Sonya Massey’s Killing Shows the Danger Police Pose to Black Disabled People

Sonya Massey’s last words before a Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office deputy shot and killed her in her Springfield, Illinois, home earlier this month were, “I’m sorry.”

The 36-minute body camera footage released Monday depicting her July 6 killing showed her interaction with the officers she called for help began calmly enough. At times, it even appeared to veer into light-hearted conversation as they responded to her 1 a.m. local time report of a possible home invasion. But the tone changed suddenly just under 15 minutes into the exchange after the 36-year-old Black woman went to remove a pot of boiling water from her stove at the direction of Deputy Sean Grayson, who informed her with a laugh as she did so that he was distancing himself to get away “from your steaming hot water.”

“Away from the hot steaming water? Oh, I’ll rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” she replied with a seemingly playful tone before repeating the phrase more neutrally in response to the officer’s confusion.

“You better f**king not or I swear to God I’ll f**king shoot you in the f**king face,” Grayson said suddenly, drawing his firearm.

Massey crouched behind the counter with her hands raised. She apologized, though nothing she had done up to this point appeared to warrant one. Still, it didn’t matter. Within seconds, Grayson fired three shots, striking her just under the eye. He’d go on to make clear to his colleagues he believed he’d opened fire on an imminent threat, call her a crazy “f***ing b***ch” and reject the other deputy’s attempt to render aid to Massey because “she’s done.”

“From looking at the bodycam footage, it’s clear that the space is not a space of distress in the sense that it’s somebody’s home. The pace and everything about the video that I saw did not seem that the police officer was under distress, either,” said Christen Smith, a professor of anthropology and African American studies at Yale whose research focuses on gendered anti-Black state violence. “It just seems to me that the threat that was perceived was simply the threat of a Black woman and not anything else, and that’s something that we need to really think about.”

In a press conference Monday, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Massey’s family, said that she had previously experienced mental health challenges but did not show any aggression. Massey’s family also confirmed she had previously been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, according to The Guardian. “She needed a helping hand,” Crump said. “She didn’t need a bullet to the face.”

Just as her family and community mourn their loss and Americans decry the brutality she faced with cries of “Say Her Name,” Massey’s killing underscores the disproportionate amount of police violence that Black people and disabled people face in the United States — and the reality that Black disabled Americans, like Massey, bear the brunt of it.

According to the Washington Post’s database on deadly police shootings, Black Americans are shot at a rate disproportionate to the size of their population in the U.S., which amounts to just 14 percent, and are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.

Outcomes for disabled people were similarly gruesome. A 2015 Ruderman Foundation report estimated that one-third to half of police use-of-force incidents involved a person with a disability, while according to the Center for American Progress, 50 percent of people killed by law enforcement are disabled.

Though empirical data on the outcomes of police interactions with individuals who are both Black and disabled is sparse, the disproportionately high rates of negative outcomes for people in either group suggest it would be high for those who occupy both, Lily Robin, a senior research associate in the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center who uses she/they pronouns, told Salon.

“It’s important to just recognize that individual and systemic racism and ableism are really the drivers there,” they said, adding that the negative outcomes for Black disabled Americans are “not just because Black people with disabilities belong to both groups that are disproportionately targeted by police violence, but also because there’s an experience of unique racism and ableism interacting in ways that we don’t, as a society, always recognize.”

Unconscious bias and officer training are two of the factors contributing to law enforcement’s more frequent killings of Black Americans, explained Susan Nembhard, who is also a senior research associate for UI’s Justice Policy Center. Those determinants also work together because the racism “woven into a lot of our institutions,” combined with the “history of dehumanization and violent stereotypes” of Black people, can inform the officers’ perspective and approach.

“When officers are trained to use deadly force in response to fearing for their lives, that subconscious bias can really end up being a mediator for how police violence for Black people and other minorities or other marginalized groups are impacted,” she told Salon, describing police violence as a “public health crisis.”

For disabled people, Robin added, officers’ lack of training on recognizing various disabilities and responding to people with disabilities, and reliance on “command and control” tactics for noncompliance contribute to their poor interaction outcomes with police.

Those issues compound for Black people with disabilities, whose disability, Robin said, society often neglects to consider in the first place due to their race. In encounters with police, they face a higher risk of arrest — with disabled Black Americans having double the risk of being arrested by age 28 compared to their white disabled counterparts —experiencing other forms of mental or physical harm and death.

Racism in healthcare and the education system can also play a role because it can lead to a misdiagnosis of disability and under-diagnosis of disability in Black communities, which in turn impacts access to quality treatment and services, she explained.

“In our society, disability is completely stigmatized, and the compounding of the stigma of disability alongside the compounding stigma of Blackness makes it so that Black disabled people are particularly seen as problematic in the eyes of the state and a threat because, for whatever reason, Black disabled bodies are really marked as grotesque,” Smith told Salon, pointing to the 1984 New York City police shooting of Eleanor Bumpurs.

