Who Do The Police Serve? The Execution of Sonya Massey
On July 6, Sonya Massey, a Black 36-year-old mother of two, was executed by police in her own home in Springfield, Illinois after calling 911 about a suspected intruder. During the visit, officers asked Massey to check on a pot of boiling water on her stove. When Massey picked up the pot to move it, the officers shot her three times in the head. Murdering officer Sean Grayson of the Sangamon County Sheriff's Office had his body camera disabled at the time the execution occurred, so the only video evidence was from the other officer’s bodycam. When initially asked for details, the officers involved told Massey’s family that she killed herself.
People who defend the police often argue that police only act violently in self-defense. When there is no video evidence, it’s an open-and-shut case for them: The police, not the people, are presumed innocent. When there is video evidence, they often scour every detail reaching for a sign indicating the victims guilt. When that doesn’t work, they point to the victim’s imperfect history. The problem with this logic is that it starts from the end and works backwards. Those who defend the police interpret the evidence in any way that justifies their use of deadly force and their existence in general.
When examining police violence, we must form our opinion from the evidence, and not vice versa. The facts of Sonya Massey’s execution speak for themselves. She called the police for help and posed no threat standing fifteen feet away with a pot of hot water. The officers’ deception is indicative of dodging responsibility. Massey also had paranoid schizophrenia, which puts her at higher statistical risk, on top of being a Black woman in the US, of being assaulted or killed by police. This story seemingly never ends.
Cincinnati is no stranger to police brutality. Timothy Thomas, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by Cincinnati Police Department in 2001, sparking justified unrest in Over-The-Rhine. Sam DuBose was shot and killed in his car off campus by a University of Cincinnati police officer in 2015. The officers responsible for the murders in both instances were never convicted.
As recently as June 1 of this year, police officers arrested and brutalized unarmed civilians at the Government Square bus stop in downtown Cincinnati. Video evidence circulated across social media platforms exposing over three minutes and forty-five seconds of police escalating and attacking a man sitting at the bus stop along with innocent bystanders. The man was tased while sitting in a defensive position covering his face after being assaulted by multiple officers. Officer Orlando Brown can be seen with his handgun ready to fire on a bystander recording with their phone.
The entire system is rotten, as we see from the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) Queen City Lodge’s response to the brutal assault of civilians in Cincinnati on June 1: "The restraint shown was remarkable. The officers should be applauded for trying to make Government Square, an already violent place, a little bit safer."
The fact that the FOP considers this "remarkable restraint” only speaks to the violent and repressive nature of CPD and police departments across the US. Furthermore, the racist and classist undertones are obvious when FOP frames Government Square, a bus terminal largely used by Black, white and brown poor and working people, as unsafe.
The Cincinnati FOP has unintentionally demonstrated their attitude toward the poor and working class as well as Black and Indigenous people of color. This gives us valuable insight into how the officers who murdered Sonya Massey likely felt about her as a working-class Black woman, despite her having been the one who called them for help in the first place. Rather than protecting and serving the poor and working masses of all races, they see it as their duty to protect from these people. But who or what are they protecting?
In reality, the role of the police is to protect, by force, the property, and thus, the supremacy of the capitalist class from the workers and the poor. The mostly white US capitalist class’ position as the ruling class is inextricably linked with white supremacy, chattel slavery, and colonialism.
Black people are 95% more likely to be pulled over for a traffic stop due to factors like overpolicing of predominantly Black neighborhoods. Black people are 115% more likely to be searched than white people during a traffic stop even though white people are more likely to be carrying contraband. The modern police force emerged from the “slave patrols” in the 1700s and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime.”
These conditions contribute to a double oppression which burdens the Black working class, who are oppressed as workers and as a race. This, in addition to the rampant racism so common among police officers, leads to disproportionate police violence inflicted upon Black people and higher incarceration rates. It’s not that there are some “bad cops” who need to be removed from the force, but that the position of the police is one set against the broad masses of working, oppressed, and especially Black people. The only “good cop” is a cop no more.
Politicians from across the spectrum of bourgeois politics attempt to obscure this reality and instead cultivate the fantasy that there is no systemic racism or class struggle and that the police exist to protect us. This picture of capitalist society without racism or class antagonisms serves to justify support for increasing police budgets and building more cop cities to keep us “safe.” Cincinnati City Council already invests over 69 million dollars annually to fund the police, equating to 11.26% of the total budget and 35.9% of the General Fund. Whether you vote for the Democratic or the Republican Party, you still vote to back the blue. This gives the slogan “vote blue no matter who” a whole new meaning.
Donald Trump even praised Kamala Harris’ VP pick, Gov. Tim Walz, for calling in militarized riot police and the National Guard on Black Lives Matter protesters in Minnesota in 2020—a sight not so different from what we saw here in Cincy in 2020, when thousands of protesters were battered and tear-gassed and hundreds were arrested for exercising their first amendment right to peacefully assemble.
Additionally, measures that would keep communities safe and reduce crime cannot be fully realized in a capitalist society; investing in uplifting people from poverty and providing access to high quality food, housing, healthcare, education, and rehabilitation. None of this serves the interests of capital, which requires a workforce desperate to labor for any wage. Instead, tax dollars are invested into police budgets to incarcerate the poor, supplying the system with prison labor which costs next to nothing. The legacy of chattel slavery lives on through the US prison system. Not only do the police protect and reinforce the capitalists’ ability to exploit the masses under wage-labor, but it literally builds an enslaved population through the prison-industrial complex.
As Alex S. Vitale says in his book The End of Policing
We must break these intertwined systems of oppression. Every time we look to the police and prisons to solve our problems, we reinforce these processes. We cannot demand that the police get rid of those “annoying” homeless people in the park or the “threatening” young people on the corner and simultaneously call for affordable housing and youth jobs, because the state is only offering the former and will deny us the latter every time. Yes, communities deserve protection from crime and even disorder, but we must always demand those without reliance on the coercion, violence, and humiliation that undergird our criminal justice system. The state may try to solve those problems through police power, but we should not encourage or reward such short-sighted, counterproductive, and unjust approaches. We should demand safety and security—but not at the hands of the police. In the end, they rarely provide either.
This is why we advance the slogan “abolish the police” while situating it within its socioeconomic context. The role of police as protectors of capitalist white supremacy is a foundational pillar which keeps an undemocratic system based on the exploitation of the global proletariat and the Earth’s resources standing. We should chip away at this pillar with the understanding of the aim and ultimate result of police abolition: the dismantling of the entire socioeconomic and political system it upholds. We cannot have one without the other.
Sonya Massey should still be alive. Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Timothy Thomas, Sam Dubose, Tortuguita, Dexter Reed Jr., Elijah Hadley, and countless others should still be alive. We should honor all of them in the struggle against racist and classist state violence. To paraphrase the famous words of The Communist Manifesto, we have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win!