An overhaul of the police can’t be put off any longer. Metropolitan police have released a 14-second video that shows how a Minneapolis SWAT team stormed into the home of Locke, who was thought to be asleep at the time. They were doing a no-knock search warrant in a murder investigation at the time. He was then seen holding a gun when he woke up, just a few seconds before he was shot and killed. Police said Locke wasn’t named in any search warrants, and lawyers for Locke’s family said he was legally allowed to have his gun.
However, the bottom line is that in a city still reeling from the homicide of George Floyd in May 2020, yet again, an innocent Black life has been needlessly killed by Minneapolis law enforcement.
Locke’s death was even more tragic because the circumstances that led to his death could have been prevented if elected officials from both parties in Washington took police reform more seriously. The no-knock search warrant, which disproportionately affects African Americans across the country, was one example. It doesn’t matter how important it is to change the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Federal lawmakers haven’t voted to change it not once, but twice. While it might have only banned no-knock warrants in drug cases, the laws would have been a big step in the right direction for the police.
However, we’re back. In 2022, less than three years after Breonna Taylor was killed by a no-knock warrant in Kentucky and less than two years after George Floyd was killed, another Black man has been killed by law enforcement because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I live in the Minneapolis area and, as I wrote in the aftermath of the Floyd homicide, the whole thing was a rude awakening for me and many other white people to the daily challenges that people of colour, especially African Americans, face when they interact with law enforcement. I thought that after so many Black lives were lost to bad policing, like Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Daunte Wright, and Philando Castile, who have become household names, federal lawmakers would have done something to clean up, set national standards, define best practises, and save lives. But they didn’t.
That is not the case with elected officials and some police departments across the country, though. They haven’t done anything, and the result has been the loss of innocent young lives and families torn apart by senseless deaths.
This is where we are now.
In June 2020, less than a month after the death of Floyd, Democrats in both houses of Congress proposed a bill that would have changed everything. It passed the House but didn’t pass the then-Republican-controlled Senate. Republicans, on the other hand, came up with a less powerful version of the bill that Democrats blocked. As of 2021, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act had been reintroduced and passed by the House of Representatives again, but now it was called the George Floyd Act.
It took a long time for the public outcry over Black Lives Matter to die down and questions about the Covid-19 Delta variant to surface on Capitol Hill. This law called for a national registry of police misconduct, a ban on racial and religious profiling by law enforcement, and changes to immunity, which protects police from being held accountable.
When it came to passing laws, even the only Republican in South Carolina who is black couldn’t get a minimum of nine other Republicans on his side. This meant that even though the laws needed a majority of 60 votes to pass, they didn’t have enough Republicans to get there. It also didn’t work out without the help of Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Without their help, there was no way for the bill to get to President Joe Biden’s desk so that it could become law. Scott even looked at his own bill at the end.
One of the main parts of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was that it banned no-knock warrants for federal narcotics investigations. It also threatened to take back federal “dollars” if state and local law enforcement agencies didn’t follow through. In the two years since Breonna Taylor’s death, many places either cut back on or completely stopped using no-knock warrants. Minneapolis, on the other hand, was not one of them.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune found that since the start of the new year, Minneapolis police officers had applied for and been granted at least 13 applications for no-knock warrants. That’s one more than the 12 regular search warrants they got during the same time period.
Though the no-knock warrant that led to Locke’s shooting was not part of a drug investigation, the threat of pulling federal “dollars” from local police budgets would have put a spotlight on the whole practise of no-knock warrants, which could have led to less frequent use of these very aggressive methods. After Locke died, the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, put a moratorium on the watch until more research could be done. This led to Minneapolis being where it is now.
It’s also getting harder for Democrats to talk about police reform now that the 2022 midterms are getting closer. There has been a big rise in city murder charges across the country. President Biden recently visited New York City to help Eric Adams, a former NYPD officer who is now mayor. He called for more money for police “to provide the tools, the training, the funding to be partners, to be protectors, and to know the neighbourhood.” This lack of will was on full display when Biden met with Adams.
For all the speeches about how Floyd, Taylor, and so many other Black people have died at the hands of law enforcement, federal lawmakers have done nothing to stop the cycle from repeating itself. This happened again with the death of Amir Locke.
Sadly, if there isn’t a lot of action in Washington, it’s going to happen again.
