A woman has filed a $10 million federal lawsuit against a Mississippi police officer who she says sexually assaulted her during a traffic stop last August.

According to the suit, filed May 21 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Shanterra Jackson was riding in a vehicle driven by a man, identified by FOX13 in Memphis as Jackson’s fiance, in the town of Sardis, Miss., about 225 miles west of Huntsville, when they were stopped by a police officer.

The Sardis officer, unidentified in the lawsuit, walked up to the vehicle with gun drawn, the suit claims, ordering Jackson and her fiance to get out. The officer never informed Jackson or the man why they had been stopped, but he called for assistance from an officer from nearby Senatobia.

Senatobia officer Willis McNeil arrived at the scene and, without explanation or probable cause, handcuffed Jackson, according to the complaint. At the same time, Jackson’s fiance was ordered by the Sardis officer to get inside a police vehicle.

McNeil began driving Jackson into the woods. When Jackson repeatedly asked why, McNeil is alleged to have replied “You know for what.” Once McNeil stopped the vehicle, he took Jackson out, removed her handcuffs and bent her over his car before sexually assaulting her, according to the complaint.

The complaint says McNeil turned his body camera off prior to the assault. FOX13 obtained police records which also showed McNeil turned his body camera off after detaining Jackson.

Jackson’s attorney, Carlos Moore, told McClatchy News Jackson was never charged with a crime after she was detained and assaulted.

McNeil and Senatobia police chief Richard Chandler are named as co-defendants in the $10 million suit.

In a statement to McClatchy News, Chandler seems to suggest McNeil wasn’t on duty at the time of the incident.

“In the complaint, Attorney Moore makes allegations against Defendant Willis McNeil and says that McNeil was on duty for the Senatobia Police Department. Attorney Moore’s allegation is blatantly false. The City and Chief Richard Chandler look forward to responding to Attorney Moore’s allegations in more detail through the proper legal channels.”

Jackson’s lawsuit marks another controversy for the embattled Senatobia police department and Chandler, both listed as defendants in a $2 million lawsuit filed by the mother of a 10-year-old boy who was arrested last August for urinating in public.

In addition to Chandler and police Lt. Zachary Jenkins, four unnamed police officers are listed as defendants in that lawsuit. It’s unknown whether McNeil is one of those officers.

A “descent into dystopia” is how one Jackson, Mississippi resident describes the violent crime, carjackings, and shootings that have been plaguing the city in recent years.

Disturbing new video footage caught on a Ring doorbell camera on Friday shows a Jackson family being attacked and carjacked in their driveway. A mom, her kids and her grandkids were held at gunpoint, pulled out of the car,  and even shot at as two suspects — yet to be caught by the police — stole a car and fled. 

Fortunately, no one was seriously injured and the stolen car was later recovered. But the mom in the video, Heather Allen, told WAPT that her family plans to move out of the area after the shocking incident, despite only living there for three months. 

The Jackson Police department has since said they have identified two persons of interest, and released a surveillance image of a man they believe is connected to the crime.

“It shows you the mindset of the individuals here that we are dealing with,” Chief Joseph Wade told WAPT, Jackson’s Hearst-owned ABC affiliate, of the carjacking video. “They are bold and brave and they will do whatever it takes to commit these criminal acts, and we are going to be just as bold and brave to bring them to justice and hold them accountable for their actions.”

Carjackings such as the one on Friday have becoming commonplace in Jackson, the only difference with this one being that it was caught on video.

“Sadly, this is now an everyday occurrence in Jackson,” the president of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, Douglas Carswell, who lives and works in downtown Jackson, tells the Sun. “Just last week, someone was murdered at the park where I play tennis,” he says, adding that shootings are a “regular occurrence” in Mississippi’s capital city. 

Jackson has outsized violent crime numbers for its population of nearly 150,000 residents. In 2023, there were 118 homicides in Jackson, a WLBT analysis found, and though the numbers decreased from the previous year, following a national trend post-Covid, Jackson nonetheless tops other major cities for killings per capita, that report found. 

“Jackson now has one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the country, higher than Memphis, higher than Baltimore, higher than Detroit,” Mr. Carswell says. “Tragically it’s an everyday thing.”

Jackson’s murder rates were “significantly lower” in 2013 but a “dysfunctional city government” has created major crime issues for the city, he adds. 

“In the past 10 or 15 years, Jackson has been a story of a descent into dysfunction,” Mr. Carswell says, adding that more than a policing issue, there is a “prosecution problem” in Hinds County, where Jackson is located. 

The county’s Soros-backed district attorney, Jody Owens, has been rocked by turmoil during his time on the campaign and on the job, including allegations of sexual harassment and accusations that he pulled a gun on a man in an apartment — claims he denied at the time — and most recently, an FBI raid of his cigar bar. His office did not respond to a request from the Sun for comment on the recent Jackson carjacking and whether he intends to prosecute the perpetrators should they be apprehended. 

Over the past several years, Mr. Carswell says criminals took advantage of the justice system not “functioning properly,” but that the crime rates are slowly beginning to decline as the state government steps in.  

The state has been extending the purview of the Capitol Police, who used to stay primarily around the Capitol building, to  police about one-third of the city, he says, adding that the areas they police have seen crime go down “dramatically.” 

“Where crime is under control in the city, the neighborhoods run by the Capitol Police, you’re starting to see people moving back in,” Mr. Carswell says. “ But crime is definitely a big factor in pushing people out of those parts of the city that aren’t run by the Capitol Police.” 

