Joe Biden has called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, moments after shocking police video was released showing an Illinois officer fatally shooting Sonya Massey after she called police fearing a home intruder.

In his first public statement since dropping his bid for re-election, Biden said the shooting of Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman, by white Sangamon county sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson, in her home in Springfield, after a dispute over a pot of boiling water, “reminds us that all too often Black Americans face fears for their safety in ways many of the rest of us do not”.

Biden, who is recovering from Covid at his home in Delaware, said Massey, “a beloved mother, friend, daughter and young Black woman … should be alive today”.

  • Nougat@fedia.io
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    5 months ago

    For those not in the know, Springfield, IL, is the state capital (capitol?). It’s waaaay down in the generally rural middle of the state, with a 2022 population of just over 113,000. It is not anything like the Chicago metro area.

    • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It’s weird and dumb and arbitrary, but just to answer your uncertainty, it’s “capital” in this context.

      Capital means, in vague terms, the highest of something. So in regards to a city, it refers to the most important city (for the government, anyways) in a given administrative region (e.g., state capital, national capital).

      Capitol, with an O, refers specifically to the building where the US government is housed and the hill it sits on.

      I don’t know if they have a shared etymology but it wouldn’t surprise me.

      • JDCAce@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        According to etymonline.com, capital comes from “Latin capitalis ‘of the head’”. Capitol comes from “Latin Capitolium, [the] name of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, protector of the city, on the Capitoline Hill in ancient Rome”. The American architecture “deliberately evokes Roman republican imagery”. The “relationship of Capitoline to capital is likely but not certain”.

        Interesting! Thanks for making me look that up!

        • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Well, in this particular incident that the post is about, there was definitely a stovetop that had a pot of boiling water on it. That’s apparently worth shooting someone over…

    • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It’s almost exactly like one of the many generic looking suburbs, maybe a little ghetto, definitely not Hicksville some some other places. There’s pockets of suburban areas in Central Illinois such as Bloomington/Normal and Champaign/Urbana