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.
It’s also important to recognize the relevance of class warfare here. Many many many organizations responsible for human safety often cut back on staff and hours so much that you’ll take a piece of shit watching your back because if they get fired your boss is gonna take those savings as a win and not hire anyone else and then no one will be watching your back so you just tolerate the piece of shit until they finally do something you can’t conscience anymore (which is waaay too late) or until they also become a danger to you, and the fact that they’re making individuals make that call on reporting the person responsible for their safety is a huge problem that needs to be addressed if we’re going to make any headway.
I don’t wanna talk about it in detail but I was put in a similar situation at the age of like 19 when I didn’t know any better and was constantly dragging another technician away from patients or even having to put my physical body between them but if I had reported them I would’ve been completely alone with the literally criminally insane men on my unit. I thank my stars every day they got fired on a regulatory technicality instead of actual patient harm because at the age of 19 with a highschool diploma and two weeks technician training I had no idea where to even start (and its also hard to get your head on straight when you’ve got that much adrenaline and cortisol in you for months on end). Oh and yeah, no, they didn’t hire anyone else and thank God I felt shit heating up and left because the day I did they had to put down a literal riot because of the conditions they were leaving these people in. If it weren’t for the patient care / working conditions (they’re the same thing but I’ll get to that) I probably never would have left that patient population; while they certainly weren’t cute harmless little kittens, those criminally insane men were some of the realest people I ever met and I learned so much from them and they’re almost entirely responsible for my WASP fundie deprogramming but I digress.
There’s also an element of if you report and nothing happens, or even if something does happen, you can get “frozen out” and no one in the entire organization will watch your back or some people will even push you into dangerous situations to get rid of you by getting you to quit or …worse. I saw so many people become persona non grata and while I fortunately had a strong reputation as a hard worker looking out for everyone’s safety, I still got dirty looks for even helping frozen-out coworkers with housekeeping tasks like wiping down the dayroom tables. I’ve got uniquely good instincts for navigating violent situations in ways that turn out ok for everyone involved (perks of getting beat as a kid), but 90% of people don’t have the skillset to balance on that tightrope and wind up having to make a choice between going along with shit or getting frozen out (even I was lucky to make it as long as I did snatching that idiot off my patients). So you’d have to have it be a tolerable and high paid enough position even with high standards that you can afford to just replace entire departments quickly. Defunding won’t do that, so the real answer is just making sure the funds they do have go more to regulatory oversight, but especially the most to the lowest rung people who do the most hands-on work.
I have thoughts about how they should have to be licensed and have oversight boards and a couple other things similar to Healthcare, but there’s a lot of problems in all sectors that just aren’t going to get solved until we address the fact that no one wants to pay for direct human services labor of any kind anymore. Hands-on blue collar work has been just so fundamentally devalued at the actual monetary level that even people who WANT to do it and do a good, honest job that serves other humans can’t even afford to sometimes, both monetarily and in costs to their physical wellbeing. So there’s nothing left that’s desirable about these positions except having power over others, and no shit that’s going to attract the worst of humanity.
Gun control is also critical and the lack of it is the #1 reason I don’t work in community mental health services despite specifically specializing in violent and malignantly manipulative behavior. I’d 100% be an amazing violent conflict deescalator (I’ve only been doing it almost a decade now) but the risk of getting shot is just not worth it. And I can tell you that’s also on the cops minds because I’ve chatted with them while sorting out emergency psych hold paperwork. I think even without that shitty “warrior cop” training they’re exposing them to, the question “what if they have a gun” is going to be at the forefront of their minds. Until that’s a lot less likely and / or they’re much more likely to know ahead of time, they’re going to want to shoot first before the other guy has even a hypothetical chance.
“Defund the police” is a great catchy tagline that just sounds like nonsense to the people actually doing this work or who are adjacent to it, so no wonder it’s not going anywhere. Fuck I keep adding shit but this is a topic I’m really passionate about (like I said, I loved my forensic patients so much and they deserve so much more). There’s a saying in L&D that baby isn’t safe if mom (/ the primary caregiver) isn’t safe but it really applies to pretty much any person responsible for another human beings’ safety. No human can ever fully devote themselves to another’s safety if they aren’t already reasonably sure of their own.
Honestly my fiance just listened to my rant and came up with a much better tagline: “make the cops realize they’re poor too” because blue-collar class solidarity is the only real way out of this mess (but even that’s not really as catchy). On a similar note there are also a bunch of people with like 0.5-1mil in assets not even in the bank who think they’re the rich we’re talking about taxing who need to realize they’re just upper middle class / a little safer than us, not actually rich in the “no life consequences ever” way that no one should ever be, and that taxing billionaires actually benefits them too (like my idiot parents I don’t talk to anymore). Anyway I need to log off before I write a damn book (I can’t, I keep coming back. Again, passion, LOL).
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.
You say that, but what I’ve realistically observed is people with little enough insight into the actual issue that they wind up perpetrating a lot of functional hypocrisy / double-think. Most of of the people working these positions in my area are black because that’s just the demographics of the area, so they’ll see these videos of cops killing black people and SAY ACAB or defund the police, but in the same shift I’ll watch them turn around and say some of the exact same shit to patients that these cops said to that poor schizophrenic lady (“don’t you dare or I’ll ___” or something similar but in this case the blank is fortunately something non-fatal like forced medication or restraints).
Most people lack the insight to realize that their thought patterns are the same as the people doing these things, because they think THEY had a good reason to say it because it made sense to them in the context of what was happening to them personally and the patient was ok in the end. When all they see is the video they don’t see the other frustrating or situationally intimidating things this person did before their death (and it’s not that they deserved it, it’s that you have to control whole situations to stop this kind of thing, intervening in the last five minutes is faaar too late). That video was actually an excellent example of this; I even saw someone point out that they never should have let her hold the kettle in the first place; one of the officers should have recognized that she was in crisis and offered to get the kettle FOR her. She should never have been allowed the opportunity to pick up the improvised weapon in the first place because it should have been obvious to them that she could not control herself in that moment.
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 and who don’t account for what a person not in control of themselves is actually capable of that wind up doing the most fucked up shit.
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.
A big part of them having their own mental health struggles is that it’s also some of the most unhinged people that can make some of the best conflict deescalators because we’ve been there. A big part of the reason I’m so good at this is because I know what I’ve done and what I’m capable of and I know what my stupid ass should’ve been told when I was doing dumb shit. I’ve actually wound up in restraints being forced medication after getting my ass beat by the cops for being a mentally ill little shit. A LOT of people start out thinking they’re going to be the person that makes the change they needed way back when.
The difference is I’ve had 3 years of literally the most intense psychological therapy that exists and I was going to that therapy while I was working with some of the most acutely ill psychiatric patients that exist so I was actively processing and growing from my own childhood and history while I was also learning to manage these patients, so those same therapists got the chance to simultaneously help me process the experiences I was actively having AND contextualize my innate responses to that exact environment.
It’s a situation that’s almost impossible to replicate without the kind of financial resources that the people running this country don’t want to dedicate to this end, and not just because they’re stingy but because they’re actively benefiting from convincing us to brutalize each other instead of picking our heads up and realizing what’s happening and going after them instead. It really does all come down to class warfare in the end (BTW Dialectal Behavior Therapy also includes a STRONG element of controlling your own mental energy so you can channel it to combat systemic injustices as effectively as possible).
Also, you have to be unhinged to walk up to a convicted violent felon with psychosis who thinks you’re trying to hurt them and think you’re just going to talk them into not going for your throat. Sane people run.
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.