What else can we do?
Today Justin Glawe reports from Springfield, Illinois after the release of bodycam footage showing police murdering a woman named Sonya Massey in cold blood in her own home. It is one of the worst such killings we have seen in a long time. So bad in fact that the cop in question was arrested and charged with murder which as you know is exceedingly rare.
A reminder from a few months back:
At least 1,232 people were killed by police in the U.S. in 2023 according to the research group Mapping Police Violence. That is an increase of 30 from 2022 and represents the highest number of killings in a decade. It breaks down to roughly three people killed by police per day. In fact there were only twenty days in the entire year in which someone wasn't killed by police.
"Black people were 26% of those killed by police in 2022 despite being only 13% of the population," they note.
Only 1 in 3 of those killings were set into motion by police reporting to a violent crime they found. The vast majority resulted from non-violent crimes or traffic stops and mental health checks.
A third of the killings were while the person was trying to flee.
Here's another stat they reported you might not find surprising:
Previously Glawe wrote about a movement of Trump-worshipping election-denier conspiracy theorists in Georgia.
After that some brief thoughts on the big news of the week plus – for paid subscribers – a few new short stories by me which you can jump to directly here:
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The most heartless, the most shocking and callous I’ve ever seen
by Justin Glawe
The white cop with the skull tattoos on his arm shot the unarmed Black woman in the face at point-blank range then told his partner not to bother trying to help her, she’s already gone. Then he walked outside and told his radio dispatcher that the woman had killed herself. Police then told her family the same lie, which is all they knew until attorneys got involved and the local press started digging.
This is as near to the true version of events as I can gather after a day and a half in Springfield, Illinois, where authorities yesterday released bodycam footage of Deputy Sean Grayson killing 36 year old Sonya Massey. How deep the initial cover up went isn’t currently known to the public, but Grayson has since been charged with first-degree murder in Massey’s killing — an exceedingly rare thing in this country when a police officer kills someone.
At a press conference on Monday afternoon at Springfield’s NAACP headquarters — an organization founded after race riots ravaged the city in 1908, claiming 17 Black lives, including a distant relative of Massey herself — Massey’s family revealed that police initially told them their loved one had killed herself. Indeed, police radio traffic I obtained shows someone, presumably Grayson, when he leaves the house to grab medical equipment, saying Massey’s wound was “self-inflicted” and asking dispatch if the call had been recorded as a 10-76 — code for a psychiatric emergency.
The implication is clear: Grayson planned to portray Massey as a crazed threat who he had to defend himself from. Luckily, just barely, Grayson’s partner had turned on his body camera which shows the complete opposite.
The two deputies were called to Massey’s house early on the morning of July 6 because Massey thought someone was trying to break in. When Grayson and his partner arrived they searched outside the house and shone their flashlights inside. Once in the living room, the pair can be seen talking to Massey for 10 minutes or so before Grayson tells her to turn off a pot on the stove filled with boiling water.
She does, pulling the pot from the stove on the other side of a counter from Grayson as he and his partner move back a few steps. She laughs and asks why they’re moving. Grayson says he’s getting farther away from the “pot of steaming water.”
“Away from the hot steaming water? Oh, I’ll rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” Massey says, most likely a baptism joke. That’s when Grayson pulls out his gun.“You better fucking not, I swear to God I’ll fucking shoot you right in your fucking face,” he yells.
She says she’s sorry and begins to kneel. Again he demands she put the pot down and she says she’s sorry again. Then three shots. “Fuck!” Grayson says, then goes into action, thinking of ways to protect himself from what he had done.
He complains about how close she was with the pot of water. Now it’s touching his shoe, he notes. We should get the medical kit, Grayson’s partner says. What’s the point? he replies. “That’s a head shot. She’s gone.”
But she wasn’t. Massey was gurgling and gasping for air as the other officer began applying pressure to a bullet wound in her eye with a kitchen towel. Grayson went outside to get the medical kit.
This is apparently when he told a dispatcher the wound was self-inflicted.
When other deputies arrived they asked where the gun was. Grayson says there was no gun, but adds “she came at me with boiling water. She said she was going to rebuke me in the name of Jesus and came at me with boiling water.”
Massey never came toward Grayson.
For 10 years I have been driving and flying into cities where police have just killed a Black person, and it’s always as awful and heartbreaking as you might imagine. Springfield felt a bit different for me this time because it’s only an hour away from my hometown of Peoria, where my parents still live. It isn’t Baltimore or Charlotte or hilly Cincinnati, where I dropped in to cover the killings of Freddie Gray, Keith Lamont Scott and Samuel DuBose. Frankly, ever since I began covering police violence back in 2014 in Ferguson, I’ve always thought that it was only a matter of time before I ended up reporting on a bad police shooting in Peoria.
The city of Springfield is not much different: it’s an economically depressed rust belt town with about a 70/20 white to Black population compared to Peoria’s 60/30, and the Black part of town is one of the oldest and least cared for. In both places, what are called “best” homes — post-war, manufactured, one-story shoeboxes that all look mostly the same with the exception of window dressing — line streets that were once well-paved and where the American dream was once in reach thanks to good-paying manufacturing jobs. Now, most of those jobs are gone but the best homes remain, rented out for cheap and often falling apart.
The big difference between Peoria and Springfield is that in the latter, you can turn the corner on a crumbling street and see the shining dome of the state capitol.
Throughout all this madness over the last decade I have seen, read about, and reported on a lot of police killings, but this one is the worst, the dumbest, the most heartless, the most shocking and callous I’ve ever seen. Grayson — over six feet, 200-something pounds — was on the other side of a counter from a woman who weighed about half what he does.
“What else can we do?” Grayson asked his partner after killing Massey. “I’m not taking hot boiling water to the face.”
