A Mississippi sheriff who oversees a department where five deputies were convicted of torturing two Black men earlier this year — and where at least five people died in its custody in 2021 — is running for reelection unopposed.
Malik Shabazz, an attorney for the two men tortured in January, told a CBS affiliate in Jackson on Tuesday that he believes the problem extends beyond the group of officers who pleaded guilty and that the sheriff, Bryan Bailey, should be removed from office.
“We must press for the maximum sentence for this hate crime, and we must continue to press for the removal of Bryan Bailey as sheriff,” Shabazz said. Activists in Rankin County have also been calling for the sheriff to resign.
For now, Bailey remains on the ballot in November, according to the Rankin County elections website. Bailey received a total of 22,850 votes in the Republican primary on August 8. He’ll be running unopposed though there is an option to write in a candidate.
People want to get rid of corrupt cops, but no one wants to do the job of replacing them and trying to do better.
I mean, especially in the case of a “sheriff”, the position is fundamentally corrupt. The police already have WAY too much power in this country. And sheriffs offices have power even beyond that with so much discretionary ability that they can largely decide what is and is not law.
I pretty regularly say that anyone who would even put their hat in the ring to be a sheriff probably belongs in prison. But… that makes for a problem in trying to replace them.
I could also see a new sheriff that’s trying to “clean things up” getting undermined by the officers at every turn, making it pretty much impossible to run on any kind of positive record.
Have you ever considered the blue wall of silence and the consequences for breaking that silence?
Yes, I have. I’m not without empathy for the difficulty of standing up for what’s right in an atmosphere wherein you’re going to be punished for doing it. Still, progress has to start somewhere, and while I would absolutely agree that means pressure coming down from the top, the fact of the matter is that the system isn’t going to get fixed unless well-intentioned people start replacing the corrupt cops to the point where the corrupt ones are outnumbered. This is a necessary step if we want change.
Ok but did we have any reason to expect different?
Who’d run against this guy? What halfway sane, left leaning person would want to involve themselves in law enforcement right now? Your own people hate you, the Republicans hate you, the other cops hate you … it’s just awful all the way down.
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Which instance is he on? Sorry I just see his name
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Uh, this one, lemmy.world.
Ok next question: since when does lemmy.world support Neo nazis? Where is that coming from?
No idea. I think they’re trolling.
They commented on kbin but it didn’t federate yet:
There was a thread dunking on Nazis and an admin came in, locked the thread and told people to be nice to everyone regardless of their ideology. They refused to defederate from exploding heads for a very long time, preemptively defederated from hexbear (whatever your thoughts about the instance it’s deeply weird they didn’t want to defed the Nazis but immediately defederated from the weirdo lefties)
The guy who blew the whistle on the piracy forums was an out and obvious nazi. They didn’t ban him after his obvious naziness went on display.
It’s not really an outlandish thing to suggest. They clearly are much more biased towards fascists than leftists, at the very least - which is highly questionable and problematic on a leftist-literally-by-design site.
No links to the threads they talk about though.
