The recent shooting death of Sonya Massey in Springfield, Ill., by a sheriff’s deputy embodies this tragic systemic failure. Massey called 911, reporting she thought there was a prowler near her house. From the beginning of the interaction, the two officers appeared to recognize that she was not fully lucid. Whether in a mental or emotional crisis or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, it should not have mattered. There was no aggression or threat from her. The officers had room to retreat. There was time to talk. But they used no de-escalation, no calming, no patience. As the horrible video shows, Deputy Sean Grayson treated someone in crisis as a threat. He upped the tension and the aggression, then fired not because Massey attacked or even threatened to attack, but because she did not immediately comply with his threats.
Too many interactions become dangerous explicitly due to responders’ unilateral demand for immediate compliance and submission. What if the person does not speak English? Has a brain injury? Is hypoxic or hypoglycemic or in shock? Is under the influence of narcotics? What if it’s my father with Alzheimer’s or someone on the autism spectrum? I have responded to many people with each of these conditions and none of them were lucid or immediately compliant. None of them were deliberately a threat, either. Yelling orders at an incoherent person is a flawed, futile approach. Putting our hands on them — for “safety” and “control” — seldom calms a person in crisis. We escalate and then treat their response as aggression, rather than something we have caused.
There can be a racial component to these situations too, which for too long has been ignored or denied. There can be an immediate and reactive perception of “threat” when responders encounter a nonwhite person. It may be unconscious bias, but the consequences have been deadly. For decades, the excessive mistreatment of Black people by police was concealed by excited delirium and the problematic claim that Black people had a specific medical deficiency that caused sudden deaths — not that police officers escalated the violence. The fact/truth is, the aggression and force by police toward people of different races is not proportionate or equal; more violence is directed against people of color than white people. Sonya Massey is the most recent addition to the long and tragic list of people of color killed by police officers. George Floyd was one as well; he was not even the first I personally responded to. Both Massey and Floyd were clearly in crisis, yet they were treated only as threats.
Paramedics and firefighters/EMTs encounter a vast array of messy humanity in our work. We do not have guns or Tasers. We get skilled at reading a person and recognizing when they are incoherent or in crisis. By not escalating and not conflating altered mental status with deliberate resistance, we limit the situations that go sideways, that go deadly. Many police officers are also great at this.
Those who aren’t pose significant unreasonable risks to the public. It is not enough to blame an individual officer after the fact without demanding true structural reform. It is not enough to strike the flawed terminology from trainings and the post mortems. These are systemic and cultural issues. Comprehensive training and genuine reconsideration of approaches must be instituted. We continue not to learn from each singular extralegal killing. The litany of the dead attests to this.
