Front Burner - Amir Locke: Minneapolis grapples with another police killing
Episode Date: February 10, 2022Minneapolis streets are once again filled with protesters demanding justice after the Feb. 2 police killing of a 22-year-old Black man. Amir Locke was fatally shot by police who were executing a no-kn...ock search warrant unrelated to Locke. Since the death of George Floyd in May 2020, Minneapolis has been at the forefront of the movement to radically reimagine policing and community safety. But after Locke’s death, many in the city are asking how much has really changed. Today, Solomon Gustavo, a reporter for the MinnPost and a contributor to The Daily Beast, explains what we know about the killing of Amir Locke and where efforts to reform or disband the Minneapolis Police Department stand now.
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Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. On the streets of Minneapolis this week, you'll see what have become familiar scenes in the city.
People protesting another police killing of a Black resident.
On the airlock! People protesting another police killing of a Black resident.
Body cam footage shows police, who were serving a no-knock search warrant,
quietly unlock an apartment door,
announce their presence,
and then kick the couch,
where 22-year-old Amir Locke appears to be sleeping under a blanket.
Locke, who is not a target of the investigation, starts to sit up, holding a gun which appears to be pointed towards the ground.
Police then shoot and kill him, less than 10 seconds after entering.
His family says he was sleeping over at a cousin's home and that he was, quote, executed moments after being startled from a deep sleep and reaching for a legal firearm to protect himself. At the end of the day, I believe that he was executed by the NPD.
And I want the police officer that murdered my son to be prosecuted and fired.
Ever since George Floyd's killing a year and a half ago, Minneapolis has been at the forefront
of the movement to radically overhaul how cities approach policing and community safety. But for many, Locke's killing is a sign
of how little has changed there. Today, I'm speaking to Solomon Gustavo, a reporter for
the MinnPost and a contributor to the Daily Beast, about the killing of Amir Locke and where the
efforts to reform or dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department are now. Hi, Solomon. Thank you so much for coming on to the
podcast for making the time today. Sure. Hi, Jamie. Thank you for having me.
So firstly, what do we know about why police conducted this no-knock raid on the apartment where Amir Locke was sleeping?
They were doing so on the behest of St. Paul police who were in the midst of a homicide investigation in early January after someone was found shot in St. Paul and they later died at the hospital.
That investigation led them to the Bolero Flats,
an apartment complex in downtown Minneapolis, and they asked Minneapolis to conduct
a search of that apartment. And St. Paul doesn't do no-knock search warrants, so they did not ask
for one. Minneapolis said that if they were going to conduct the search, that it would be a no-knock warrant.
And that was their reason for being at Blairville Flats that night.
OK. And what have police said about why they shot and killed Locke?
According to interim police chief Emilio Huffman, at the moment after the officer kicked the couch where Locke was sleeping and Locke emerged with a handgun in his hand, according to Huffman, the gun, which, as everyone has seen in the videos, kind of pointed downward. She says that it was pointing the direction of an officer that we cannot see that's out of frame.
And Officer Mark Hanneman fired three times and hit Locke with each bullet.
OK, how have Locke's family members or his lawyer responded to the police's characterization of what happened that night? The police in their first press release of the
shooting said that in the incident, they encountered a suspect. And we later learned
that that person was Locke, who was shot. And that Locke was not the person who was involved in that investigation wasn't a suspect at all. So the family took real umbrage with that characterization and spent a lot of time and expressed how painful it was for them.
And in their moments of immediate mourning and grief to also have to do this kind of optics control around the way their son was being
characterized as a potential suspect when he was not one. He has no criminal record,
as his father and mother reiterate at press conferences and protests, and then painted
a picture of who he was, just a young man making his way through life. My son didn't deserve what happened to him. He was planning on coming back to Dallas,
Texas, where I'm currently at, to work on and pursue many goals that he had planned.
But on 2-2-22, it was taken away from him.
What did his parents say about
what he wanted to do with his life?
Locke's father,
Andre Locke, spoke for
a good while at the
process on Saturday.
I love Amir dearly.
Amir was a bright
light.
And he deserves to be able
to shine.
And he talked about how his son was very passionate about music. He had ambitions to become a music producer and was staying at his cousin's place
briefly before heading down to Dallas, where he was going to try to make a start at a music production career.
What has his family said about why he had a handguard?
He started working as a delivery driver,
and he got it, they say that he got it because he, uh, wanted to feel safe in
that work, just going house to house.
But he also just kind of got it because it's something he wanted to get.
He felt like it was his right.