Nevermind, for a second, that Massey at no point appears to threaten Grayson with the water, and think about that statement. Think about all the Blue Lives Matter and Don’t Tread on Me flags you see around the country, flown by men who look a lot like Grayson. Think about what those people say — how they’re tough, how they’re patriots, how they’re badasses who aren’t afraid of anything — and now imagine them all freaking out over a 100-pound unarmed woman with a small pot of boiling water at least five feet away.
That’s one way to think about this — that men like Grayson, men who become cops to act tough and push people around — are actually just cowards. The other way to think about it is that Grayson is simply a racist with complete disregard for the sanctity of Black life.
Attorney Ben Crump said nearly as much on Monday with Massey’s family standing behind him. “Black women aren’t given the respect and consideration” that they deserve he told a small gathering of local press. I couldn’t help but note that as he was saying this the entire national political media apparatus was going bananas over the massive fundraising haul pulled off by Kamala Harris, the first Black female presidential candidate since Carol Moseley Braun, who like Massey is also from Illinois.
Massey’s killing cannot be disentangled from the national political climate, especially as the prospect of another, likely more draconian Trump administration looms. (Not that things have been much better under Biden. 1,232 people were killed by police in 2023). This is what the beginning of authoritarianism feels like. How quickly our rights, and our lives, especially those of the traditionally disenfranchised can be taken away.
Massey’s own father apparently feels that way, too. Yesterday he said that he now thinks God helped him survive a recent major heart procedure for a purpose.
“Maybe it was to tell this whole country that in order to honor my daughter, we must pass the George Floyd Act, we must pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act," James Wilburn said.
However you think of Massey’s killing, men like Grayson reflect a significant portion of this country — supposedly tough, big guys who are the exact type of people Donald Trump talks about when he says he wants to preserve law and order. That is, of course, code for punishing non-white Americans for crimes real and perceived, and if you don’t believe me just give it a couple weeks or maybe even days and see what the dregs of the American right start saying on the internet about Sonya Massey.
I remember walking through an airport in May 2020 on my way to Minneapolis. Even white people who I’d never expect were talking about George Floyd’s killing with disgust and anger. It was heinous and unacceptable, a complete abuse of power and a clear example of murder. Everyone agreed. Until they didn’t.
Now, like so many things in this increasingly doomed country, Floyd is a Rorschach test for one’s political beliefs. If you are on the left you believe he was murdered (which is correct). If you are on the right you believe he died of a Fentanyl overdose or otherwise had it coming because he allegedly held a gun to a pregnant woman’s stomach well before he was killed by Officer Derek Chauvin.
Maybe Massey’s killing will be different. Maybe the American right won’t be able to twist this one into another example of the War on Police. But I bet they’ll find a way — that pot of water, for instance, could have really hurt poor Grayson. Maybe they’ll find a way to blame her for her own death. To rebuke her in the name of America.
Justin Glawe is a writer and journalist who writes the newsletter American Doom, where he covers election deniers, right wing extremism and other threats to democracy. He has covered police shootings since Ferguson.
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Anything big happen since we last spoke?
I have nothing new or interesting to add on the matter so I'll just repeat myself briefly from the last few Hell Worlds.
"No one should have to think about who the president is and/or who the president is going to be every single day of their lives like this."
I stand by that sentiment.
"I do not want Donald Trump to be president.... The thing is because I really do not want Donald Trump to become president I want...someone who I think can beat him soundly."
I'm starting to think she can do it. That dude fucking sucks so bad and everyone is sick of his shit.
"Now I don't know anything but it remains my position that replacing Biden with Kamala or any single Democrat JAG would bring with it a huge surge of voter enthusiasm. Just any sign that they're aware of the moment and ready to fight. Donald Trump having micro-dosed getting assassinated does not change the fact that he represents a grave threat to the future of this country."
That seems to have been proven very true. Also the part in there about how he got shot and everyone just sort of shrugged and moved on.
"I've had this confusing feeling for the past day or two. Am I actually gassing myself up with excitement over the idea of Kamala Harris stepping in for Biden? That can't be right. Then a couple hours ago I realized what I was actually experiencing was a moment of hope that the Democrats might actually take drastic measures to do something outside of How Things Are Typically Done for once in my fucking life. Imagine that? Trying their damndest to win power and then wield that power instead of losing by the rulebook. What a high!"
I felt that high the day he dropped out. Huh. They might actually try to win this thing.
Ok here's some short fiction. You'll have to pay to read all of it. Good bye.
The vacuum
I sat out in one of the heavy beach blue beach chairs it took us forever to assemble that one perfect frustrating day when we loved each other and watched the trees not move at all like the TV screen when it freezes for hours of late and waited for their summer browning and deathly still leaves to waver an inch. At least some sign of movement. Putting your ear to an injured person’s chest. No idea in this case how to perform CPR on trees and all of everything.
Sitting in this very spot this very rough hour two rough summers ago so many different types of insects would have been crawling over and onto and into me that I could have convinced myself I was lost in a bad trip from my youth with ease but then just like that I would have snapped to and remembered what the outside is. Or used to be. The old bug-winded outside.
It was sort of a last call deal for them it turned out. These bugs. Today my ankles and forearms unbitten. My God you can miss anything when it’s gone. Any fucking thing. You remember this. Beach burned and heat drowsy scraping the unclipped talons of one foot against the red welts on the back of the other in a sweating bed.
You were inside cooking sausages and onions I couldn’t smell even with the windows open. Not real sausages. Not real onions. For our health you lied to me. For morale. With nothing possible to gain from the effort besides more of us and more of this.
Yesterday you disassembled our ancient vacuum. Piece by piece. To figure out if it was worth saving. Cleaned every plastic purple part of it. I thought of a Marine breaking down his rifle.