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.
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.