Years before sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson gunned down Sonya Massey in her own home, he had been discharged from the Army for serious misconduct and had a history of driving under the influence, records show.
He also failed to obey a command while working for another sheriff’s office in Illinois and was told he needed “high stress decision making classes,” the agency’s documents reveal.
Grayson, who was a Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy before he was fired and charged with murder, responded to a report of a prowler at Massey’s home July 6. Bodycam footage from another deputy showed Massey saying she rebuked Grayson, and Grayson responded by threatening the 36-year-old. The exchange ended with Grayson shooting Massey and failing to render aid.
So, not quite human…
Sounds like a candidate for life in prison.
In the same sense that Dennis Kucinich was a candidate for president, yes.
He’ll get a promotion by the time his police frat bros are done fucking the system.
The video is awful… 1000 other outcomes could have existed here that didn’t involve killing her for no reason. One of the articles attached to the link explains each bad decision made and even how he showed zero lack of remorse. It’s insane that they would tell her to take care of the pot of boiling water only to then use that as the excuse to consider her a threat when they could have easily done this themselves if they were so worried. They also could have just backed away if it was really so concerning to them as well. They also shot her in the head? If you have to shoot someone, is there even an attempt at all anymore to just shoot them in non vital areas so they can be apprehended, or is the outcome supposed to be shoot to kill? Aiming for the head doesn’t sound right for almost all situations.
He had to approach her to shoot her. Sonya ducked behind a counter when the officer pulled his gun on her and said “I will fucking shoot you in your fucking face”. Why would someone approach a threat? He didn’t see her as a threat, he saw an excuse to kill her.
is there even an attempt at all anymore to just shoot them in non vital areas so they can be apprehended, or is the outcome supposed to be shoot to kill?
It’s always shoot to kill, as it should be. A gun is a lethal weapon. It’s only use is to kill. Police have less-than-lethal tools if their intent isn’t to kill.
He didn’t see her as a threat, he saw an excuse to kill her.
I come away with this thought often in situations like this.
Too many cops seem to look for how much force they get to use instead of how much they need to use.
So in other words, there was every reason to realize that this guy shouldn’t have access to a gun and a badge, but neither his coworkers nor his supervisors did anything about it.
AND THAT is why people say ACAB, because the other police who allowed this man to remain an officer are 100% complicit in this outcome.
Why do we have to wait until they fucking execute someone to do something about it?
Well, you better remove as much funding as possible from every police agency, and make sure that being a cop is as unpopular a career as possible, while still saying that having a police force is a vital part of our societal structure and so they have to find someone to hire.
Surely those efforts will help to solve this very genuine problem.
I wish we didn’t live in a binary world where there weren’t only two possible things that can be done about every issue, both quite extreme.
Yeah. There are quite a few people in the real world who actually are pursuing the sensible course - like places that are replacing cops for every call with mental health professionals, but backed up by police when violence is a clear possibility, and everyone working together. Supposedly that works great. Bodycams are another good example; almost every police agency loves them and the handful that resisted them (e.g. Portland and various police unions) represent a HUGE red flag about that agency.
I do think that both on the internet and real world the two extremes of “stop criticizing the cops cops are always right” and “fuck the police all the time cops are always the enemy” are the majority of the discourse, though. 😢
You’re literally contributing to that discourse.
Am I? I am pretty sure I explicitly advocated for a few different things that were neither of the binary alternatives, and pointed out specific problems that could be caused by the “other side” approaches, without simply saying it had to be the opposite binary.
Was that not what I did / not how it came across?
No! We ended up in this timeline, pick a side!
Cops make themselves unpopular, and they already get more than their share of communities funds.
Or we could start by getting rid of that fucking police fraternity and raising our quality standards for who gets hired as an officer.
Sounds like a great idea on both counts. And actually I would add to that, create a nationwide registry of complaints against officers. There was an initial start at that in some of Biden’s police reforms, although it’s still sort of partial. Aviation dealt with this a while back, that the system is flawed if you’re depending on the job candidate to volunteer to you the information that they were fired from some other location for incompetence. You need to have an external system in place that tracks it nationwide.
For some reason, the solution to this (again, very real) problem “bad cops tend to get fired and travel to some other agency” is not “let’s fix the holes that make that pattern possible” but “See? Police agencies always protect bad cops! Let’s starve them for money and make them desperate for more people!”
For some reason, the solution to this (again, very genuine) problem “bad cops tend to get fired and travel to some other agency” is not “let’s fix the holes that make that pattern possible” but “See? Police agencies always protect bad cops! Let’s starve them for money and make them desperate for more people!
We had decades of uncritical support of police from most of the population until cameras started showing up everywhere to let us see what we were supporting. It turns out those decades of mostly uncritical support does not seem to have resulted in the sorts of police we want. So maybe try being upset about the shitty police instead of being upset about people being upset about the shitty police.
help to solve this very genuine problem.
