Deputy’s fatal shooting of Sonya Massey highlights risky practice of hiring America’s legion of ‘wandering officers’

(CNN) — The Illinois sheriff’s deputy who gunned down Sonya Massey in her home last month is now listed as suspended on a statewide registry of officers who have been fired, forced to resign or had their law enforcement licenses revoked due to misconduct.

The suspension of former Sangamon County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Grayson’s law enforcement certificate came only after he was fired and charged with murder.

On July 6, Grayson responded to a report of a prowler at Massey’s home. Bodycam footage from another deputy showed Massey saying she rebuked Grayson, and the former deputy threatening the 36-year-old woman. The encounter ended with Grayson shooting Massey in the head and failing to render aid .

After being discharged from the Army for serious misconduct and a history of driving under the influence, Grayson was employed since 2020 by six Illinois law enforcement agencies – at three of them, as a part-time officer, employment records show.

Grayson is part of what law enforcement officials and experts call America’s legion of “wandering officers” who drift from police department to police department – sometimes even after having been fired, forced to resign or convicted of a crime.

“The shooting again underscores the critical need for police agencies to thoroughly vet potential hires,” the International Association of Chiefs of Police said in a statement Tuesday. “The pattern and nature of frequent job changes by a police officer should raise flags about their suitability for the policing profession.”

The professional association of prominent police leaders called Massey’s death “a devastating and avoidable tragedy.”

The absence of an exhaustive, national database for tracking and weeding out rogue cops – along with a lack of coordination among the more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the country – has allowed officers like Grayson to get hired without their checkered histories sounding an alarm, according to policing officials and experts.

“There’s no question that … officers getting rehired after they’ve been let go under whatever circumstances is a huge problem and appears to be responsible for a grossly disproportionate number of tragic incidents,” said Christy Lopez, a former deputy chief in the special litigation section of the civil rights division at the Justice Department during the Obama administration.

In addition, Lopez said, part-time law enforcement positions – like those Grayson held – tend not to attract the best candidates or get the most training.

“It’s never a good sign when a police department is hiring officers on a part-time basis,” said Lopez, a Georgetown University law professor.

A police misconduct registry funded by US Justice Department, and known as the National Decertification Index (NDI) , already lists nearly 55,000 officers who had their law enforcement certificate or license revoked because of misconduct. But its coverage is spotty, according to policing officials and experts: Not every US police agency submits data to the registry or checks it before making hiring decisions. The names in the database are not public. And Grayson had never been decertified.

“That certification index on its own is not enough,” Lopez said. “It wouldn’t have caught Sean Grayson. It’s not going to catch a lot of your problem officers.”

Military discharge should have been ‘red flag’

Grayson, 30, was indicted by a grand jury on three counts of first-degree murder and one count each of aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct. He has pleaded not guilty and was denied pretrial release, according to court records.

Grayson’s attorney Daniel Fultz declined comment on Saturday.

Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell fired Grayson after the shooting, saying in a statement : “Sonya Massey lost her life due to an unjustifiable and reckless decision by former Deputy Sean Grayson.”

“Grayson had other options available that he should have used. His actions were inexcusable and do not reflect the values or training of our office.”

Campbell, in a separate statement, said no law enforcement agencies reported problems with Grayson before he was hired in Sangamon County, though previous employers had commented he “needed more training.” Grayson received 16 weeks of academy training after being hired, according to Campbell.

“This is not unusual for deputies with Grayson’s experience, and is standard procedure for Sangamon County deputies,” Campbell’s statement said. Grayson’s personnel file included “references from people I know well,” said the sheriff, adding those “insights are invaluable in making informed hiring decisions.”

Grayson was discharged from the US Army in 2016 due to “misconduct (serious offense),” according to a Department of Defense document included in Grayson’s personnel file during his time at the Kincaid Police Department in Illinois. The personnel file was obtained by CNN affiliate KSHB .

“A red flag would be his military” discharge, said Brian Grisham, deputy director of the nonprofit International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training and chair of the National Decertification Index. “That’s a potential disqualifier in most states.”

The DOD document said Grayson was separated from the Army under a general discharge after he served as a private first class at Fort Riley in Kansas. The alleged misconduct was not disclosed.

Army spokesperson Bryce Dubee, in response to a CNN request for more detail, wrote: “Sean P. Grayson was a 91B (Wheeled Vehicle Mechanic) in the Regular Army from May 2014 to February 2016. He had no deployments and left the Army in the rank of private first class.”

Grayson was charged with two DUI misdemeanor offenses in Illinois’ Macoupin County – one in 2015 and the other in 2016, court records show. The website of the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, which sets professional standards for law enforcement and correctional officers, does not list driving under the influence as a “decertifiable misdemeanor.”

