|
Post by lowes on Sept 11, 2024 19:35:47 GMT -5
What do you think happens when a hundred people answer a cop's questions, or give their consent to search their car or home? When so many people show respect to a cop, offer them a free meal or service? What I think is this cop gets used to this, expects it, they are above all the peasants, minions, better than lowlife criminal scum like me. So that when one person comes along who don't answer a cop's questions, don't show enough respect, snubs or shuns the cop, crosses to the other side of the street to avoid them, they get abused or killed. They get much worse but I'm not allowed to post about it here. This is the "big shot complex" all cops have it, some more than others but they all have it. There's not a cop in existence that don't violate the 4th amendment. What would happen to a cop that didn't?, who refused to violate someone's rights, serious question, what would happen to that cop? Would they just be fired?, or arrested themselves?, maybe killed by their fellow cops? Do you get it now? do you get why there can't be any morally good cops? Knowing the truth about them will you still respect them, out of fear? Will you answer their questions and let them search you car because you have nothing to hide. Then don't blame the cop next time a young kid is killed by them, or the next time a young girl is abused in a holding cell for their entertainment. Blame the person you see in the mirror, because you created this monster.
.
|
|
|
Post by lowes on Sept 20, 2024 13:44:44 GMT -5
The 36-minute video released via the Illinois State Police includes body-camera footage from each of the two Sangamon County sheriff’s deputies who responded to Massey’s house after midnight on July 6 after Massey called 911 to report a possible “prowler” at her home in Springfield, according to a court document filed by prosecutors. In the footage, deputy Sean Grayson and another deputy speak calmly with Massey in her home when she goes to the stove to turn off a pot of boiling water. She then picks up the pot and the other deputy steps back,
“away from your hot steaming water,” he says.
“I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” she says in response.
“Huh?” the deputy says.
“I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” she repeats.
“You better f**king not or I swear to God I’ll f**king shoot you in the f**king face,” Grayson says.
He then draws his firearm and points it at her, and she ducks and says, “I’m sorry” while lifting the pot, the video shows.
“Drop the f**king pot!” both deputies yell.
Three shots are heard. After a few seconds of silence, one deputy says “shots fired” and calls for emergency medical services.
“Dude, I’m not taking f**king boiling water to the f**king head. And look, it came right to our feet, too,” Grayson says.
Minutes after the shooting, Grayson speaks to another law enforcement figure.
“She had boiling water and came at me with boiling water,” he says in the video. “She said she was going to rebuke me in the name of Jesus and came at (me) with boiling water.”
The release of the video comes about two weeks after the fatal shooting. Grayson, 30, was indicted by a grand jury last week on three counts of first-degree murder and one count each of aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct. He has entered a not guilty plea and was denied pretrial release, according to court records. Massey is one of a number of Black women who have been killed by police in their own homes in recent years, including Breonna Taylor and Atanana Jefferson. In a news conference Monday afternoon, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents Massey’s family, connected her death to other cases of police violence against Black people across the US.
“Until we get justice for Sonya Massey, we rebuke this discriminatory criminal justice system in the name of Jesus,” he said.
Grayson did not activate his body camera until after he fatally shot Massey, according to charging documents. The other deputy had activated his body camera when he first arrived at the scene, the documents state. According to footage from the other deputy’s body camera, the incident began with the deputies walking around Massey’s yard and finding a vehicle with broken windows. They then knock on the door and speak with her, and she struggles to understand and answer some questions about the vehicle and about herself. As they speak in her living room, the deputies note the pot on the lit stove and one says, “we don’t need a fire while we’re here.” Massey gets up and turns off the stove and the shooting then follows. Immediately after the shooting, the video records Grayson telling his partner Massey would not need medical help. The other deputy says he’s going to get a medical kit to help, but Grayson responds, “Nah, she’s done. You can go get it but that’s a headshot.”
Grayson later goes to his vehicle to get his own medical supplies. When he gets back to the house, he asks if there’s anything he can do, but is told no. “All right, I’m not even gonna waste my med stuff then,” Grayson says. Next, Grayson leaves the house and speaks to a group of law enforcement officers outside. “Yeah I’m good, this f**king b*tch is crazy,” he says, according to the footage. In the news conference Monday, along with members of her family, Crump said Massey had mental health challenges but was not aggressive toward the deputies. “She needed a helping hand,” he said. “She didn’t need a bullet to the face.”
