No Charges Against Police in Amir Locke Shooting

The shooting drew thousands of protesters to the streets and renewed calls for police accountability in the city where George Floyd was murdered.

Protesters in Minneapolis in February. Prosecutors said they would not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an officer had committed a crime in fatally shooting Amir Locke during a no-knock raid.Credit...Aaron Nesheim for The New York Times

By Tim Arango-April 6, 2022

The Minneapolis police officer who shot and killed Amir Locke, a Black man, during an early-morning raid in February at an apartment complex will not face criminal charges, prosecutors announced on Wednesday.

The shooting drew thousands of protesters to the streets and renewed calls for police accountability in the city where George Floyd was murdered.

Even as the killing provoked new rounds of condemnation against the Minneapolis Police Department and the mayor who oversees it, criminal charges were seen by legal experts as unlikely. That is because Mr. Locke, who was awakened by officers entering the apartment under a no-knock warrant, was holding his own handgun. Mr. Locke owned the gun legally.

Mr. Locke was 22 when he was killed. He was an aspiring musician. His father, Andre Locke, said in an emotional news conference after the shooting that his son had been days away from moving to Texas to live near his mother.

 

“Amir Locke’s life mattered,” Attorney General Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Michael Freeman, the Hennepin County attorney, said in a joint statement. “He was a young man with plans to move to Dallas, where he would be closer to his mom and — he hoped — build a career as a hip-hop artist, following in the musical steps of his father.”

In announcing they would not file charges, the prosecutors were critical of the raid that the police carried out with a no-knock warrant, but said they would not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer had committed a crime in violation of Minnesota law that allows officers to use deadly force in certain situations.

In a graphic, and short, video clip from a police body-worn camera that was released in the aftermath of the killing, Mr. Locke is seen under a blanket on the couch where he was sleeping, clearly groggy and startled as he raises a gun that he held in his hand.

Mr. Locke was not a suspect on the warrant, which was being carried out in connection with a homicide investigation in nearby St. Paul. But after the killing, the Police Department’s first statement about it described Mr. Locke as a suspect — a misstatement that fueled anger in the community and drew comparisons to the department’s first, misleading, statement about Mr. Floyd, which said he died after a medical emergency. (A cousin of Mr. Locke’s was later arrested in connection with the St. Paul homicide.)

“Amir Locke was a victim,” Mr. Ellison said at a news conference on Wednesday. “He never should have been called a suspect.”

In a region still shaken by the murder of Mr. Floyd, as well as the police killing of Daunte Wright, a Black man, in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center last year, the killing of Mr. Locke reopened wounds in the community that were still raw.

Mr. Locke’s killing also brought renewed scrutiny to a department that is still depleted from the exodus of hundreds of officers in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s murder, and one that is still struggling to enact reforms and rebuild trust with the community.

During the investigation of the raid, Mark Hanneman, the officer who killed Mr. Locke, told investigators that when he saw Mr. Locke’s gun, he feared for his life, and that he had acted quickly because he felt his life was in jeopardy. Mr. Hanneman, 34, was placed on administrative duty after the shooting but has since returned to his regular job, according to the Police Department.

Mr. Ellison, while stressing that the law did not support criminal charges in the case, used the news conference on Wednesday to push for more legislation to overhaul policing, and he expressed exasperation at the slow pace of change, especially in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death.

“The problems involving policing and communities of color in Minneapolis are longstanding, and everyone knows it, yet it feels like nothing is ever done about it,” he said.

He urged residents who have been pushing for police reform not to let up.

“This is not the time for people to feel like there’s no hope,” Mr. Ellison said. “There is. People should carry forward and continue to try to make the system one we can all be proud of.”

The decision not to file criminal charges does not mean the end of the matter. The Locke family, which met with the prosecutors on Wednesday morning, has hired Benjamin Crump, the civil rights lawyer, to pursue a lawsuit against the city and to push the city to make changes to its Police Department.

 

At a news conference in New York on Wednesday, Karen Wells, Mr. Locke’s mother, stood next to Mr. Crump and the Rev. Al Sharpton and addressed the officer who killed her son: “The spirit of my baby is going to haunt you for the rest of your life.”

She also delivered pointed remarks directed at Mayor Jacob Frey, over his management of the department and over the city’s surge in violent crime, which, she said, led Mr. Locke to obtain a gun for protection.

“My son was protecting himself, thinking he had to protect himself from all the crime that is out of control, Mayor Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, that you can’t control,” she said. “So my son decided that if he’s going to go back and forth and do Instacart and DoorDash, he needed to bear arms, the legal way.”

That Mr. Locke was killed as police officers used a no-knock warrant, a law enforcement tactic that was heavily criticized in the wake of the police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., in 2020 during a botched raid, only added to the anger in Minneapolis.

Mr. Frey had already limited the use of no-knock warrants, but the killing of Mr. Locke drew accusations that the mayor had misled the public during his campaign for re-election last year when he claimed to have banned such warrants. In response to Mr. Locke’s killing, the mayor issued a new policy this week, which prohibits no-knock warrants and requires officers to knock and announce their presence, and then wait, before entering a building.

“This policy is among the most forward-looking and extensive in the nation, and will help keep both our residents and officers safe,” Mr. Frey said in a statement.

Just as Mr. Wright was killed during the trial last year of Derek Chauvin, the officer who was convicted of murdering Mr. Floyd, the killing of Mr. Locke occurred during a federal trial in St. Paul, Minn., for the other three officers involved in Mr. Floyd’s death. Those three officers were all found guilty of violating Mr. Floyd’s constitutional rights.