A deputy put the barrel of his gun into a man's mouth and pulled the trigger. It clicked. So he racked the slide and pulled it again. Michael Jenkins lived. This was JANUARY 2023. Braxton, Mississippi. 24 January 2023. A white neighbour telephoned the police to report that two Black men were at a house with a white woman. The homeowner, Kristi Walley, was a childhood friend of one of them. She was in hospital at the time. Six officers came. Five were Rankin County sheriff's deputies. The sixth was an off-duty officer from another force. They broke the front door down. They had no warrant. They called themselves the Goon Squad. Over roughly ninety minutes they handcuffed Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker, beat them, used tasers on them repeatedly, poured liquids over them, sexually assaulted Parker with an object, and threatened them with rape. They used racial slurs throughout and told the men to go back to Jackson — to their side of the river. Then Hunter Elward put his service weapon in Michael Jenkins's mouth for what the officers later described as a mock execution. The first pull clicked. He racked the slide and pulled again. The round tore through Jenkins's tongue and shattered his jaw. He survived. Read the date again. The twenty-fourth of January, two thousand and twenty-three. Not 1963. Not Mississippi in the era your grandmother remembers. Three years ago, in a house, by men in uniform, who had a name for themselves. What they did next is at nine this morning, and it is arguably worse.

This Halloween America should dress up as a democracy.