Massey’s father, James Wilburn, said he initially received conflicting information from law enforcement.
“I was under the impression that a prowler had broken in and killed my baby. Never did they say that it was a deputy-involved shooting until my brother read it on the internet,” Wilburn said at the news conference.
“We were led to believe that the intruder – or someone from the neighborhood – may have killed her. We were absolutely shocked to find out that it was a deputy who shot her,” Wilburn told CNN’s Laura Coates on Monday night.
“You’re used to having ‘the talk’ with boys, but now I guess we have to talk to our girls about … their interactions with the police,” Wilburn said. Wilburn said that his daughter’s death had left him heartbroken.
“Sonya was a daddy’s girl. She never ended a conversation – whether by text or telephone or in person – without saying, ‘Daddy, I love you.’ And that’s the last message I have from my daughter that’s saved on my voicemail, was ‘Daddy, I love you’,” he said.
Since the shooting, several local and state officials have made findings in support of the deputy, saying "Grayson was justified in his use of deadly force" .
In a court document filed by the state last week, prosecutors said a “use-of-force” expert had reviewed the body-camera footage and concluded the use of deadly force was justified.
Grayson had worked at six different law enforcement agencies in Illinois since 2020. He began working part-time at the Pawnee Police Department in August 2020, then moved to the Kincaid and Virden police departments, before taking up full-time work with the Auburn Police Department then the Logan County Sheriff’s Office and – in May 2023 – Sangamon County. It is unclear why Grayson changed jobs so frequently and CNN has reached out to the other law enforcement agencies for more information. A petition calling for an investigation into why Sangamon County hired Grayson was circulated at a march and barbecue in Springfield on Monday night.
President Joe Biden, who wrote the 1994 crime bill and choose cop-mala Harris as his VP said in a statement Monday that Massey’s family “deserves justice.”
“I am heartbroken for her children and her entire family as they face this unthinkable and senseless loss. Jill and I mourn with the rest of the country and our prayers are with Sonya’s family, loved ones, and community during this devastating time,” Biden said in a written statement.
Sonya Massey's death: How race, police and mental health collided in America's heartland-
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Three times, Sonya Massey's name floated into the evening air amid bunches of star-shaped purple balloons.
"Say her name," her friends and family yelled. "Sonya Massey."
A month earlier, a sheriff's deputy shot and killed Massey, 36, inside her small home after she called 911 to report a prowler. A Black woman who had a mental health illness, according to her family, Massey was home alone when the two deputies from the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office arrived.
In addition to the trauma for her family, Massey's death has triggered a fresh wave of anger, frustration and exhaustion in her hometown and across the country as the United States continues to grapple with its long history of racist treatment of Black residents, systemic inequality, and lack of access to mental health care.
Experts say Massey's death reflects a longstanding reality in many police departments: A shoot-first mentality when it comes to interactions with the Black community.
Was Daniel Shaver or Dillon Taylor black? Kelly Thomas?..
Civil rights experts say they are increasingly hopeful that both the deputy and the system that trained, hired and deployed him will be held accountable. Friday, Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell announced he would retire amidst calls for his resignation.
"We just need to get some justice and that's all this is about," Donna Massey said at the balloon-release ceremony marking the one-month anniversary of her daughter's death. "It's thousands of us (who) have been killed by the hands of the police."
A link to history and race riot of 1908
Although she was born in San Diego, Massey's 600-member family has deep roots in Springfield, pop. 114,000, a historic cornfield-surrounded city in central Illinois.
Family lore says they're related to William K. Donnegan, a shoemaker and conductor on the Underground Railroad who helped enslaved Black Americans flee the south. Among Donnegan's customers was not-yet President Abraham Lincoln, who practiced law nearby.
A white mob lynched the elderly Donnegan in 1908 after growing angry that two other Black men accused of violent crimes were removed from the local jail before the mob could attack them. At least five people were killed in the race riot, which destroyed many Black or Jewish-owned businesses, and led to the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, now known as the NAACP.
