When U.S. Attorney Clay Joyner described the allegations against 14 current and former law enforcement officers in the Mississippi Delta as a “monumental betrayal of public trust,” he was not engaging in hyperbole.
The bombshell busts last week represent a huge scandal in law enforcement.
Charges are not proof of wrongdoing, but if the allegations are true, the scope of the wrongdoing is shocking.
Eleven city, county or state law enforcement agencies over a six-county area are implicated in the arrests. In two of the counties, Washington and Humphreys, their sheriffs, the chief law enforcement officers in those jurisdictions, were among those arrested.
According to Joyner and the FBI, the accused, some of them working together, took tens of thousands of dollars in payoffs to provide protection and safe passage for illegal narcotics across the Delta and into Memphis. Instead of trying to curtail the drug trafficking, the officers are accused of taking bribes in exchange for helping to facilitate the criminal activity.
The accusations not only severely tarnish the reputation of these 14 individuals. They also cast an unfairly poor light on other law enforcement officers, the majority of whom perform their difficult and often dangerous jobs with honesty and integrity.
When word gets out that an officer is on the take, the public becomes leery of trusting not only that officer but also most others. Citizens become scared that if they cooperate with the authorities, their cooperation will be passed on to the criminals on whom they are informing. One of the FBI supervisors claimed that the agency heard of this distrust of local law enforcement during a separate, unrelated investigation into last month’s mass killing in Leland.
Although this latest law enforcement scandal is concentrated in the Delta, wrongdoing by police is not limited to any one region of the state. The Sheriff’s Department in Rankin County, for example, remains under federal investigation for a multiyear pattern of malicious violence and deliberate intimidation of minorities and drug users. That investigation was spurred by the arrest and conviction of six former officers, who self-identified as a “Goon Squad,” for torturing two Black men and then conspiring in a cover-up.
When law enforcement degenerates into lawlessness and corruption, civil order deteriorates. Criminals are emboldened, and citizens are fearful of going to the police. The law enforcement profession loses respect, making the job harder to perform and diminishing its attractiveness as a career. A crooked cop can also put the honest ones in danger.
The public can be thankful that the FBI is willing to invest the time and resources into investigating police misconduct. There have been some worrisome signs from the Trump administration that this might not continue to be a priority of the federal government. But these recent scandals demonstrate why backing away from this oversight role would be a huge mistake.
If the feds aren’t willing to try to identify and weed out the thugs and crooks within law enforcement at the state and local levels, who will?
