Police killing of Sonya Massey argues for alternatives to reform

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On July 6, Sonya Massey called 911 to report an intruder. After Sean Grayson, a sheriff’s deputy, and another officer found no intruder outside of her home in Sangamon County, Ill., they knocked on her door. The situation escalated after Massey went to turn off her stove. Within seconds Grayson drew his gun and shot her in the head.

The death of George Floyd in 2020 drew public outrage and calls for a wide variety of police reforms. There still a lot we don’t know about the Massey situation, including if she was experiencing mental distress. But the killing of Massey is a cold reminder of how little has changed in the years since.

It’s true that there have been piecemeal reforms at the state and local level. But at the federal level, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was unable to get past partisan gridlock in the Senate — and, in any case, many experts agree that the act would not do enough to reduce rates of police violence in the United States.

Amid a stalled federal legislative agenda, arguably the most significant development since 2020, is what appears to be a newfound willingness to prosecute officers who use unjustifiable deadly force. Between 2016 and 2019, only 43 police officers were charged with murder or manslaughter related to an on-duty shooting. From 2020 to 2023, more than 70 officers were charged. And yet, more than 1,100 people were shot and killed by police officers last year — the highest one-year number on record.

Grayson was fired and charged with first-degree murder, but that is unlikely to reduce rates of police violence. Such violence often arises because we ask the police to serve in an impossibly wide range of roles, many of which they aren’t well-suited for.

Police officers are charged with too wide a range of duties: from monitoring the status of your vehicle headlights to clearing homeless encampments and maintaining youth curfews. All of this amounts to tens of millions of U.S. residents having at least one contact with police officers each year. If we want more effective law enforcement and fewer police abuses, we need to start seriously investing in the programs across the country that have shown promise at taking work off the plate of law enforcement.

About 20% of police killings involve someone in mental distress. To meet the needs of residents experiencing issues like homelessness, addiction and behavioral health crises, cities like Albuquerque, Durham, N.C., and Denver have launched alternative response programs, in which unarmed civilians, instead of armed officers, are being dispatched to respond to thousands of calls for service.

Before launching these programs, both the police and the general public often expressed concern that unarmed responders will be hurt on the job, most likely by someone experiencing a mental health crisis. But in the past few years, no crisis teams in any of these places have had any known major injuries while on the job and people in need are getting more tailored responses for help.

These programs are a political winner; most police officers surely didn’t sign up for the job to arrest someone for sleeping in a Starbucks bathroom, and police chiefs have expressed enthusiasm about a reduction in the number of calls on their dashboard.

Many programs have started in recent years, perhaps the most enduring legacy of the George Floyd protests. But even the biggest programs only respond to a fraction of the calls that come in and few programs operate around the clock.

Community violence intervention programs rely on several overlapping strategies: outreach to high-risk individuals to offer services, focused interventions to prevent retaliatory violence, mediation and cognitive behavioral therapy to prevent violence before it happens.

This isn’t a question of defunding the police — it’s about funding some of the most promising community-led innovations in municipal governance in recent decades. President Biden’s administration has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in community violence intervention and alternative responses, with bipartisan support in Congress, and the investment may be yielding results. We are in the midst of one of the steepest declines in the homicide rate in recorded history, despite the fact that little seems to have changed in police staffing in recent years.

Nonetheless, House Republicans recently proposed slashing federal funding for the Department of Justice’s community violence intervention initiative — a clear step in the wrong direction. The federal government spends tens of billions on policing each year; it should similarly allocate significant annual investments into community violence intervention and alternative response.

Cities across the nation are showing us that we can widen the way that we think about community safety. Until we narrow the scope of what police officers can do, we’ll continue to see officers bring violence into situations that don’t require it.

Tahir Duckett is the executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety. This article originally appeared in the New York Times.