The first incident occurred in August 2015. Grayson’s vehicle was impounded after he was charged with driving under the influence. He pleaded guilty and paid more than $1,320 in fines, according to court records.

In July 2016, Grayson was charged with another DUI. Again, he pleaded guilty and paid more than $2,400 in fines, court records show.

Grayson acknowledged the DUI charges when he applied to be an officer at Auburn Police Department in Illinois in 2021. He worked there from July 2021 to May 2022. CNN’s review of Grayson’s records there did not reveal any major problems or disciplinary issues.

In May 2022, Grayson started working at the Logan County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois, records show. He wrote the sheriff a brief letter detailing his “terrible decision to drink and drive.”

Grayson’s letter also said he lost his driving privileges for one year after pleading guilty to his second DUI, in 2016.

A background check was performed prior to Grayson’s hiring in Sangamon County, Campbell said. Prior DUI convictions “are not disqualifying criteria for a deputy,” Campbell said.

‘We can’t have you in our uniform’

Grayson worked at six Illinois law enforcement agencies over a four-year period.

He started working part time with Pawnee police in August 2020, followed by the Kincaid and Virden police departments. Then he started working full time with Auburn police, the Logan County Sheriff’s Office, and finally the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office in May 2023.

His employment records from the Auburn Police Department indicated why Grayson said he left previous positions: In some cases, he wanted to work full time but could only get part-time hours. In another, he said he didn’t want to move.

Grayson was on the Kincaid police force for only three months before he was let go “because he refused to live within a 10-mile radius,” KSHB reported .

“The decertification index originally was created to keep problem officers from moving from state to state but the reality is they move from agency to agency,” Grisham said.

“I do think there have been rogue officers that have gone all over the place and inadequate background checks let them continue on with potential bad acts in other jurisdictions.”

Grayson did not appear to have disciplinary issues as an Auburn officer but records from the Logan County Sheriff’s Office recommended he take “high stress decision making classes.” The records said Grayson failed to slow down after his boss called off a vehicle pursuit. Grayson was driving about 110 mph before striking a deer, according to the records.

A Logan County chief deputy wrote that Grayson “failed to show due caution while driving through stop intersections.” Grayson’s supervisor “terminated the pursuit” and the deputy turned off his emergency lights, the report stated. But Grayson “continued at a high rate of speed (110/55 mph zone) prior to striking the deer.”

Audio recordings that appear to coincide with Logan County’s internal review of the incident captured the chief deputy admonishing Grayson for describing it inaccurately in his report despite previous orders to check for accuracy.

“If we can’t trust what you say and what you see, we can’t have you in our uniform,” the chief deputy told Grayson.

“I’m getting goosebumps. This is extremely concerning,” the chief deputy said later. “Everybody likes you. I gotta be able to trust you. Was this a purposefully done lie?”

“No,” Grayson responded.

“Deputy Grayson acknowledged he lacks experience,” the report said. A series of recommendations included “additional traffic stop training, report writing training, high stress decision making classes, and needs to read, understand and discuss issued Logan County Sheriff’s Office Policy.”

It was not immediately clear if Grayson followed through with the recommendations. In April 2023, he resigned from the Logan County Sheriff’s Office. The next month, he joined the sheriff’s office in Sangamon County, where his encounter with Massey more than a year later resulted in murder charges.

A psychological examination before his was hired by Sangamon County said Grayson was “a suitable fit for the position” but also noted a low score on a cognitive assessment. “He knows he can move too fast at times. He needs to slow down to make good decisions,” read the report of the March 2023 examination.

On Friday, a spokesperson for the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office said the agency did not receive a complete disciplinary report from Logan County about Grayson, including his reprimand for an inaccurate report of the traffic incident.

Campbell did not respond to CNN’s request for comment, but he told CNN affiliate WICS that “we need to take a look at” more thorough background checks of job candidates.

“We did not receive all the information from some of his previous employers that came out afterward,” the sheriff said.

The Logan County Sheriff’s Office has not responded to a request for comment.

The union representing Illinois law enforcement officers said it will not challenge Grayson’s termination. After an evaluation of the deputy’s grievance, “the union has determined that it will not be proceeding any further,” the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police Labor Council said in a statement, which expressed sympathy “for the family and loved ones of Sonya Massey.”

“If you look at it, an individual can push the envelope over and over and never get to the point of being disciplined on their license, but they’ve left a cloud everywhere they’ve been,” Grisham said.

