Last year, two Black men were beaten and tasered by six officers in a no-warrant house raid. Since then, the Justice Department said it got more complaints regarding similar instances by the deputies.

Authorities said the civil rights probe would examine whether officers systemically targeted minorities with excessive force.

Nearly two years after Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker survived hours of a sadistic torture plot conjured up by six white former Mississippi law enforcement officers, the U.S. Justice Department has launched a pattern or practice investigation into Rankin County,