I’m so glad you asked, even though you didn’t.
Here are some examples of what defunding actually means.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/07/25/police-mental-health-alternative-911
Yeah. All of this (aside from that one thing of taking legal action against the city) sounds pretty good.
How does this relate to the woman who specifically called for the police to deal with a situation that needed police attention, and me advocating for diagnosing and fixing some of the problems that led to a person who should never have been a cop in the first place getting sent to that call?
It’s true the messaging was terrible, it should’ve been “lets reallocate law enforcement funds to mental healthcare, crisis intervention workers, and job programs!” or something but that doesn’t roll off the tongue and lets be honest would’ve just been decried as socialism and a “government handout” anyway.
edit: I guess the messaging served it’s purpose, bringing the issue to the forefront, we’re still talking about it now.
Yeah. Personally I suspect that “defund the police” was explicit advocacy for exactly the type of vindictive make-everything-worse solution that it sounds like, and then got retconned afterwards into something much more sensible once (some) people realized how bad the initial idea was as a civic policy.
May I suggest “fix the system” as an alternate solution? It encompasses both the idea of productively addressing the systemic problem in policing, and moving on from there to wider issues in the criminal justice system that at this point I think are actually much bigger unaddressed problems than anything going on on a large scale with frontline police.
There’s no fixing the system it must be destroyed and replaced.
Do you wanna get together with a bunch of like minded people, find a city somewhere where you can vote in new leadership and destroy the police department, and see how it works out?
The hippies tried their version of that back in the 1960s with Vermont, and it turned Vermont into a substantially more pleasant place. Some people tried it in Aspen (read Hunter Thompson’s proposals for how he wanted to reform the police department and what the voters did and how it played out; it is fascinating reading.) The libertarians tried it somewhere in New England and somewhere in the Southwest, more recently, and their philosophies in practice were an utter failure.
I am asserting that your solutions will not work in the real world. If you want to prove me wrong, you are empowered to organize and find a place and make it happen and run the experiment. People are actually doing this with non-destroying options like sending mental health professionals on mental health calls, and it’s working well, so sure give your thing a shot.
isn’t your first paragraph what the country was literally founded to do, should we be surprised then, when, people want to do that?
I wasn’t trying to express surprise or sarcasm. Whether or not I personally think it’s a good idea, I was fully unironically saying that taking over a city and doing it the way that you think makes sense, if the current system of policing isn’t making sense to you, is a good idea.
Honestly, whether or not it works, we need more of that. The whole idea that “they” run the cities and “we” are at the mercy of what “they” have decided to do is not completely true, but it’s also not completely false. If a bunch of ACAB people took over a city, destroyed the police department, suddenly realized that it’s a bad idea to have no one to respond / only non violent people to respond if some violent crime happens, and then started working on “okay well then what do we want it to look like, avoiding the problems we experienced in the past with the way the police were organized”, that would be a pretty fantastic thing. Again whether or not I was on board with how they thought about it before or after going into it. And, non-caricature versions of that (e.g. sending community response teams instead of police for non-criminal matters) has been a reform that’s been happening, and it’s been working. It’s a good thing.
(Actually the citation the one person sent me to the Marshall project went into a decent amount of detail about what we do actually want it to look like. It pointed out that a lot of the fundamental problems are problems of social services, social framework, underlying root causes, and then beyond that, funding for 911 centers and non-police emergency response, and only beyond that does it even become an issue anything that the police do whether right or wrong. Like I said I actually liked that citation and what it had to say. I was only disagreeing with the idea of applying it as justification for the idea of “and that’s why the police are BAD!” as a conclusion and as the sum total of what we need to do to fix the system, apparently.)
But anyway, we need more self government in civic society, including policing. Because, yes, that is what the country was literally founded to do, and it’s not really fully the system right now.
What’s worse is they hired him in the first place.
I didn’t downvote.
I don’t think I said you did.
It’s also important to recognize the relevance of class warfare here. Many many many organizations responsible for human safety often cut back on staff and hours so much that you’ll take a piece of shit watching your back because if they get fired your boss is gonna take those savings as a win and not hire anyone else and then no one will be watching your back so you just tolerate the piece of shit until you either can’t keep it on your conscience anymore or until they also become a danger to you, and the fact that they’re making individuals make that call on reporting the person responsible for their safety is a huge problem that needs to be addressed if we’re going to make any headway. There’s also an element of if you report and nothing happens, or even if something does happen, you can get “frozen out” and no one will watch your back or some people will even push you into dangerous situations to get rid of you. So you’d have to have it be a tolerable and high paid enough position even with high standards that you can afford to just replace entire departments quickly. Defunding won’t do that, so the real answer is just making sure the funds they do have go more to regulatory oversight, but especially the most to the lowest rung people who do the most hands-on work.
