Source: Joseph Sohm / Getty
Booooy, there’s something going on with these cops in Mississippi.
I mean, cops across the country, especially in every Black-populated area, are prone to racial profiling, harassment, police brutality and all other manner of reckless and racist behavior. But these cops in the state where Emmett Till was brutally murdered, where six cops tortured two Black men because they were in the home of a white female friend and where Black bodies are still being found in unmarked graves are really a whole other thing. Many of them appear to be of a special breed capable of cruelty that is reminiscent of the Jim Crow South—and still as shocking as ever several decades later.
On Wednesday, former Pearl Police Department patrol officer Michael Christian Green received a sentence of one year in prison for forcing a man he had arrested to—*double checks notes because this couldn’t possibly be right*—lick urine off of a jail cell floor.
According to the Associated Press, Green received the maximum prison time on the misdemeanor charge of acting under the color of law to deprive a person of their civil rights after the Dec. 23 incident during which security cameras captured him forcing a Latino man he arrested over an alleged disturbance at a store to get down on the floor and lick up his own urine as punishment for peeing on the floor of the cell.
From AP:
Police department security footage showed that once the man was in a holding cell, he knocked on the door and tried to tell Green that he needed to urinate, according to the court document. After waiting for some time, the man went to the back of the cell and urinated in a corner, the document said.
The man who was arrested is identified in the court document only by his initials, B.E. The security camera footage showed Green threatening to beat B.E. with a phone.
Green took the man back into the cell and told him to get on the ground and “suck it up,” then used his phone to take videos of B.E. while the man got on the ground and licked his own urine, the document said. After the man gagged multiple times, Green told him, “don’t spit it out,” according to the document.
Just think about how common this kind of thing must be in the city of Pearl, which is in the Jackson area of Mississippi, if this officer of the law felt so comfortable treating a detainee this way that he would do it in front of security cameras he must have known were there, and take photos of his own to document it.
Of course, AP noted that it’s “rare for law enforcement officers in Mississippi to be charged with brutality,” but that doesn’t speak to how often police brutality happens in the state as it could easily be a reflection of how seriously the offense is taken in the state that currently has a spotlight on it over the death of Black teenager Kadarius Smith, who was allegedly “run over” by Mississippi police in March.
Police brutality is so common it rarely even makes the news. But a cop making a citizen suck urine up off the floor is something so shockingly different—and only marginally less perverse than the six former Jackson cops were when they entered a home without a warrant where Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker were visiting a sick friend and proceeded to handcuff and torture them using sex toys, stun guns and regular guns.
“Mississippi Goddam” is as relevant as it was in 1964 when Nina Simone first wrote and then sang those words that became an anthem.
SEE ALSO:
Torture Accusations Could Lead To Civil Rights Case In Mississippi
DOJ Deems 3 Mississippi Prisons Unconstitutional For ‘Violence And Unsafe Conditions’