More than 100 years later, Massey was pronounced dead in the same hospital Donnegan was.
A mother of two, Massey for a time worked as a home healthcare aide, her family said, traveling the streets of Springfield that are filled with reminders of the city's racist past - and its efforts to overcome them. Excerpts of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation wrap around monuments, and a statue of Lincoln overlooks downtown, which is dotted with plaques explaining the 1908 race riot. Springfield is also where Barack Obama in 2007 declared his history-making candidacy for the White House.
"This community is very similar to others. We're families, multigenerational, nontraditional, all trying to do the best we can," said Dr. Nicole Florence, 55, who moved to Springfield when she was a child. "But just like other communities we need to be more cognizant of how we move among each other, and the words we use to talk to each other."
Massey lived in a neighborhood known as Cabbage Patch. It's physically within the city limits but not legally part of the city, and is instead part of surrounding Sangamon County.
Crystal Chalmers remembers taking long walks with her “God-fearing” cousin around the city's east side, where the effects of historic mortgage redlining are still apparent in the size differences in homes on the city’s north and west sides. No matter how much time passed between visits, Chalmers said they would never miss a beat when they reconnected.
"She was just a happy person all the way around. I've never seen her upset or angry, and she would always do what she can to help anybody that was in need,” Chalmers said.
Another cousin, Kevin Holmes, remembered Massey was a quiet, serious child who sang along from the pews at Second Timothy Baptist Church whether she knew the words or not, and listened with rapt attention to the pastor’s every word.
Massey stopped coming to the church in recent years, but Holmes said it was clear she carried the faith instilled by her mother into adulthood.
“And the fact that she said ‘I rebuke you in the name of Jesus’ as she lost her life, I feel almost like she was martyred,” Holmes said.
Massey was petite - about 5'3" and 112 pounds according to the autopsy report - and had had boundless energy, recalled Jimmie Crawford Jr., the father of Massey’s youngest daughter, Jeanette "Summer" Massey, 15.
Crawford remembered thinking Massey was "a ball of spice" when they first met more than 17 years ago.
"Sonya was bold," Crawford said. "She was sweet and then she was spicy, just like her daughter."
Several family members recalled Massey as a mom who preferred to be home with her kids. She didn't love to go out, but she loved to do hair and cook for family barbecues, especially mac and cheese. She also had lupus, an autoimmune disease, for which she had received government disability payments after stopping work.
While several family members said Massey had a mental health illness, they declined to discuss the specifics. Lupus can also cause headaches, confusion and memory loss.
Neighbor Theresa Mercado, 37, said her kids often played with Massey's children in the narrow paved road between their houses in the year and a half they were neighbors. Mercado's 11-year-old daughter, Maleyah, recalled once asking Massey for honey while she was making tea with some friends.
"She was sweet, always nice," Mercado said.
Troubled days before the shooting-
In the days and weeks leading up to the shooting, Massey appeared to be in crisis. Springfield police on July 5 told a sheriff’s deputy Massey had talked with the mobile crisis team, a co-responder program between Springfield Police and Memorial Behavioral Health, three times in the two weeks before her death, according to details of her interactions. The relatively new program allows mental-health workers to accompany police officers on calls.
Two days before Massey's death, as the nation celebrated Independence Day, a woman calling from Donna Massey's house told 911 dispatchers someone was trying to hurt her. When asked who was trying to hurt her, the woman replied “a lot of them.” Sangamon County Central Dispatch System Director Chris Mueller said in a statement that he could not confirm whether the caller was Sonya Massey. The next morning, Massey’s mother called 911 to say her daughter was having a “mental breakdown.” She stressed Massey was not a danger to herself or others and pleaded with the dispatcher not to send any "combative policemen who are prejudiced.” Her mother told the dispatcher: "I'm scared of the police. Sometimes they make (the situation) worse."Massey initially told the Springfield Police officers who responded to her mother’s home that she did not want treatment and two emergency medical technicians at the scene checked her out and "cleared her," according to a report filed by the Sangamon County sheriff's office.
