The police killing of Sonya Massey, the 36-year-old Black woman who was shot in the face by a white sheriff’s deputy in her own home after she called for help reporting a prowler, is just the latest episode of the hellish TV show that is Black life in America.
And if you’ve been paying attention, the script is often the same: person calls cops for help, cops go into their house, cops shoot them, cops lie about what happened, cops get off (relatively) scot-free.
As we all grapple with the weight of multiple continuing global tragedies and the media’s waning attention to police brutality, Massey’s death is a bleak reminder that Black people are still being hunted like prey in their own homes.
“When we call for help, all of us as Americans – regardless of who we are or where we live – should be able to do so without fearing for our lives,” Joe Biden, the president, said in his statement condemning the killing. It’s a sentiment that is obvious; yet being killed by the people who are supposed to protect you – and often when you call them to do just that – remains par for the course for African Americans.
Weeks after Massey was killed, we’ve now come to the part of the story where video of the shooting is being shared and reshared on a loop, with her terrified final moments serving as “proof” that she didn’t deserve to be murdered in her own home.
Still, as traumatizing and ghoulish as it is, bearing witness in this way has become necessary because not only did authorities execute Massey in the place she should have felt safest, they were evil enough to allegedly lie about it afterward. In police audio obtained by the Guardian, someone at the scene of the shooting – presumably a deputy – can be heard describing Massey’s wound as “self-inflicted”. When a dispatcher asks for confirmation of this, the person on scene repeats her injury was “self-inflicted”.
Massey’s family also maintain that they were given misleading information by police when she was taken to hospital, and at a press conference last Tuesday they said that police initially told them she had either killed herself or was killed by an intruder.
Both Biden and Kamala Harris have condemned the senseless killing. Trump, unsurprisingly, hasn’t said a word.
In her statement, Harris renewed calls for Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill she co-authored while in the US Senate. Described as “a bold, comprehensive approach to hold police accountable”, Harris and its co-authors claim the new legislation would make it easier for the federal government to prosecute police misconduct cases, would end racial and religious profiling and would eliminate qualified immunity for law enforcement.
I’m not sure how the bill would be able to profoundly reshape the hearts and minds of people who have been socialized and trained to regard Black and brown people as inhuman, but the legislation would also ban the use of the same chokeholds and no-knock warrants that allowed for the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner, at the federal level.
The American government’s commitment to keeping policing intact is yet another achingly familiar plot point in the never-ending story of the struggle for Black liberation. Talking about police brutality like it’s the inevitable consequence of a necessary-but-broken system – and not the product of carefully crafted structures built to reinforce the ongoing subjugation of racialized people – is probably the most tired trope of the wretched Groundhog Day-style horror that Black Americans have been forced to live in. And now, breathless calls for justice and reform – even when they come from the highest office in the land – feel stale and hollow.
In the coming days, weeks and maybe even months, you’re going to hear that Massey deserved justice. But tempting as it is to reach for any kind of recourse in the face of a tragedy like this, it needs to be said that Massey doesn’t deserve this kind of justice – especially not America’s version of it. Because what that looks like is maybe a prosecution of the cop who killed her, and maybe some monetary compensation for the family who will never see her again; but none of that will bring Massey back, nor will it heal the loved ones she left behind.
What she actually deserved was to be safe, to be alive and to have people she could call for help, who wouldn’t show up and kill her.
Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist
