Joe Biden has called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, moments after shocking police video was released showing an Illinois officer fatally shooting Sonya Massey after she called police fearing a home intruder.
In his first public statement since dropping his bid for re-election, Biden said the shooting of Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman, by white Sangamon county sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson, in her home in Springfield, after a dispute over a pot of boiling water, “reminds us that all too often Black Americans face fears for their safety in ways many of the rest of us do not”.
Biden, who is recovering from Covid at his home in Delaware, said Massey, “a beloved mother, friend, daughter and young Black woman … should be alive today”.
I definitely don’t think it was a joke. Her twitchy nature and constant fear strike me as someone facing a mental health issue. Specifically schizophrenia as she said she was hearing people around the house. All that said, a cop should be able to recognize those signs immediately and should have used less lethal force at the most. His first instinct shouldn’t have been to bridge the gap and get closer after he felt “threatened.”
Schizophrenic people still have a sense of humor… To me it came off as if she recognized that the cop was afraid of her and made a snappy comeback, because it’s generally offensive to be accused of wanting to mame strangers with boiling water.
Rebuke just means to criticize, it’s not an attack, or even aggressive. To rebuke someone to God, is just saying your going to complain about their behavior to God. Tbh the moments before she was killed seem to me the most coherent and responsive she behaved during the entire encounter.
This was what I got from it too. She was offended that they would think that she would attack them with boiling water.
It’s kinda like she said “don’t bring that Hateful ideas into my house.” She was warding of the bad juju and disagreeing at the same time.
I think she’s also not dumb and knows what officers are capable of and might have knew where things were going. The police were escalating the situation for no good reason. And she was scared, cause they kill people who are black for very little. In this case they killed her for listening to them.
Not when they’re paranoid. Which she is now confirmed to have been a paranoid schizophrenic. It runs in my family and I’ve seen it quite frequently and heard the stories of others in my family that have seen it. When you know the signs it’s incredibly easy to spot, and police should be trained on the simple signs to figure this out and better help them keep a situation calm.
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Or just maybe, we should have other workers available than tinhorn sheriff wannabes with guns in our local governments that you can call to de-escalate situations. But no no, that’d be too much like defunding the police.
A good friend of mine lives in Burlington, VT and has schizophrenia. There is a service there, First Call, that will send people trained to recognize mental illness and deescalate the situation only getting police involved as a last resort.
Or at least that’s how it is supposed to go. Said friend was still drug away by police with First Call on the scene before. At least they weren’t shot, I guess. Still if they are ever in need of outside intervention I saved the number in my phone and I’m sure as shit not calling the police on them.
I wish more cities had a similar service.
She actively thought people were outside her house trying to get in. That’s what you send the police for. A counselor can’t ask someone to go away if there was an actual threat and they were armed. This is one of those events where a police officer was the best initial call and then as things continued the way they were they should have brought in a counselor.