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.

    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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      1 month ago

      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?

      • octopus_ink
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        1 month ago

        My response was specifically to respond to this common sideswipe against the defund movement.

        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.

        In any case:

        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

        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.