Two-thirds of people killed by Minneapolis police are Black
African-Americans make up less than 20 percent of the city's population
Early Wednesday morning Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man, was asleep on a couch at a Minneapolis residence when a SWAT team with the city’s police department entered, shouting multiple commands with their guns drawn. Body camera footage released by the department shows a groggy and disoriented Locke struggling to sit up and apparently reaching for a handgun that had been placed nearby. The officers shoot him dead almost immediately. A total of nine seconds elapsed between when they entered the apartment and when they shot and killed Locke.
Locke’s gun was legally owned, according to attorneys for his family, and the man had no criminal record, nor was he the target of the SWAT team’s warrant. It’s unclear at the moment why he was at that particular residence, or what he was trying to do when the officers killed him. Was he reaching for the gun in self-defense? Was he trying to alert the officers to its presence? Was he even aware, in his half-awake state, that the men shouting at him were police?
Locke is at least the 12th person killed by Minneapolis police officers since 2013, according to data maintained by mappingpoliceviolence.org. While Minneapolis’ population is more than 60 percent White, fully two thirds of the people killed by the police department over the past decade have been Black. That staggering racial disparity is again coming under scrutiny in the wake of Locke’s killing.
The officers who shot Locke were executing what’s known as a no-knock raid, which allows them to quickly enter a building without first knocking and announcing their identity. In theory, they’re supposed to be used in cases where officers are dealing with especially violent suspects, or when announcing their presence might give suspects time to escape or destroy evidence.
But in reality they often get used for routine police business where the greatest risk springs from the inherent chaos caused by a group of men charging into a residence with guns drawn. An ACLU study found that 80 percent of SWAT team deployments were for simple search warrants, most of them related to suspected drug use. The raids often turn deadly: between 2010 and 2016 at least 81 civilians and 13 police officers were killed in no-knock raids, according to a New York Times investigation. Official statistics are impossible to come by because police departments typically aren’t required to track them.
Following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, the city of Minneapolis announced that it was limiting the use of these raids, and the state of Minnesota placed additional restrictions on the practice. But the raids haven’t been banned completely, and as a result Minneapolis police have continued requesting them from judges and getting them approved, at similar rates to the period before the restrictions.
The raid Locke was caught up in wasn’t even supposed to be a no-knock situation, according to the latest reporting. It was initiated by St. Paul police, who wanted a standard knock-and-announce warrant. But the Minneapolis police department, who carried out the raid, insisted on approval for a no-knock entry.
As a result, a young man with no criminal record is now dead, and a city is reckoning once again with the pain its law enforcement officers inflict on its Black community.