JACKSON, Miss — After a man urinated in the corner of a jail cell, a Mississippi police officer forced him to lick some of the urine off the floor, according to a federal charge filed against the officer.
Michael Christian Green lost his police department job because of the behavior, said Jake Windham, the mayor of Pearl, a suburb of the capital city of Jackson.
Windham spoke Thursday at a news conference hours before Green was scheduled to plead guilty to a charge of deprivation of civil rights. Although court documents did not mention race, a Pearl spokesperson said Green is white and the man he arrested is Latino.
A charging document was issued March 4 and unsealed Wednesday. It says Green arrested the man Dec. 23 after a disturbance at a store in Pearl.
Security footage in the Pearl jail showed that once the man was in a jail cell, he knocked on the cell door and tried to tell Green that he needed to urinate, according to the court document. After waiting for some time, the man went to the back of the cell and urinated in a corner, the document said.
The man who was arrested is identified in the court document only by his initials, B.E. The security camera footage showed Green telling B.E. that he would beat him with a phone.
"You're fixin' to go in there and you're going to lick that p—— up," Green said, according the court document. "Do you understand me?"
Green took the man back into the cell and told him to get on the ground and "suck it up," then used his phone to take videos of B.E. while the man got on the ground and licked his own urine, the document said. After the man gagged multiple times, Green told him, "don't spit it out," according to the document.
"Green did not have a government interest or law enforcement purpose in ordering B.E. to lick his urine," the federal charging document said.
The city of Pearl said in a statement Thursday that officials learned about the "disturbing event" during Christmas weekend and opened an investigation, using an independent attorney. Windham said Green resigned Dec. 27.
"I don't understand how you treat someone like that," Windham said. "The proper thing to do was to take the gentleman to the restroom and to not do anything of this magnitude and violate his civil rights."
An attorney for Green, Brad Oberhousen, was in court Thursday and was not immediately available to comment on his client's case.
Windham said Green had worked for the Pearl Police Department for about six months after having worked at other law enforcement agencies in the Jackson area.
Conviction on the charge of deprivation of civil rights carries up to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Pearl is in Rankin County, where six white former law enforcement officers — including some who called themselves the "Goon Squad" — pleaded guilty last year to federal charges in a racist assault on two Black men.
Windham said Thursday that the Pearl Police Department handled its own investigation quickly.
"I think there's a stark contrast between the Pearl Police Department in this incident and the Goon Squad," Windham said.
