Minnesota’s Attorney General Says the Cop Who Killed Amir Locke Was Defending Himself. So Was Locke.

“Eight seconds after a Minneapolis SWAT team entered the apartment where Amir Locke was sleeping on a living room couch, Officer Mark Hanneman shot him dead. A joint report that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman released yesterday uses footage from six body cameras to break those seconds down into tiny pieces, describing what each officer was doing and what he could see at any given moment. The bottom line: Ellison and Freeman say criminal charges will not be filed against Hanneman or any of the other officers who participated in the deadly February 2 raid, because they reacted appropriately to what they reasonably perceived as a lethal threat—the handgun that Locke picked up after the cops stormed into the apartment.

At the same time, Ellison and Freeman describe Locke as “a victim” and concede that his reaction to the pre-dawn, no-knock raid “was not per se unreasonable.” In fact, they say, “We recognize that Mr. Locke may have been sleeping and that he, like others in the apartment, may have perceived the officers’ entry to be someone breaking into the apartment. We do not dispute this and believe that it is possible that is exactly what happened here.”

The implication is that Locke and Hanneman both acted in self-defense: Locke was justified in grabbing his gun, and Hanneman was justified in responding by shooting him. That perplexing situation, which is similar to what happened during the March 2020 drug raid that killed Breonna Taylor in Louisville, underlines the dangers of police tactics that aim to reduce the risk of violence but often have the opposite effect.

The SWAT team was assisting the St. Paul Police Department in a homicide investigation, but Locke was neither a suspect nor a person of interest. The cops were looking for his cousin, Mekhi Speed, who lived on a different floor of the same apartment building. Locke, a 22-year-old aspiring hip-hop artist, was staying with Mekhi’s brother, Marlon Speed, who shared the apartment with his girlfriend. St. Paul police originally obtained “knock and announce” warrants for Mekhi Speed’s apartment, his brother’s place, and a third unit where “the suspect and his associates often convened.”

Minneapolis SWAT officers refused to participate unless the warrants were changed so that they were authorized to enter early in the morning without first announcing themselves. From their perspective, that was a prudent precaution, since their main target was a murder suspect who was known to be armed. Ellison and Freeman note that police knew “the primary suspect and two other suspects had recently made social media posts in which they were seen with multiple firearms; that the suspects were associated with multiple armed robberies and carjackings; and that the .223 caliber rifle used in the homicide had not yet been recovered.””

” the problem illustrated by Amir Locke’s senseless death goes beyond no-knock warrants. Even when police knock and announce themselves before they enter, they can easily be mistaken for criminals when they burst into a home at an hour when the residents are likely to be sleeping.”

“The problem in both cases was not the officers’ split-second decisions so much as the situation that made them necessary. The strategy of discouraging resistance by deliberately discombobulating people while serving warrants has for years led to similar outcomes in cities across the country. Such tragedies are completely predictable in a country where people have a constitutional right to keep guns in the home for self-defense and commonly do.

This well-established hazard has to be considered every time police enter a home, regardless of whether the warrant notionally requires that they give the residents a chance to answer the door. When police decide to surprise people by serving warrants in the middle of the night with an overwhelming show of force, there is little practical difference between banging on the door and quietly unlocking the door before charging in. Either approach creates a substantial risk that people will not understand what is going on. And if they dare to defend themselves, even “an objectively reasonable officer” is apt to perceive a danger that justifies the use of deadly force.”

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