Hired by the department in May 2023 and paid just over :: $56,000 :: annually, Grayson, 30, arrived in Sangamon County with a litany of missteps to his name, including two DUIs, a discharge from the U.S. Army for "serious misconduct," and complaints against him from the people he policed as well as from law enforcement officers. He'd also had five law enforcement jobs since 2020, some of them part-time and overlapping with each other. The Sangamon sheriff's department's own hiring interview warned that Grayson "needs to slow down to make good decisions." They hired him anyway.
A few months before Grayson started at Sangamon County, he was working for the Logan County Sheriff's Office the next county over. In December 2022, a female inmate complained that he tried to force her to remove drugs hidden in her vagina in front of him, and that he only stopped when a female deputy intervened. Then when a doctor was called in to remove the drugs, Grayson “flung the curtain back and exposed me to him," inmate Chelsey Lowe wrote in a complaint. “I felt very violated on both occasions." After Lowe complained, Grayson visited her partner, George Wisehart in jail.
“He did this simply b/c Chelsey Lowe filed a report on him,” Wisehart wrote in his own complaint. He said Grayson appeared to be trying to intimidate him and make other inmates think he was collaborating with police: "He is now harassing me and abusing his power and putting people in danger." Grayson denied both their claims and then quit the Logan County Sheriff's Office, records show. A month earlier, his supervisors confronted him about discrepancies between his written reports and what video recordings captured on another case.
"If we can't trust what you say and what you see, we can't have you in our uniform," one unidentified supervisor told Grayson in a recording obtained by USA TODAY. "I'm calling you on your integrity. How's that make you feel?"
Other departments and supervisors expressed similar concerns about Grayson, including the clinical psychologist who conducted a screening interview for Sangamon County. “Mr. Grayson scored low on the cognitive assessment,” wrote Dr. Thomas R. Campion, who expressed caution after noting Grayson passed the assessment. “He knows he can move too fast at times,” Campion wrote. “He needs to slow down to make good decisions.”
Separately, a Sangamon County Sheriff's Office lieutenant reported in a background investigation on Grayson that Chief Steven Snodgrass of the Virden Police Department, where Grayson worked from May to December 2021, said Grayson “did not demonstrate good officer safety skills.” An investigator for Logan County reported that Auburn Police Chief Dave Campbell "expressed concern" that Grayson was "too aggressive" in performing his duties, according to a background check obtained via open records request.
Unidentified Logan County officials expressed doubt that his issues policing could ever be solved in a recording obtained via open records request. One of the two officials said Grayson committed a “mountain of policy violations,” some of which were “pretty egregious." The other official on the recording added: “We can guide you. We can mentor you. We can provide you documentation or training or whatever, but the only person that gets to put it in play in context is you.” Officials at Logan County, and the Auburn, Virden, Kincaid and Pawnee police departments where Grayson worked in the past four years either declined or did not reply to requests for comment.
The shooting-
Because Massey's house in Cabbage Patch is technically not part of the city, it was sheriff's deputies, not Springfield police who came to her house on July 6. At 1:18 a.m., having determined there was no prowler, Grayson followed Massey into her house as his partner checked on an SUV parked in her driveway. The footage shows two broken windows on the side of the vehicle, but Massey told deputies she didn’t know whose car it was. Exactly what happened to the vehicle remains unclear. The day before, Massey told a sheriff’s deputy that a neighbor smashed her front driver’s side window with a brick, and then she herself broke the back driver’s side window in an attempt to get inside, scraping her arms as she reached through the broken glass. A neighbor later told a deputy Massey threw the brick through her own window, according to the sheriff’s office. It’s unclear why Massey told deputies the vehicle wasn’t hers. In a report written after he shot Massey, Grayson said he had asked her “if she was doing okay mentally” because “it seemed as if Sonya’s mind was all over the place and not able to focus or have a conversation.”
Grayson repeatedly asked for her name or identification, and Massey instead said she wanted to show him some paperwork. Massey asked Grayson to hand her a Bible as she searched through her belongings.. “Just a driver’s license will do and I’ll get out of your hair,” Grayson chuckled.. Responded Massey: “I want to show you all my paperwork… I got some paperwork.” . As she dug through her purse, Grayson pointed out the pot of boiling water on the stove and Massey hurried over to grab it.
