as long as we want.”
Mary Jenkins, Michael’s mother, first learned her son had been shot when she got a call from a friend the next morning. Panicked, she started calling hospitals and the police. She finally reached a deputy sheriff to learn her son was in intensive care at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, under police supervision. Desperate to see her son, she asked the police how long they would be holding him. “Michael is our property” she was told by a deputy, “and we can hold him as long as we want.”
When she called the hospital for more information about Michael's condition, they told her his name wasn't in the system—he had been admitted under an unknown name. When she finally saw him, he was in a medically induced coma, hooked up to a breathing machine with a cop in the room. Michael's father, Mel Jenkins, said, “You can just imagine him waking up and seeing the same department that shot him in his room. Probably thinking they [fixing to] finish killing me. They [were] trying to wait for him to die.”
Michael Jenkins spent three weeks in intensive care. He had to undergo two surgeries to treat injuries to his mouth and head, including surgical removal of his tongue.
After all of this, it was not until five months later—June 27—that the sheriff's deputies involved in the raid were fired or forced to resign.
Not the First Time
The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office has faced other allegations of brutality and corruption in recent years. An Associated Press investigation released in March found that several of the pigs involved in the torture of Jenkins and Parker were connected to at least four other violent encounters with Black men since 2019. Those incidents left two men dead, and another with injuries. According to the website INSIDER, at least five people died in the custody of the Rankin Sheriff's Department during an eight-month period in 2021. At least one of the pigs who just pled guilty was also involved in one of the 2021 killings.
The six Mississippi pigs involved in the January raid each pled guilty to felonies “stemming from the torture and physical abuse” they committed against Michael Corey Jenkins and Terrell Parker. The felonies include civil rights conspiracy, deprivation of rights under color of law, discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence, and conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice. According to the Associated Press, the cops could be sentenced in mid-November. Two of them each face a maximum sentence of 120 years plus life and $2.75 million in fines. The others face 80- to100-year sentences with fines of over $1 million each.
“A Few Bad Apples”?
While it is a good thing that these pigs have been forced to plead guilty to these charges, this is NOT some kind of vindication of this sick police department and the sick system they enforce. The Sheriff said, “This incident and the crimes of these individuals has been devastating not only to the victims but also to the sheriff’s office and the hundreds of men and women that work here.”
Bullshit! The grotesque pack of racist, white supremacist armed goons in Mississippi are not the “few bad apples” being brought to justice—they are just the tip of an iceberg.
The Braxton Goon Squad had clearly been operating for years and they clearly felt they had utter impunity for their actions. Can anyone seriously believe that the so-called “good cops” that were allegedly done a disservice don't know who the so-called “bad apples” are and what crimes they've been committing? How come these “good cops” never come forward to call them out? How come they always cover up and lie for their fellow cops? And how come, in rare instances when one of them is made to answer for doing dirty stuff, they almost always all come out in support?
Why? Because the police in this country serve an unreformable system that rules over the people, the system of capitalism-imperialism with white supremacy poured into its foundation.
Any decent person has to ask what kind of system puts the use of legitimate armed force into the hands of such twisted, vile people? And why should anyone live one more day putting up with this system!?
It must be—and it can be—abolished through an actual revolution and replaced with a radically different and far better system.
