Mississippi 'goon squad' officers are part of larger law enforcement problem, experts say

Six former Mississippi police officers, some of whom reportedly called themselves the “Goon Squad,” pleaded guilty this month in a racist attack on Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, two Black men who endured hours of torture from the officers in January.

Authorities said the former Rankin County and Richland Police Department officers, all of whom are white, broke into the men’s home without a warrant, after a neighbor complained about the men staying at the home of a white woman, whom Parker knew and was taking care of.

While using racial slurs, the officers placed Jenkins and Parker under arrest and tased, shot at and sexually abused them for more than two hours, authorities said.

Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey said at a news conference on Aug. 3 that the police badge was “tarnished by the criminal acts of these few individuals.”

But experts say rogue groups like the Goon Squad are not an anomaly in the U.S.

“If you look hard, you’ll see other instances of [the officers] violating police department rules, the procedures, [and] the fact that they named their group shows some degree of organization,” Vida Johnson, a criminal defense attorney and associate law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, told Yahoo News. “I think the real problem is, just how many other groups are there like this?”

The rise of rogue groups

Over the past decade, more than 80,000 law enforcement officers across the country have been disciplined or investigated for misconduct, according to a 2019 investigation by USA Today.

In addition, “there's a number of instances of police officers being members of white supremacist gangs or expressing white supremacist views,” Johnson said.

In 2006, the FBI warned that white supremacist groups were infiltrating police departments. According to Michael Chairman, a former special agent with the FBI and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, the formation of groups like the Goon Squad is not a rare occurrence.

“This has been a part of the fabric of law enforcement in the United States for some time,” Chairman told Yahoo News, and in fact it goes back to the history of policing during the Jim Crow era.

While it’s unclear exactly how many rogue groups — meaning police officers who act outside the scope of their responsibilities, typically by violating the law — exist, recent cases of such groups continue to come to the forefront.

“A lot of these rogue groups are actually officially created by the police department,” Chairman said. “So in Baltimore, you look at the gun crime task force that was involved in all kinds of criminal activity, including episodes of violence and drug dealing and theft of drugs.”

Most recently, in Memphis, the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, or SCORPION, unit was accused of brutally beating and killing Tyre Nichols in January following a traffic stop, resulting in murder charges for five former officers who were involved.

Also, in Los Angeles, “the L.A. County Sheriff's Department is dealing with a long-standing problem of what they call deputy gangs,” Chairman said.

‘One of the biggest crises in American life’

Experts say rogue groups are becoming increasingly prevalent and are a threat to democracy. “I think it’s absolutely one of the biggest crises in American life,” Johnson said.

“The idea that we have police officers who have this incredibly important role in our society of maintaining law and order, for them to be rogue and to hold beliefs that other members of our community are inferior to them, are inferior to others in our community, is an enormous problem in our society and our government,” she said.

But groups like these can be hard to investigate and shut down. “If you think about a tight-knit group of people, a tight-knit group of officers, who have sworn to cover each other’s back no matter what, then it’s almost [an] impossible nut to crack until somebody decides that they want to listen to the community that’s complaining,” David Thomas, a former police officer and professor of forensic studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, told Yahoo News.

As authorities combat the infiltration of rogue groups, some polls have shown a decline in Americans’ trust in law enforcement. In a 2020 Gallup poll 48% of Americans trusted the police, a 5-point drop that occurred in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

Earlier this year, a Washington Post-ABC News poll taken after Nichols’s death found that only 39% of Americans are “very” or “somewhat” confident that police are “adequately trained to use excessive force.”

“The greatest failure in law enforcement over history has been to learn from its past mistakes,” Thomas said. “Because if you look at our history, it continues to be cyclical and it just continues to happen over and over again.”

While Johnson acknowledges that these groups are hard to investigate, she says more needs to be done to address the problem at every stage of policing.

“In terms of how police officers are recruited, how police officers are vetted before they’re hired, there should be periodic reviews of their emails, their body-worn cameras, their text messages, their social media accounts, looking for racial and other types of slurs,” Johnson said. “Because ultimately, they are public servants and they’re supposed to represent all of us.”