The murder of Sonya Massey by the Illinois police is a symptom of a larger, deeply rooted, systemic assault on Black and Brown working-class communities. The only way to protect the people and resist this violence is through community-based organizing.
It was with deep regret and indignation that Pan-African Community Action (PACA) learned of the deplorable murder of Sonya Massey at the hands of the Springfield, Illinois police. We denounce this murder as one more in the persistent war waged on Black people by the U.S. settler state.
Ms. Massey was a 36-year-old Black woman who called 911 to report a potential intruder on July 6, 2024, only to be fatally and senselessly shot in her home by one of the responding officers, Sean Grayson. The other officer on the scene stood idly by as the incident unfolded.
This tragedy is strikingly similar to other high-profile incidents like the murder of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who was fatally shot in her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment on March 13, 2020. At least seven police officers forcibly entered her apartment, ostensibly as part of a drug investigation. Breonna was ultimately killed while defending herself and her home from the intruders, who were not known to be officers at the time and whose intentions were unknown.
After Breonna’s murder, the state’s immediate course of action was to place all blame on the officers involved, calling only for their prosecution when in actuality police murders are a byproduct of a criminal system that requires the subjugation of Black communities. Similarly, the state of Illinois has moved to prosecute Officer Grayson for his direct role in killing Sonya Massey while issuing public relations disclaimers to distance itself from his behavior and urge the public to focus solely on his actions as an individual.
However, African (Black) people must be clear that these incidents reflect the rank and racist disregard that the U.S. settler state has toward the colonized—and that the state by and large views Black and Brown working-class people as enemy combatants. Police murders are the result of the constant police occupation, suppression, and brutality imposed on our communities. These casualties are collateral damage from the state’s perpetual war against the Black working class and the criminalization of our people.
This criminalization includes the targeted suppression and assault against our organized resistance. The U.S. settler state has a history of political repression against Black revolutionary organizations, such as the infiltration and subversion of the Black Panther Party. This included the 1969 state-sanctioned murders of Black Panther members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who were killed while sleeping in their home. More than half a century later, the state is still engaged in the repression of the Black liberation movement, as demonstrated by the outrageous and unsubstantiated federal indictments against Uhuru Movement members.
The agents of the state do not keep us safe because their job is to protect and serve settler colonialism and capitalism. Their job is to enforce the laws of the colonizer over the colonized.
We must create people(s)-centered alternatives that are tasked with defending our communities. Sonya Massey would still be alive if she could have called upon a force directed by the mandates of an organized community. Such a force under the obligation to follow policies and priorities set by an organized Black working-class community would have drawn their weapons on anyone who did what officer Grayson did and would have demanded that he stand down.
It is possible for us to create our own organized forces to defend us that are highly regarded by our people and that have wide enough standing for us to call on in cases where we feel threatened, even when those threats are from the state itself.
PACA calls for community control over police, a transformative vision that empowers the Black and Brown working class to redefine community safety and security. To this end, alternatives to the established institution of policing would be developed to displace the occupation forces and adequately address community issues, such as safety, crime, and other concerns.
Real and permanent solutions to the systemic atrocities our communities continue to suffer are achieved by shifting power into the hands of an organized Black and Brown working class. This can only happen through the process of taking community control over all the institutions that govern our lives.
Isaac Saney is a Cuba and Black studies specialist and historian at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
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