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.
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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.
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.
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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Just wanted to jump in - I 100% agree with this. The cop should have had the sense just not to tell her to fool with the pot, since it was fine for a couple minutes and they were on their way out anyway. But he did, and then they flipped out and pointed guns at her because they are unsuited to stressful situations, and she lost her fuckin mind with fear (as is understandable) and didn’t react with anything coherent and sensible, still tried to do what they were asking her to do anyway (somehow), and then they shot her anyway because they were in a total twitchy panic.
(She was actually controlling herself fine until they pointed guns and started shouting, for literally no reason at all, and then she started to react with irrational movements and statements as anyone under life threatening stress may be prone to do. And somehow they weren’t prepared for that and interpreted it as this terrifying level of hostility on her part.)
I’m not trying to excuse the cop. Bottom line, however it happened, he’s guilty. Res ipsa loquitur.
Maybe he’s a POS in addition to being a panicky person who doesn’t think ahead, and either one should have disqualified him from being a cop long before it got to this point. But it genuinely didn’t seem to me like he was looking to shoot anybody; he just was fearful and irrational under pressure and this was that one time where when you equip someone like that with deadly force and send them into random situations, something really bad with permanent consequences is gonna happen because of that combination.
What’s worse is they hired him in the first place.
I didn’t downvote.
I don’t think I said you did.
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.
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, and it caused some fatal accidents until they fixed it; 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 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.
Cops make themselves unpopular, and they already get more than their share of communities funds.
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.
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.
No! We ended up in this timeline, pick a side!
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?
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?
My response was specifically to respond to this common sideswipe against the defund movement.
In any case:
You seem to be advocating rewarding police for their unacceptable behavior, if I’m correctly understanding your layer of sarcasm from the first quoted bit. If I had even a molecule of faith remaining that police would use such additional funding to solve any of these issues, that would be great. But I don’t. They have destroyed my faith that they would take any such proactive measures and I expect they’ll just spend more money on different ways to harm or kill people and some more killology training, where they can be reminded that sex after killing someone will be the best sex they ever had.
So in the meantime, I’d like to see some accountability for those who hire these awful people and ignore their issues until they murder the people they are paid to help. Because currently it feels like they have little incentive to do things differently. Taxpayers pay police, police harm and kill people, then taxpayers pay the settlements for them. It’s going to take some convincing for me to believe that if we give them even more money they are going to use it in a responsible way.
To me this is like the folks who advocate more guns in schools for the problem of shootings at schools.