The shooting death of Sonya Massey by former Sangamon County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Grayson was a tragedy that could have been avoided with better and more thorough hiring practices by the sheriff’s department.
Grayson, who fatally shot 36-year-old Massey in her Springfield home in a near-inexplicable police interaction horrifyingly captured on Grayson’s partner’s bodycam, now stands charged with first-degree murder, among other counts. He has said he feared for his safety when he and his partner responded to Massey’s call for help in the early morning hours of July 6, since Massey was holding a pot of boiling water and he was concerned she would fling the water at the officers. Whatever a jury ultimately decides, most who’ve seen the video have concluded that the shooting was unnecessary at the very least. That Grayson is white and Massey was Black raises racial discrimination questions that we face all too often in violent police interactions with the public.
The charges rapidly brought against Grayson no doubt helped keep the public outrage from being expressed violently on the streets, as has been the case with some past police shootings. But the after-the-fact finger-pointing by many, including Gov. J.B. Pritzker, has obscured the practical lesson that police departments around the state — indeed around the nation — can and should take from this brutal event.
The Sangamon County sheriff’s office is far from the only department struggling to recruit officers and thus prone to making poor hires. With policing under more public pressure and scrutiny than any time we can remember, particularly in diverse, Democratic Party-controlled states like ours, the profession clearly isn’t nearly as enticing as it used to be, even with early retirement, good salaries and generous pensions on offer. The Chicago Police Department, for one, is short about 2,000 officers.
The temptation for these departments, then, is to skimp on the background checks and vetting that are necessary to weed out the unsuitable but can hamper recruiting. There were plenty of red flags available on Grayson, including a 2015 citation for driving under the influence and a record of working for five different police forces in the three years before Sangamon hired him in May 2023. At a bare minimum, an applicant bouncing around that many departments in such a short period of time ought to compel a police chief interested in hiring him to call the chiefs of those other departments for an honest assessment rather than relying on applicant-provided references.
The public has an interest in fully staffed police departments. But there’s an even greater public interest in taking every step possible to ensure those on the force are truly qualified and well trained. Better to be undermanned than to run the risk of employing officers prone to losing their cool in tense moments, flaws that carry with them potentially fatal consequences. Sonya Massey’s tragic death is a cautionary tale for police chiefs everywhere.
That brings us to the matter of the police chief in this case, Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell. Campbell has defended the process he undertook when hiring Grayson, saying he followed normal procedures, but has allowed there are changes he’ll make going forward.
“My standard is now that ‘I want you to figure out a way not to hire this person,’” Campbell told Illinois Public Media News. By that, we took him to mean that every applicant will be scrutinized as thoroughly as possible. If that’s what he meant, we agree.
Campbell’s explanations haven’t been good enough so far, though, for Pritzker and the Sangamon County Democratic Party. Both have called for the Republican sheriff to resign.
In addition to finding Campbell’s rationale for hiring Grayson to be unconvincing, Pritzker criticized the sheriff for failing to meet with Massey’s family, something Campbell said he’s tried to do. Clad in a bright yellow shirt as he unveiled the traditional butter cow at the state fair on Wednesday, the governor spent more than 15 minutes explaining why he thought Campbell had to go. It was an odd setting to talk on such a serious subject, but kudos to Pritzker for making himself available to reporters despite the backdrop. Thus far, Campbell, who isn’t up for reelection until 2026, has rebuffed the calls to step down.
It’s relatively easy, of course, for the Democratic governor to castigate a Republican sheriff in a case that has garnered national headlines and reflects poorly on the state. It wasn’t hard to detect the whiff of politics in the harsh criticism of a GOP officeholder by a governor with national aspirations (and demonstrated prospects) who needs to appear as tough as possible responding to a horrific police shooting within the state’s capital city.
We’d be a bit less cynical had Pritzker, for example, been as critical when his appointees to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board failed so starkly earlier this year to keep convicted domestic abuser Crosetti Brand behind bars, freeing him (despite numerous red flags) to allegedly kill the 11-year-old son of an ex-girlfriend as she was attacked as well and badly injured. Pritzker asked two of those appointees, including the board chair, to resign. But when it came to his own appointees, who failed every bit as badly as Campbell did with similarly fatal consequences, the governor publicly expressed nothing like the outrage he leveled at the sheriff.
Sangamon County is dominated by Republicans at the local level. To date, as far as we’ve seen, no local GOPers have called on Campbell to leave.
If Campbell resigned over this tragic lapse, that would be an appropriate acceptance of responsibility. But he’s an elected official answerable to the voters of the county, not Gov. Pritzker. If he chooses to stick to the path of attempting to improve the office’s personnel management and regaining the public trust as he runs again, the voters of that county will be able to decide two years from now on his ongoing suitability.
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