Update on Rankin County Sheriff’s Office Training, Policies

Pelahatchie News
12/15/2023 07:03 AM

This past January, inappropriate conduct from an isolated group of deputies injured citizens in our county and undermined the reputation of this department. The safety and security of our citizens, and visitors, is one of our main objectives, and we take all occurrences of this nature very seriously.

Once the true facts were discovered, we took immediate action to remove the perpetrators from the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, cooperated fully with the official investigation, and they are being dealt with through the legal system. We didn’t stop there.

• With assistance from Jeffrey Artis and his team at J. Artis Consulting – who collectively have 50 plus years of experience with the FBI – we revamped the department’s patrol policy and procedure manual. In an effort to keep the community informed, we have placed many of these policies on our website under the “Useful Links” tab and are open to feedback from our citizens.
• We also updated our Compliments /Complaints process so that submissions can be made online, in addition to in-person, via telephone, and/or via U.S. Mail. Look for a new tab on our website to be active by this coming Friday. With this new process, measures have been put in place to ensure that the entire management team has access to every compliment /complaint. The duties will be shared amongst our entire team so that every citizen critique is reviewed.
• We recruited and hired an Internal Affairs Investigator from outside of the department to help foster impartiality and fairness in our reviews. We are expanding our Compliance Division to include additional IA investigators so that all complaints that rise to the level of serious investigation can be dealt with in a timely manner.
• Our deputies and jailors recently completed a Color of Law training session taught by Ron Reed and others from the Civil Rights Unit at the FBI headquartered in Washington, D.C. For clarity, “under color of law” means the real or purported use of authority provided by law. This training was designed to help our staff know what is expected when interacting with our citizens.
• Our management team has completed leadership training taught by experienced leaders.

We appreciate the seriousness of what occurred this past January. Even though the prior actions were abnormal and extreme, we will make every effort to ensure that they do not occur in the future. Everyone expects to be treated fairly and we will continually strive to improve how we protect and serve our community.