Deputy who killed Sonya Massey was removed from the Army, had DUIs and needed ‘high stress decision’ classes, records show | CNN
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Before he gunned down a mother in her home, former sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson had a history of problems in the Army and another sheriff’s agency, records show.

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.

  • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    3 months ago

    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 your 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.

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        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.