You know, his, his, his father talked about how, when he was getting licensed, his parents
were concerned and he said, I'm not a driver, but I also just kind of want to have it for
protection.
I'm a young black guy.
I want to have it for protection. I'm a young black guy. I want to have it. And then, you know, they were saying to him,
you know, if you have a gun, it almost makes the risk of being a young black man, perhaps even
riskier. So there's this kind of competing things, but that's why he got it.
Okay. Okay. And I saw them say that he was a really deep sleeper and that they think he was startled awake, right,
and maybe was potentially reaching for his legally owned handgun to protect himself from intruders.
What we saw when the officer kicked the couch, the mayor wasn't even moving before then,
and so the officer startled him.
When he kicked the couch, when he aggravated Amir, I think that's what I think. I think that's what I think. I think that's what I think.
I think that's what I think.
I think that's what I think.
I think that's what I think.
I think that's what I think.
I think that's what I think.
I think that's what I think.
I think that's what I think.
I think that's what I think.
I think that's what I think.
I think that's what I think. I think that's what I think. as we've all seen in the video, um, you know, personally, I sleep somewhat deeply,
but if someone opened my door and even said a few things,
even spoke kind of loudly outside my door, I might wake to that.
And he didn't wait, you know,
Locke Amir did not wait to that and didn't rouse until the sofa he was
sleeping on was, was kicked. So, um,
we can all imagine the kind of confusion that you would have if you think
you were sleeping on was kicked.
You can all imagine the kind of confusion that you would have if you think you were sleeping on was kicked.
You mentioned before the officer who who shot who shot Locke.
Has this officer or have any other police officers been charged in the shooting?
Not charged. No, I it's just procedure, I believe, to have them on leave after an incident like this. But I don't think they, as of this morning, no one's been fired. And I know Attorney General Keith Ellison made announcements saying that he
was teaming up with the Hennepin County Attorney's Office to see whether or not charges are justified.
So that's an ongoing thing, but no, no charges yet. Okay. And I understand that there has been
an arrest, a suspect in the homicide case that the no-knock warrant was for, and that's Locke's 17-year-old cousin, correct?
Locke's cousin, right.
He was Amir Locke's cousin, Mackay Speed.
How have people in Minneapolis responded to Amir Locke's killing?
A great deal of exhaustion and exasperation just all around. The reaction this time compared to protests immediately following Floyd's death.
Minneapolis today with its charred remnants of last night's rioting, the fury evident at every corner.
Or the killing of Dante Wright in Brooklyn Center, just north of the city, or Winston Smith in the city by U.S. Marshals following Floyd's death.
Each of those instances had a lot
of rage and passion around them. And the kind of rallying cry for a lot of people was kind of
this sense of saying, this is not who we are. This is not us. We can do better than this.
This time, there's a lot of kind of like, well, this is who we are. And this is embarrassing.
And this is horrifying. And I'm done. I don't want to, you know,
asking people protesting immediately after the killing, just, you know,
asking them, you know, why are you here again?
Why is it important to go to the Bolero flats and,
and a caravan protest because it's cold outside and honking your horns at the
residents of Bolero flats or honking your horn outside of a police precinct here again.
And, you know, it's been the sense that people are truly fed up
or at least much more fed up than they ever really imagined.
With more accountability with our police,
we need to end police brutality, end these no-knock warrants.
It could be me. It could be anyone I care about.
I could be walking home. I could be asleep. I could be atrants. It could be me. It could be anyone I care about. I could be walking home.
I could be asleep.
I could be at work.
I could be anywhere.
I would like to see the police officers held accountable,
first and foremost.
And also, no knock warrants need to be banned.
There's this really powerful video at a briefing
after the Amir Locke body cam footage
was released from the police officers.
And the mayor, Jacob Fry, and the chief of police are there,
Amelia Huffman, and they're confronted by this woman
named Nikima Levy-Armstrong.
She's this prominent civil rights lawyer,
and she was recently appointed by the mayor
as co-chair of a working group
that's basically looking at police reform.
You're supposed to make a split second decision about when it's a threat.
Why did you refer to Chief Huffman?
Hold on, hold on.
Chief Huffman.
No, no, do not.
Okay?
I'm not a threat.
I don't have a gun.
Okay?
Don't treat me like I'm a threat.
And I'm wondering if you could describe a little bit about what she says to them in
that video and what you thought when you saw it.
Speaking of exasperation, the moment that Levy Armstrong kind of counts us forward to take the reins of the press conferences, just as Huffman saying, you know, saying things we've heard many times.