For a moment, body camera footage shows the group seemed to joke about Grayson’s partner moving away from the “hot, steaming water.” . Then as Massey picked up the pot, she said the words Grayson claims made him fear for his life: "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus." . Dropping his hand to his gun, Grayson shouted back, “you better f------ not or I swear to God I will shoot you right in the f------ face.”
Some critics of the sheriff's office say the rush to fire and prosecute Grayson risks allowing the law enforcement and area political leaders to avoid accountability for systemic failures in hiring, training and operations.
The fact that Grayson moved between so many agencies in quick succession should have given Sangamon County pause, said Brian Higgins, a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former police chief in Bergen County, New Jersey.
“Moving from police department to police department is not the norm, and it is usually a reason for you to dig deeper,” said Higgins.
He said it’s often easier to simply ask an officer to quit than to follow the formal process to fire them: “If you have a cop who’s really a bad egg, someone you want off the job, you make a deal: ‘We won’t put anything negative on your background, but just leave,’” Higgins said.
Grayson’s DUIs and non-honorable discharge also should have been red flags, Higgins said. He said about 60% of the officers he hired as chief were veterans but he never considered hiring anyone with anything less than an honorable discharge.
The records don’t say exactly why Grayson was discharged. The paperwork noted the reason was “misconduct (serious offense).”
His first DUI came in August 2015, six months before he was discharged, though military experts were skeptical that a DUI he got in Illinois hundreds of miles from Fort Riley where he was stationed in Kansas would be cause for discharge.
Grayson’s stint in the Army lasted from May 2014 to February 2016, a 21-month total that would be the longest he ever held a job aside from his position at the Zone, a gym in Illinois where he worked for three years.
His second DUI came in July 2016 in Girard, Illinois, according to court documents.
Higgins said based on what he's seen about Grayson, the sheriff's office should never have hired him. But he said the departments Grayson used to work for also bear some responsibility: "It falls on them too," he said. "If there’s somebody bad enough you don’t want to employ them, why do you let them loose out on the world?"
Marc Ayers, who sits on the 29-member Sangamon County governing board, said the sheriff’s office has trouble retaining deputies because they often leave for better-paying agencies like the Springfield Police Department, where the starting salary is tens of thousands of dollars higher.
“The attrition rate is really high because we cannot pay these deputies the same amount,” said Ayers, a Democrat. “That is a problem that is leading to these awful hires.”
While Campbell said he was unaware of the red flags in Grayson’s past, the young officer came highly recommended by Scott Butterfield, a decorated former sheriff's deputy close to Campbell. "Mr. Butterfield describes Mr. Grayson as a mellow, non-confrontational person who has good communication skills," a Sangamon County background investigator relayed.
Butterfield is also the father of Grayson’s live-in girlfriend.
“The good ole boys club is alive and well in Sangamon County,” Ayers said. “That seems to get more attention than their background, and that is wrong and that needs to change.”
He added: “If our community can’t trust the department and trust they can call law enforcement for help, that’s a big problem.”
According to the group Mapping Police Violence, law enforcement officers have killed 739 people in 2024, putting the year on track to be the deadliest since the nonprofit that catalogs deaths at the hands of officers began in 2013.. Officers killed 1,247 people in 2023 - the current record - and 1,203 people in 2022, the previous record, according to the nonprofit.. More and more of the killings are also coming at the hands of sheriff's department officers, according to data from the nonprofit. In 2013, sheriff's department officers nationally accounted for 26% of all deaths; in 2022, they accounted for 31%.. The number of convictions is vanishingly small, according to Mapping Police Violence. Less than 2% of killings by police result in an officer being charged and 1% result in an officer being convicted..
Like other experts, Robinson said the rush to blame Grayson risks allowing local officials to avoid responsibility for creating and perpetuating the system that hired him.
"Giving people a gun, badge and authority and sending them off is part of the problem here. To place this all on an individual is a way to avoid talking the larger power structures that make all of this possible," Robinson said. "As long as the public feels like they can turn away, as long as politicians feel like they don't have to answer questions about it, as long as police departments are able to use taxpayer dollars to pay off civil penalties, this will continue to happen."
|
|