The expansion of the Capitol Police was the subject of pushback last year, as some in the majority-Black city saw the increased state police presence as trampling on local control and unfairly targeting Black residents. The city has largely “moved beyond” those racial tensions, Mr. Carswell says, as “quite a lot of the city lawmakers and representatives who used to criticize expansion of the capital base, are now criticizing them for not policing the whole of the city.”

Earlier this year, Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves, announced a “major public safety operation” in Jackson aimed at “surging” local, state, and federal law enforcement into the city in an attempt to tackle the violent crime epidemic. 

The governor’s office and the Jackson Police Department did not immediately return a request from the Sun for comment on how those operations are proceeding so far. 

Even with more state resources and local policing, without more prosecutions, the violent crime will continue to plague Jackson, Mr. Carswell notes. 

“Having a D.A. who’s soft on crime, I think has been a real problem,” he says. “And there’s only so much the police can do until we’ve got an effective D.A. in Jackson.”

CNN
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The Rankin County Sheriff’s Office says it will conduct a review and analysis after a Wednesday report from The New York Times and Mississippi Today detailed messages in an encrypted WhatsApp group chat between known “Goon Squad” members and other law enforcement officers, some of whom are still employed by the county.

The “Goon Squad” was the name a group of deputies gave themselves because of their willingness to use excessive force and not report it, federal prosecutors said in court documents.

Some of the messages discuss brutalizing and demeaning suspects, as well as exchanging disturbing crime scene photos and pictures of “rotting corpses,” the report said.

In one exchange from a 2022 domestic violence arrest, then-Deputy Hunter Elward wrote, “Did you Tase him in the face!?”

Fellow Goon Squad member Daniel Opdyke asked if they had shocked the man in the anus.

Another deputy said the suspect would have “gotten more lovings,” seeming to indicate they held back because of potential witnesses, saying, “All the neighbors were outside watching.”

Chat members also “discussed taking nude pictures of a woman they had arrested,” the Times reported.

Another exchange discusses deputies getting “points” for shooting someone.

The “reporting on a WhatsApp group chat is believed to contain information from a former deputy’s private cell phone. Since we cannot compel any employee to turn over his / her private cell phone data, we have requested the full private text thread from the New York Times for use in an internal review and analysis,” an attorney for the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement to CNN.

“There are three individuals who remain employed with this Department that were added to this private group chat by a former deputy, and none are alleged to have violated someone’s constitutional rights or committed any criminal act,” the statement said.

Former deputies and Goon Squad members Elward, Opdyke and Jeffrey Middleton all participated in the chat reviewed by the Times and Mississippi Today. Former Deputy Brett McAlpin is also mentioned in one exchange, according to the report.

McAlpin, Middleton, Elward and Opdyke, along with former Deputy Christian Dedmon and Richland police officer Joshua Hartfield have all pleaded guilty to the sexual assault and kidnapping of two innocent Black men, Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, in Rankin County in January 2023. They are serving concurrent state and federal prison sentences.

The planning of the assaults on Jenkins and Parker took place on WhatsApp, according to the Department of Justice. It is unclear if the group chat referenced by the Justice Department is the same as the one on which the Times and Mississippi Today reported.

CNN has not obtained the full group chat that was described in the report.

One member of the group chat, who no longer works for the sheriff’s department, called his messages “absolutely all jokes,” in an interview with the New York Times.

Neither the department nor Sheriff Bryan Bailey “knew of the existence of ‘a shift of officers who called themselves the ‘Goon Squad’ until a bill of information was filed in federal court,” the sheriff’s office statement said.

The statement continues, “It was also around this time we learned that the five former deputies coordinated their criminal activity via private text messaging, presumably in an attempt to avoid detection by this Department and Sheriff Bailey.”

In March, after the sentencing of the former law enforcement officers, CNN spoke with attorney Jeff Reynolds, who represents Opdyke. Reynolds noted Opdyke cooperated in the case by sharing the WhatsApp encrypted text messages.

“The explanation by some that they were just ‘joking’ about torturing people in their what they thought were secret WhatsApp texts rings hollow given the multiple incidents of torture that have now been documented,” Reynolds said Wednesday in a statement to CNN about the latest report.

CNN has reached out to attorneys of the other Goon Squad members alleged to have taken part in the chat for comment but has not received a response.

Malik Shabazz, the lead attorney for Jenkins and Parker, said the “latest revelations regarding the Rankin County Mississippi ‘Goon Squad’ text messages are not surprising at all.”

“For years, the lawlessness of Rankin County deputies, especially the night shift, had become notorious to residents. Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker were not shot and tortured in a vacuum. There will be much more to come,” Shabazz said.

“It was just unbelievable,” Angela English, president of the NAACP Rankin County chapter, told CNN, speaking about the report. “What I have read is extremely disturbing … we will not give up the fight.”

Mary Asa Lee, communications director for Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, told CNN in an email the office does not “comment on open investigations.”

The office of US Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Todd Gee also declined to comment on the current investigation.

But earlier this month, Gee, along with members of his criminal and civil rights divisions, held a listening session in Rankin County inviting residents to share accounts of police misconduct.

“We know from members of the public who have already called… that there have been a lot of other incidents here in Rankin County over the years,” Gee said. “I can’t emphasize enough to you, please let us know what has happened to you, what has happened to your friends, what has happened to your family.”