These are high risk situations, split second decisions.
We can understand how much pressure they're under. They have to choose. These decisions are made very
quickly. That's the moment when the officer had to make a split-second decision to assess the
circumstances and determine whether he felt like there was an articulable threat, that the threat
was of imminent harm, great bodily harm or death,
and that he needed to take action right then to protect himself and his partners.
And then Livia Armstrong interrupts and confronts the two,
Chief Huffman and Mayor Fry, and interrupts them by saying, this is what I would call the anatomy
of a cover-up. This is unacceptable. I'm sorry. It is. And she in short says, this is not what I
signed up to do. As you were talking about her appointment to that working group on policing.
When I agreed to work with you on the work group,
we talked about the importance of transparency and accountability.
And here what we are seeing is business as usual.
And you know this, Amelia, you know this, Jacob.
I don't know how you guys slept that night.
She also referred to Locke as someone who looked like a young boy,
someone who looked like her son. I saw the picture of Amir. He looks like a boy.
My son is 17 years old. He has slept on his friend's couches for sleepovers.
So we cannot sit here and whitewash this and pretend that it's OK.
You know, Libby Armstrong is quite the leader. She has a lot of clout in the Twin Cities generally and particularly among police reform groups and communities like the black communities in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
And if anyone to do that, if anyone would have had the gravitas to be able to go up there and confront security and get the year of the mayor and the chief, it would it would be her.
And and get the year of the mayor and the chief, it would it would be her.
And she and she expressed a lot of the things that a lot of people were saying at protests. This feels like business. This is this feels like business as usual.
This feels like this is who we are instead of instead of an aberration.
And people are, you know, the fight against that sort of denial is a losing fight.
So that is what we want to see as the residents of Minneapolis.
We don't want to see cover ups. We don't want to see whitewashing.
People are asking very simple questions that have still not been answered.
Amelia, you're saying you want to be the chief?
Then act like it.
Demonstrate integrity.
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This seems like a good moment, I think, then to step back and just catch people up on what's
been happening with efforts to either reform or disband the Minneapolis police. And so firstly,
a lot of Canadians, I think, will remember when about two weeks after George Floyd's death,
city councillors in Minneapolis stood up on an outdoor stage
and promised to dismantle the city's police department.
The commitment is to end our city's toxic relationship
with the Minneapolis Police Department,
to end policing as we know it,
and to recreate systems of public safety
that actually keep us safe.
And for time, I'm going to skip over some process-y details about why that plan initially
stalled in 2020. But last year, activists managed to get more than 20,000 people to sign a petition,
which made this into a ballot question in November's municipal election. And so
voters were asked about replacing the police department with this, quote, public safety
department. And what happened when Minneapolis voted on that? It lost pretty handedly. 56%
of the city voted against dismantling the police department.
Advocates who spent months collecting more than 20,000 signatures to get the question to voters, seeing progress in defeat.
We asked Minneapolis residents to imagine something different, even though that might be scary and it might be hard.
And 60,000 Minneapolis residents said yes. And though there was all that momentum and all the impact that reverberated
internationally from Floyd's death, once that question was officially put on the ballot and
both campaigns got going, you know, I'm not much of a political scientist, but it seems as though
the exact language around defund, dismantle, that language, it wasn't very clear to a lot of people.
Cynthia Brown has lived in Minneapolis for 35 years.
I was going back and forth with my pen, trying to decide which way I was going to vote.
I still feel strongly reform the police department, not get rid of the
police department. Even if you were to tear, if that just simply meant tearing everything down,
what's the alternative? What's to be built back in its place? You know, the request was to have
a department of public safety put there and people didn't know what that was. And this is also
coinciding with humongous spikes in
crime and violent crime and homicide, assaults and carjacking. These numbers have, you know,
gone up during the pandemic. And here in Minneapolis, with this impending ballot question
to get rid of the police department, there are people who are living in the areas of Minneapolis,
in North Minneapolis in particular, where and that's the highest concentration of black communities and communities of color.
I also have the highest concentration of of crime and and violent crime and calls into the police department.
So many people there who want a deep change from the police, from policing, weren't at that moment right now, even, with the kind of crime wave going on,
weren't comfortable just getting rid of police
in the name of some amorphous alternative.
And people just were not comfortable
to make that change in fall of 2021.
Do you think that it all just happened too soon then?
That if the idea was more fleshed out, that if there was a viable alternative presented, that it might have passed?
