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.
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.