Nate Rosenfield and Mukta Joshi are reporters for Mississippi Today. They examined the power of sheriff’s offices in the state as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
For nearly two years, the embattled sheriff of Rankin County, Mississippi, has tried to distance himself from brutality in his department, saying he was unaware of assaults like those carried out by deputies who called themselves the Goon Squad.
But department records and interviews with a former FBI agent reveal that the sheriff, Bryan Bailey, had evidence of his deputies’ violent acts going back to his earliest days in office…