Mississippi Today, The New Times and Reveal are winners of the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ Medal for Outstanding Crime Reporting for the team’s investigation of scandals at the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department.
Honored were Mukta Joshi, Jerry Mitchell, Brian Howey, Nate Rosenfield and Steph Quinn with Mississippi Today, Sarah Cohen with The Times and Najib Aminy at Reveal, a nationally syndicated weekly investigative radio show.
The team was cited for its investigation of the department’s use of the so-called “Blue Wave” of jail trusties as enforcers in the county jail and for Sheriff Bryan Bailey’s use of deputies, trusties and county equipment at his mother’s chicken farm.
“This team of journalists from four news organizations tackled law and disorder in Rankin County, Mississippi, for three years,” the judges noted. ”They exposed the abuses of the sheriff’s Goon Squad, misuse of tasers, an inmate’s suspicious death and a new sheriff who used deputies and inmates for work on his mother’s chicken farm. The reports are a praiseworthy product of teamwork and persistence. The characters seem like they’re from Central Casting, and the stories read as if they belong in an Elmore Leonard novel.”
The award is named in honor of Tom Renner, a veteran investigative journalist who specialized in covering organized crime and corruption.
Also honored in the 2025 IRE awards in the student category was Madeline Ngyuen, Mississippi Today’s Fellow from the Roy Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University. The Howard Center team was honored for its “Deadly Force” project.
Judges said the team “took a Justice Department report about civil rights abuses by Phoenix police and decided to dig into deadly force incidents. They interrogated the concept of ‘less lethal’ force and weapons, which were supposed to reduce the number of incidents involving deadly use of force. Instead, the team found that the ‘less lethal’ and ‘non-lethal’ labels are actually misnomers because serious injury and death still result. The team methodically analyzed data that showed that use of ‘less-lethal’ weapons by police did not result in a significant reduction in deadly force incidents. The investigation also documented incomplete police data and a police practice of favorably editing body-cam video before release to the public.”