I have thoughts about how they should have to be licensed and have oversight boards and a couple other things, but there’s a lot of problems in all sectors that just aren’t going to get solved until we address the fact that no one wants to pay for direct human services labor of any kind anymore. Hands-on blue collar work has been just so fundamentally devalued at the actual monetary level that even people who WANT to do it and do a good, honest job that serves other humans can’t even afford to sometimes, both monetarily and in costs to their physical wellbeing.
Hey I just wanted to say thanks for the lengthy and detailed response, and I don’t mean to seem I’m reducing it just to you final paragraph, but articles like these (which I see with reasonable regularity) lead me to believe that the real world applications of the defund movement do tend to be supported by those who are actually doing the work or are adjacent to it.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/07/25/police-mental-health-alternative-911
As someone else has already pointed out, in this specific circumstance it seems likely to me they would have sent police anyhow, which is why I think the other important step is to start letting the folks who hire and retain these clearly problematic officers feel some of the heat - whether financially or through civil suit (thanks QI), or other means.
What I do not support is giving more funding to any department without some ironclad limitations on how they can use it and actual consequences for failing to use it in that way. I have lost all faith that any such increase in funds will be used appropriately though, or that any related agreement will actually be enforceable enough to have the desired effect.
As I mentioned elsewhere, we had decades of uncritical support of police from most of the population until cameras started showing up everywhere to let us see what we were supporting. It turns out those decades of mostly uncritical support do not seem to have resulted in the sorts of police we want, so I’m skeptical that any such conditions will be obeyed or enforced.
the defund movement do tend to be supported by those who are actually doing the work or are adjacent to it.
You say that, but what I’ve realistically observed is people with little enough insight into the actual issue that they wind up perpetrating a lot of functional hypocrisy / double-think. Most of of the people working these positions in my area are black because that’s just the demographics of the area, so they’ll see these videos of cops killing black people and SAY ACAB or defund the police, but in the same shift I’ll watch them turn around and say some of the exact same shit to patients that these cops said to that poor schizophrenic lady (“don’t you dare or I’ll ___” or something similar but in this case the blank is fortunately something non-fatal like forced medication or restraints).
Most people lack the insight to realize that their thought patterns are the same as the people doing these things, because they think THEY had a good reason to say it because it made sense to them in the context of what was happening to them personally and the patient was ok in the end. When all they see is the video they don’t see the other frustrating or situationally intimidating things this person did before their death (and it’s not that they deserved it, it’s that you have to control whole situations to stop this kind of thing, intervening in the last five minutes is faaar too late). That video was actually an excellent example of this; I even saw someone point out that they never should have let her hold the kettle in the first place; one of the officers should have recognized that she was in crisis and offered to get the kettle FOR her. She should never have been allowed the opportunity to pick up the improvised weapon in the first place because it should have been obvious to them that she could not control herself in that moment.
Few people just snap and kill somebody in under a few seconds, its the fact that they’re ever letting shit get that far in the first place is the actual core issue here. It’s incredibly easy to look at a single video and say “I would never” but part of my talent for handling these situations is understanding what causes a person to get to that point. I’m the person who notices my coworkers getting frustrated and taps them out because I’ve noticed that it’s always the martyrs who say “I would never” that fail to monitor and intervene with their own frustration levels and who don’t account for what a person not in control of themselves is actually capable of that wind up doing the most fucked up shit.
I certainly can’t argue with your lived experience, but I hope you’ll appreciate that from my point of view it’s an anecdote, even though I don’t doubt your sincerity, nor the accuracy of your statement.
Few people just snap and kill somebody in under a few seconds, its the fact that they’re ever letting shit get that far in the first place is the actual core issue here. It’s incredibly easy to look at a single video and say “I would never” but part of my talent for handling these situations is understanding what causes a person to get to that point. I’m the person who notices my coworkers getting frustrated and taps them out because I’ve noticed that it’s always the martyrs who say “I would never” that fail to monitor and intervene with their own frustration levels that wind up doing the most fucked up shit.
I agree with all of this, but combined with the information in the OP, what we can do, rather than blame that cop for their own mental health struggles (although I do blame a person with those kinds of anger control issues for choosing a career where they need to decide whether to kill people or not), I think there must be, should be, and should always have been actual consequences not only for the cop who pulled the trigger, but for the folks who hired and retained him.
