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”.
Are body cams really providing justice? Where is Sonya’s justice? Hailing body cams as the ultimate police reform is the type of thing I’d expect a cop to say. For people who have been experiencing this racist police violence for generations, it’s clear that body cams are at best a half measure, and at worst a means of documenting all of the brutal murders that pigs continue to carry out on innocent people while body cams are running. The answer isn’t in body cams, but in comprehensive police reform. So long as the pigs are running around with sus norse tattoos, toxic masculinity (“nah im good” -cop who just developed a tremor in has hand after holding in the brains of a gasping woman for 5 min), guaranteed firearms, no psychological training, gang support via departments, body cams aren’t really going to do shit to protect at-risk people.
I am very critical of this ultra pro body cam discourse. It seems like a distraction. Make no mistake, there is no justice today because of the body cams present for Sonya’s execution.
I suppose the definition of justice is flexible, between preventative justice and restorative justice and so on, but in this case I am referring specifically to holding guilty people accountable for their actions. There will be no making right what happened here, not by any stretch of the imagination, and there is still a lot more work that needs to be done to make sure this sort of thing never happens again. But while I am sure it is of little consolation to Sonya’s family, her murderer is going to prison.
I know there are long-standing charicatures in media of the “corrupt cop” type of character shooting some innocent person and then planting a knife or drugs on them to make it look like self-defense, but that wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t some grain of truth to it.
With the body cam footage that had been released, there is no question of his guilt. There’s no way for the police to cover this up by painting another innocent victim as a criminal, dragging her name through the mud, just to keep this racist scumbag on payroll and free to keep terrorizing the people he’s supposed to protect. The racists don’t have to gather in droves to protect this monster and put a community through hell to further some disgusting agenda or another.
It doesn’t fill the void, but it is some degree of justice which is better than none.