As for timing, if it was on the belt in 2020 and this notion of a pandemic crime wave hadn't set in so deeply, perhaps even being a little sooner might have been more beneficial, perhaps.
And a confusion around the terms wouldn't have been as much of a deal as just being in the immediate aftermath of still being in the year in which Floyd was killed.
A few days ago, a new city council member, Elliot Payne, tweeted that he was going to get the city council process going again to put a question on the ballot this fall to dismantle the department again. But the lessons that I think a lot of the activists who are on the side of getting rid of the department have learned from that campaign was that maybe so much change isn't,
that much change right away,
it just isn't prudent,
probably isn't that fair for a lot of people.
And also there was a sense that
people want to find other ways
to kind of take control of the police department,
maybe not dismantle it,
find another way to find authority over it.
Meantime, there is this mayor, right?
Jacob Fry.
He's this young mayor.
He campaigned in 2017 on a platform of police reform.
But he has pretty famously never been in favor of disbanding the police. And some of our listeners might also remember this video from June 2020,
where this big crowd of activists at a rally called on him to say he would defund police.
Jacob Fry, we have a yes or no question for you. Yes or no, will you commit to defunding minneapolis police department and when he
wouldn't they actually boot him out of the crowd it's quite something to watch
but he has promised these reforms right um? Especially after George Floyd's murder.
And so what kind of changes has he promised and how much action has actually been taken there on the, you know, reform side?
Yeah, as to that video, that has to do with him making not specific promises, but rather sweeping promises when he was running for mayor in 2017.
And Fry, who was a council member at the time, stepped in and said, I will make deep changes to the police department.
Now, none of those changes really came.
They never really quite occurred.
So he was elected in 2017.
Floyd dies in 2020.
He says he's going to make changes again, but those changes end up being quite small.
Like he banned chokeholds, for example, or he updated the policy so that if a police officer is seeing another police officer do something like pin someone to the ground and suffocating them to intervene.
So those are two small slivers of policy.
And even the situation with Amir Locke and no knock warrants, all he's done is put a pause on approving any other or making requests into a judge for another warrant.
He hasn't said what he will do or what he thinks the policy is.
It should be exactly just that he's going to stop it and then take some time for community engagement to understand what the best policy is going to be,
which he said there's no timeline for. He's not going to rush. And that's just one policy.
If you're asking whether I'm willing to do everything I possibly can throughout the rest of my term to make sure that the police union, the police contract, the arbitration system,
and some of these policies that have resulted in problems specifically for Black and brown people,
have resulted in problems for specifically for black and brown people and murder, by the way,
over a series of generations. I'm all for that. I'm not for I'm not for abolishing the entire police department. I'll be honest about that. So the promises for big sweeping change,
they just flatly haven't come in a way that a lot of voters had hoped for. And even even the
smaller changes have only really come
after in the immediate aftermath of someone's death. Okay. I know there's also this probe into
the Minneapolis Police Department by the Federal Justice Department right now. And all of this is
to say that it seems like there are really some deep, deep problems in this police department
that need to be addressed one way or another. So
with all of that in mind, I'm wondering where the city goes from here. And I know that this
is something that you touched on during this conversation. But I think if I could just ask
you straight, what are activists calling for now? And what does it seem like the mayor is willing to
do? You know, there's calls for Fry to resign, for the interim chief to
resign, for the police officer to be arrested and charged. And these renewed calls and efforts to
either dispense with the police department or put in an advisory commission or some other sort of
authority. And looking at the last couple of years, looking at Fry's tenure in office,
Looking at the last couple of years, looking at Fry's tenure in office, it's really realistic that, you know, no-knock warrants become stricter.
You know, that one singular policy, maybe there's another policy or two around body cameras.
And even those small singular changes won't come for a while, weeks or a month or so.
And even if they come sooner, what's to follow?
If you're just looking at the last couple of years in Fry's time in office, what's to follow isn't going to be any large scale change.
You know, Amir Locke was killed in February, which like in Canada is very cold here. And there are many activists that have said if he was killed in May, like George Floyd, or September, like Jamar Clark, or over the summer, like Dante Wright, the city would be on
fire again. So a lot of those efforts might be diverted into organizing campaigns to dismantle
the police department. Again, I don't want to say I don't believe that those people have the
capacity to do that. But if you're looking at the recent history
after something like this,
a large shift in policing in the city
is not to be expected.
Okay.
Solomon, thank you so much for this.
This was fascinating.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for the interest.
I appreciate it.
All right. That is all for today.
I'm Jamie Poisson.
Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.