Police shot and killed Bumpurs, an elderly Black woman with a mental health history who officers had been informed days prior had been experiencing a mental health crisis, with a shotgun after she wielded a knife against them during their blundered attempt to evict her from her apartment. According to The New York Times, her death sparked outrage and prompted the then-police commissioner to revise official guidelines for interacting with who they referred to as “emotionally disturbed people.”

In 2016, the fatal police shooting of Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old Black woman who had schizophrenia and whom police had been called to aid previously, became a harrowing callback to Bumpurs’ killing. She, too, had been shot in a confrontation with police after a neighbor called 911 to report she had been acting erratically.

The swath of other Black disabled victims of police violence — among them Eric Garner, who had asthma, diabetes and a heart condition; Freddie Gray, who had been diagnosed with ADHD and had lead-poisoning as a child; Tanisha Anderson, a 37-year-old Black woman with bipolar disorder and heart disease who died while being restrained by police amid a mental health crisis; and George Floyd, who had a heart condition, hypertension and the sickle cell trait — further illustrate what Smith highlighted as the “irony” that the vulnerability that comes with disability is “exactly what puts you in a position to be killed more often.”

“Disability comes in so many different forms that are visible and invisible, and yet there’s a consistency with the way that Black disabled people are treated and killed by the police, no matter what kind of disability you have,” Smith said. “So to say that, ‘Oh, it’s because somebody’s making a brisk movement because they have [Tourette Syndrome]’ or, ‘Oh, they’re having a psychiatric crisis because they have bipolar disorder,’ is to skip over the fact that, no matter what kind of disability people have, whether it be one that make them immobile or one that makes them create brisk movements, we’re always seen as a threat.”

In Massey’s case, she argued, Grayson’s behavior and reference to her as a crazy “f***ing b***ch” demonstrated “he’s not perceiving her as a human being” in the moment but rather treating her and shooting her “like an animal in the literal sense. And I think that we have to consider the ways that disability is a marker of disposability in our society. We absolutely cannot discard that; Blackness and disability are markers of disposability in our society.”

Christy Lopez, a former deputy chief in the special litigation section of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told Salon that Massey’s killing “really underscores the need for a non-police response,” like a mental health team or other unarmed alternative first responders who can be called to “come in and take over” should officers belatedly find themselves responding to a possible psychiatric crisis.

The background of the deputy who killed Massey also presented a “huge red flag” that should have disqualified him from getting the job at the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office to begin with, suggested Lopez, who is also a professor from practice at Georgetown University Law School. Grayson had previously pleaded guilty to two DUI charges, been discharged from the Army for “serious misconduct” and bounced between six different law enforcement jobs over the course of four years before his latest role, according to HuffPost.

Grayson’s hiring appears “possibly reflective of a downgrade in standards,” which raises questions around who else the sheriff’s office has hired, Lopez said, noting that constant pushes to hire more police often lead to the “types of hires that are consistent with the facts we know here.”

“Any police department should take this as a wake up call, making sure that they don’t have a person like this,” she said. “Not only are you saving the Sonia Massey’s from police officers like this, but you’re saving police officers from themselves”.

“To shoot someone like that because you’re afraid of getting water on you, no matter how hot it is, to me, indicates that there’s a certain amount of dehumanization or othering going on, and [Grayson’s] language reinforces that belief,” Lopez added. “She’s a ‘f***ing b***ch,’ she’s ‘crazy,’ not someone who’s deserving of the same dignity and safety as other people like that — to me, that [language is] very much consistent with that.”

Grayson was fired and charged on July 17 with three counts of first degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct. A judge ordered he be held without bond pending the start of his trial on Aug. 26 because his actions demonstrated “such a departure from the expectations of a civil society,” according to The Associated Press.

Though such consequences are still uncommon for an officer to face, Lopez said those kind of repercussions were much less common 10 to 20 years ago, showing some form of improvements in accountability.

“The only reason that we really know about this incident is because at least one of those officers turned on their bodycam,” she said. “Ten years ago that didn’t happen. There weren’t bodycams. Officers were getting away without turning them on. The officer would have written their report. It might have been a lie. Even if it was truthful, it wouldn’t have the same resonance. We wouldn’t know about this incident. And this officer was charged, criminally charged. That didn’t used to happen even for shootings like this.”

The other officer’s attempt to administer aid to Massey after the shooting — in contrast with Grayson’s comment about not wasting his med kit — also reflected an improvement in police response that would have been scarce a decade or two ago, she explained. Still, those “small comforts” don’t change the fact that Grayson should have never opened fire on Massey to begin with.

“We know we aren’t really investing in and caring enough about preventing these sorts of incidents to do what we know will prevent them, the kinds of hiring decisions, the kinds of firing decisions, the kinds of training decisions, as well as the kind of alternative first response decisions that will prevent anyone else from having to die like Sonya Massey did,” Lopez said. “We should be beyond that.”