The case is a “horrific and stark example of bad police behavior that has no place in our society,” U.S. Justice Department Representative Kristen Clarke told reporters, denouncing acts “motivated by racial prejudice and hatred”. Six white Mississippi police officers admitted to torturing two African American men for two hours in January with a dildo, tasers and a sword, going so far as to shoot one of the victims in the mouth.
The six agents, some of whom have admitted to being part of a team known as the “Thug Squad” and known for its brutality, are currently being prosecuted and are no longer in service. In January, they entered a home in Braxton, a small town in the southern U.S. state, “without warrant or justification” to torture the two black men there, according to a ministry statement.
The officers handcuffed them and tortured them with “racial slurs,” Clarke said.
According to the prosecution, the officers sexually assaulted their two victims with a dildo and inflicted 17 electric shocks on them with their tasers. They also humiliated them by forcing them to swallow alcohol, cooking oil, milk and other liquids. According to Ms. Clarke, one of the two African Americans was hit with “a metal sword, a piece of wood and a wooden cooking utensil”.
This ordeal, which lasted about two hours, culminated when one of the officers put his service weapon in the mouth of one of the two men. To scare him, he first pulled the trigger after removing a bullet from the magazine. On a second attempt, however, the bullet left and went through the victim’s neck. The police then left their victims in a pool of blood for long minutes, while they concerted to cover up this blunder.
The team destroyed the home’s CCTV, one of the casings used, and attempted to burn the victims’ clothes to make the evidence disappear, the prosecution said. Officers also planted a shotgun on one of the victims and methamphetamine at the scene to pretend motive. They then filed false reports and repeatedly lied to investigators.
Five of the defendants were Rankin County Sheriff’s officers, while the sixth was from Richland Police. Three of them also pleaded guilty in another case of police violence, dating back to December. According to the justice, one of the members of the trio used a taser on a white man and shot near his head to extract a confession, without intervention from the other two.
