On Monday, six White former law enforcement officers pleaded guilty to lying about their torture of two Black men, brutality that was intended to terrorize their victims into getting out of town. Sound familiar?
The six men pleaded guilty to Mississippi state charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to hinder prosecution concerning their torture of Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker in Rankin County, MS in January of this year. They pleaded guilty earlier this month to federal charges stemming from their unwarranted search, beating, torture, and subsequent coverup of their actions. According to the charging documents in the federal case, the officers told the men to "go back to [the predominately Black city of] Jackson, or 'their side' of the Pearl River."
Over the past several months, this country has been forcibly reminded of what its Black people have known all along: Jim Crow is alive and well. Florida's governor has had Black people arrested for legally voting. A Black mayor in Alabama has sued to be allowed to serve, in response to White town leaders conspiring to prevent him from doing so. Two Black lawmakers were expelled from the Tennessee state legislature for actions in which they were joined by a White lawmaker, who was not ejected by their overwhelmingly White colleagues. The U.S. Department of Justice released scathing findings regarding the racist policies and actions of the police departments in Lexington, KY and Minneapolis, MN. And the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Affirmative Action in college admissions, one of the very few efforts made in this nation's history to offer a small and incomplete correction to a system that was designed to serve White people at the expense of everyone else.
The story of sadistic White men using extra-judicial violence to terrorize Black people has never been an isolated tale of evil. Like the lynchings of Emmett Till, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, this week's version of that story is one cog in a much larger machine of systemic White supremacy and racism intended to dehumanize and control us. The line between who represents the state and who does not has always been intentionally blurry.
For generations, that glaringly obvious truth has been met with timid, lukewarm, and ultimately ineffectual efforts at "reform" that nibble at the edges, beat around the bushes, and stop well short of the kind of action needed if Black people are to ever know anything like security in their persons and peace in their streets. We need comprehensive public safety redesign that will replace systems of punishment with systems of care, stop sending police officers to address challenges for which they've never been trained, such as mental health crises and student discipline, and hold accountable not just the occasional handful of officers here and there but the entire system that produces such brutality on a daily basis, as a matter of course.
We at the Center for Policing Equity (CPE) send our profound gratitude to Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker for their courage in bringing this story to light and their torturers to account, along with our deepest wishes for healing and peace. We likewise stand in solidarity with the Black residents of Rankin County, all of whom must now live with the trauma of that January night. Though White supremacist terrorism is most often carried out against individuals, its ultimate target is always entire Black communities. We at CPE remain wholly dedicated to advancing the work of racial liberation toward a world in which public safety will one day mean public safety for Black people, too.