A group of Rankin County citizens said they will start a petition to remove Supervisor Steve Gaines from office, following Gaines’ recent comments referring to two Black men tortured by white deputies as “dopers” and rapists.
But they said they will face an uphill battle in order for the governor to consider their petition.
“We’re putting our heads together now to figure out what is the best way to make a change here in Rankin County,” said the Rev. Ricky Sutton, of Mount Carmel Ministries in Pearl. Sutton said Gaines “doesn’t represent the people, and we don’t really need someone in office like that.”
At a May 3 breakfast meeting, Gaines told a crowd of 100 people that the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department’s lawyer, Jason Dare, “beat the pants off those guys – the dopers, the people that raped and doped your daughters.” Two days earlier, Dare had announced the department and county would pay $2.5 million to settle the civil rights case brought by the two men tortured by Rankin “Goon Squad” deputies.
Addressing the outrage following his remarks, Gaines said his comments “were not aimed at anyone personally,” and that he “did not name any individuals.”
The petition effort also follows supervisors’ approval in April and rescission this month of an unpopular zoning ordinance that would have restricted the placement of mobile homes and required rural residents to seek a planning commission’s consent for add-ons to their property, among other changes.
The Rev. Ava Harvey, of Pilgrim’s Rest Missionary Baptist Church in Brandon, described the ordinance as an “overreach,” but said Gaines’ comments “pulled the scab off” as county residents seek to heal from the reign of the “Goon Squad.”
Harvey said the group of 30 has hired a lawyer to comb through state law and advise them on the “tedious” petition process.
While the removal of most elected county officials, including sheriffs, requires the signatures of 30% of all registered voters in the county, there’s a higher bar – 51% of registered voters in a district – to remove a county supervisor, justice court judge or constable.
There are 20,958 registered voters in Rankin County’s fourth district, which means that a petition for Gaines’ removal would need 10,689 signatures, more than the number of voters who participated in the last supervisors’ election in that district.. In 2023, 9,965 voters cast ballots in the supervisor election for District 4 – and Gaines won with more than 75% of the vote.
“For whatever reason,” said Korbin Felder, a Justice Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, “those three positions within all county governance are carved out from it.”
Fifty-one percent of voters from the district the supervisor represents “is an incredibly high bar,” Felder said.
The law requires the petition to be submitted on a specific size and type of paper, and each page must be notarized to show that the signatures were collected within 60 days.
“You can tell it’s written by people who are already in office, and they don’t want anybody to remove them,” Harvey said.
Once the signatures are collected and verified by the county registrar, the petition must be submitted to the election commissioner’s clerk. The governor must then consider and count the verified signatures, and if they meet the 51% bar, the supervisor in question would be served notice to show cause as to why a removal election ought not to be held. The governor would then convene a “removal council” headed by the county’s senior chancery judge to determine whether there is a substantial basis for a removal election. If they determine that there is, a removal election would then be conducted. Only after a successful removal election would the governor declare the supervisor’s office vacant, and appoint a temporary replacement.
“It’s a long process that seems to be meant to disincentivize citizens from using this power,” Felder said.
But the citizens working on the petition expressed a commitment to try and push for a successful petition despite these challenges.
In addition to door-knocking, Harvey said, the group is considering establishing drop-in stations where registered voters in the district can sign the petition at certain times.
Laura Faulker, a Rankin County activist, said that even if the petition fails, she hopes the effort will raise awareness about the importance of holding local elected officials like Gaines accountable.
“I thought that he stood behind what people voted him in for, to make a change for the good, not to speak down on victims,” Faulkner said.
Sutton expressed fear that his grandsons could be stopped by deputies one night, and stereotyped like Jenkins and Parker were, “just because they wear dreads or maybe earrings,” he said. “Until we change this mentality, I think we’re going to continue to have problems in Rankin County, and I just refuse to go back.”
Though Rankin deputies appear to have targeted people based on suspected drug use, not race — most of their accusers were white — their tactics were reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, when sheriffs and their deputies harassed and beat Black Southerners and civil rights activists.
“It’s really not just a Black and white thing,” Sutton said. “This is a right and wrong thing.”
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