Although many of my opinion columns focus on acts of violence abroad, this week I was bothered by something much closer to home: the horrific murder of Sonya Massey by Illinois Sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson. I believe her death, and many similar to it, are enabled in part by the media culture in America.
To be clear, most cops are not as inept as Grayson or the cohort of criminals formerly in uniform who have killed innocent black Americans. However, what this shooting continues to demonstrate is that the minority of officers who are willing to use violence for grotesquely immoral reasons is too large of a minority for us to tolerate.
Since you can watch the details of the incident yourself online as there is a very disturbing video available, I’ll spare you the details in favor of the summary: Grayson shoots Massey in the head for holding a boiling pot of water at her kitchen sink (a pot of water that Grayson asked Massey to remove from the stove) and saying “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
This cop’s actions are the culmination of multiple massive mistakes. I will spare the details on training for someone more familiar with how police train, although as many people have stated, the length of said training feels grotesquely short. Quality can make up for quantity, but only to an extent.
What I wish to discuss is culture. For too long, American society has demonized black Americans, even after the Civil Rights Movement. When Jim Crow laws were no longer around to keep black Americans down, mass incarceration and associated policing practices rose.
For example, the start of the drug war coincided with an increase in substance abuse among minority populations – when it was mostly just white Americans using illicit drugs, compassion and treatment were the strategies of choice. The drug war changed that, backed by increased enforcement in places where minorities were predominant, without an accompanying increase in places, like college campuses, where drug use among white Americans was common.
Although predominantly black neighborhoods do face higher rates of gun crime, this is also accompanied by (and potentially because of) a lack of investment in community resources and other forms of institutional racism that continue to go unrecognized by other Americans. Thus, many Americans have grown to disproportionately associate black Americans with crime, whether consciously or subconsciously. Since some of those Americans end up being police officers, we get individuals like Sean Grayson, who shoot black people without just cause. Why is that?
I believe the media is to blame. Recently, there are plenty of examples of erroneous reporting on crime in the media. Channels like Fox News use lines like “liberals say the crime rate is down, but does it feel that way?” As comedian Jon Stewart pointed out in a segment about crime reporting, the reason it may not feel that way is because Fox News itself reports about every single instance of crime in an alarmist tone. In a country of over 300 million people, there is going to always be some crazy crime to be sensationalized.
Additionally, channels like Fox News report on illegal immigrants being responsible for a surge of crime in the country, when in fact illegal immigrants commit violent crime at a substantially lower rate than resident Americans at the same socioeconomic level. This makes sense because illegal immigrants face higher stakes – being deported on top of jailed – than resident Americans.
As Stewart points out later in his segment, it is this fearmongering and lingering racism that is responsible for the crappy media environment we live in today. That crappy media environment, as well as a host of other social factors, influence Americans, including some cops, to think and behave the way they do. In turn, that leads to the deaths of innocent black Americans at the hands of police officers.
Janagan Ramanathan is a Sartell High School alum, former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman and current aerospace engineering major at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