And if the answer is “for this reason or that they didn’t have knowledge of all those details” - then THAT problem can be the first one that supposed well meaning police solve if they want to start building some faith that they actually want to solve these problems as badly as us potential targets do.
they’ll see these videos of cops killing black people and SAY ACAB or defund the police,
The post you originally replied to is the closest I’ve ever come to actually saying it, but although I usually refuse to even get that close, I will distill down a somewhat famous Chris Rock skit to only its punchline. I may not walk around saying ACAB, but I understand.
A big part of them having their own mental health struggles is that it’s also some of the most unhinged people that can make some of the best conflict deescalators because we’ve been there. A big part of the reason I’m so good at this is because I know what I’ve done and what I’m capable of and I know what my stupid ass should’ve been told when I was doing dumb shit. I’ve actually wound up in restraints being forced medication after getting my ass beat by the cops for being a mentally ill little shit. A LOT of people start out thinking they’re going to be the person that makes the change they needed way back when.
The difference is I’ve had 3 years of literally the most intense psychological therapy that exists and I was going to that therapy while I was working with some of the most acutely ill psychiatric patients that exist so I was actively processing and growing from my own childhood and history while I was also learning to manage these patients, so those same therapists got the chance to simultaneously help me process the experiences I was actively having AND contextualize my innate responses to that exact environment.
It’s a situation that’s almost impossible to replicate without the kind of financial resources that the people running this country don’t want to dedicate to this end, and not just because they’re stingy but because they’re actively benefiting from convincing us to brutalize each other instead of picking our heads up and realizing what’s happening and going after them instead. It really does all come down to class warfare in the end (BTW Dialectal Behavior Therapy also includes a STRONG element of controlling your own mental energy so you can channel it to combat systemic injustices as effectively as possible).
Also, you have to be unhinged to walk up to a convicted violent felon with psychosis who thinks you’re trying to hurt them and think you’re just going to talk them into not going for your throat. Sane people run.
If they didn’t let just any idiot become a cop Sonya would be alive right now but instead we have iq limits on cops because uncle sam needs his cops nice a dumb.
If we ever get a progressive president maybe we’ll actually fix it.
Until “bad apples” fuck up the rest of the cops money, they won’t care.
Start taking the settlements out of their union/pension accounts. And all of a sudden I think cops will start electing different kinds of unions reps, ones that won’t fight hardest to keep the worst cops on duty
Until “bad apples” fuck up the rest of the cops money, they won’t care.
I’ve come to realize this is the only answer. Settlements have to get big enough that taxes get high enough that localities are motivated to put actual pressure on their police. Having said that, apparently the number has to get pretty big before folks start to care.
taxes get high enough that localities are motivated to put actual pressure on their police
Yes, but then you see politicians cutting funding to schools and such first, no? Taking settlements from “their own” money (such as pensions) is one of the better solutions I’ve heard.
If we ever get a progressive president maybe we’ll actually fix it.
What do you think a progressive president can/will do to fix this? Biden used every available power of the office to try to push for police reform: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/02/07/fact-sheet-the-biden-harris-administrations-work-to-make-our-communities-safer-and-advance-effective-accountable-policing/
Real change has to come from congress or state governments. The president has very limited powers here. Mostly they can only impose rules on federal officers, not local police.
Maybe you blocked the other person that asked me, but here’s what I told them:
FDR got a lot of shit done.
Even tho he wanted more and the two parties unified against him.
An actually progressive president can guilt their party into progress, because he’ll go to their voters and flat out say the Dems they voted for is holding the whole country back, so next primary he’s supporting a challenger.
Strangely enough, just the threat of that is often enough.
Hell, Bernie is just a senator but that didn’t stop him from going to WV and telling voters that about Manchin.
And Manchin started supporting the party more.
Worked a hell of a lot better than Bidens strategy of publicly admitting he would even try to change someone’s mind.
Not really under the purview of a president though (nor are they really a king, even with the insane Scotus decision.)
People need to vote in local elections for people to fix this as most departments are locally run and overseen. At most you might get your state to pass something but even then that would be only blue states.
It would be nice to have Congress do something but i don’t ever see that happening as Republicans wouldn’t go near it and even some Democrats wouldn’t.
Problem is a lot of people don’t really care as much about this as other things.
If we ever get a progressive president maybe we’ll actually fix it.
I’m not sure a president could make the necessary changes on their own. I think you’d also need a progressive congress.
FDR got a lot of shit done.
Even tho he wanted more and the two parties unified against him.
An actually progressive president can guilt their party into progress, because he’ll go to their voters and flat out say the Dems they voted for is holding the whole country back, so next primary he’s supporting a challenger.
Strangely enough, just the threat of that is often enough.
Hell, Bernie is just a senator but that didn’t stop him from going to WV and telling voters that about Manchin.
And Manchin started supporting the party more.
Worked a hell of a lot better than Bidens strategy of publicly admitting he would even try to change someone’s mind.
Maybe such classes can be added to the prison curriculum?
