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 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?
Edit: And the bootlicker who downvoted without even the courage to disagree openly can go eat a bag of dicks.
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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.
deleted by creator
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.
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What’s worse is they hired him in the first place.
I didn’t downvote.
I don’t think I said you did.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe such classes can be added to the prison curriculum?
So, not quite human…