‘There are agencies cutting corners’

Massey’s death has led to renewed calls for passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act , the failed legislation targeting racial bias and use of force – including the creation of a more robust nationwide police misconduct registry.

George Floyd, the act’s namesake, was another Black person killed by police. The 46-year-old died in police custody on May 25, 2020, after Derek Chauvin, a White police officer, was filmed kneeling on Floyd’s neck and back for nearly nine minutes as Floyd pleaded for help and said he couldn’t breathe.

Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter in a state trial in 2021 and sentenced to more than 22 years in prison. He later pleaded guilty in federal court of depriving Floyd of his civil rights.

Chauvin had 18 prior complaints filed against him with the Minneapolis Police Department’s Internal Affairs before his fatal encounter with Floyd, according to the police department. Another officer on the scene also had a history of complaints.

Floyd’s killing sparked a wave of protests around the world, along with a spate of legislative measures intended to address police brutality and racial bias. But the Floyd bill has languished for years amid partisan differences that are especially heightened today. At the same time, many police agencies have struggled in recent years to hire and retain quality officers given the low pay, dangerous work and a perceived lack of respect from the public.

“There are agencies cutting corners and they always have,” Grisham said. “But with the recruitment and retention issues we have today, where agencies nationwide, on average, used to receive hundreds of applications for vacancies and they get dozens now … they’re having to dig deeper into the hiring availability. So there could be a slight uptick in misconduct.”

Lopez, who led the team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department in Missouri after the 2014 killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown , said having “potentially thousands and thousands of bad apple officers” on the streets “can wreak havoc” in communities.

“We saw in this case, for example, there were two officers on the scene. Only one of them shot Sonya Massey,” she said. “You will see that in many of these incidents. Everything’s fine. Most officers are handling it fine, but it just takes one officer to send it spiraling off into the wrong direction.”

Lopez recalled that, while investigating police in Ferguson, local officials spoke about “the muni-shuffle” where officers often sauntered “back and forth” between jobs in the 91 municipalities and 50 or so police departments in St. Louis County.

“An officer at Ferguson complained to me about accidentally hiring a really terrible officer from another agency because he wasn’t aware about the officer’s misconduct history,” she said.

“Agencies sometimes – especially when they’re under pressure to hire, hire, hire – will hire officers from other agencies and they don’t have to go through all the same training that a brand new officer would have to go through. So it’s sometimes seen as a cost efficient way to hire new officers when, in fact, it is a really dangerous way to hire new officers.”

Smaller cash-strapped agencies often end up hiring an experienced officer who may have a checkered past instead of paying to train and hire a new officer, according to Lopez and other experts.

Police brass are ‘now on notice’

In 2015, a report by President Barack Obama’s task force on 21st century policing called on the Justice Department to partner with the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training to expand its decertification database to help remove the worst cops from the streets. National and standardized reporting, the report said, would ensure that “officers who have lost their certification for misconduct are not easily hired in other jurisdictions.”

“There’s no requirement that anybody, any local jurisdiction that has a Sean Grayson situation … send information to that central clearing house,” Laurie Robinson, a professor at George Mason University and co-chair of Obama’s task force, told CNN. “It’s something that has been going on as long as I’ve been around policing, which is 25 years.”

Decertification and other employment records are kept by the Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) boards in each state, but not all boards report the information to the national registry. Only California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Tennessee, New York, New Jersey and Texas require that records be reported to the national index, Grisham said.

“We are not a government agency. We can’t mandate usage of it,” he said, noting the registry is still “averaging over 200 new actions added monthly” and more than 1,000 new user requests per month.

“We’ve got documented cases where officers are pretending like they’ve never been in law enforcement before and applying for jobs and this system has caught them,” Grisham said.

In 2020, a Yale Law Journal study titled “The Wandering Officer” said the scope of the problem in American policing is unclear. That remains true today, according to policing experts.

“Not all those who wander are lost, but in policing, many are,” the researchers concluded.

“These officers, we have shown, are subsequently fired and subjected to ‘moral character’ complaints at elevated rates relative to both officers hired as rookies and veterans with clean professional histories. And we likely underestimate the prevalence of the phenomenon nationwide.”

The researchers found wandering officers “tend to migrate to agencies with fewer resources in communities with slightly higher proportions of residents of color.”

“Police administrators are now on notice. Even when well intentioned — as a second chance for a hard-working cop — hiring a wandering officer is risky business,” the study said. “Beyond their own misbehavior, wandering officers may undermine efforts to improve police culture, as they carry their baggage to new locales.”

CNN’s Holly Yan, Bill Kirkos, Amanda Musa, Andy Rose, Chris Boyette, Brad Parks and Dakin Andone contributed to this report.

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