Locke Was A Bad Shoot, But Not A Crime

To the binary mind, it can’t be possible. If a cop shoots and kills someone, it’s either a good shoot or a crime, whereupon the cop is either prosecuted or it proves the system is corrupt and evil cops can get away with anything. Minnesota police officer Mark Hanneman shot and killed Amir Locke. It was a bad shoot. But it was no crime.

“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.”

Whether Locke was a good guy or not, a budding hip-hop artist or the sort of guy who passes counterfeit twenties, has nothing to do with whether he should have survived the night he slept on the couch of a friend’s apartment, unaware that police would raid the apartment at night without knocking. What happened then could have happened with anyone.

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.

It was Locke’s gun, a legal gun for which he had a license. He didn’t point it at the police, but he had it in his hand, which means that it was a split second away from being pointed, being used. But it wasn’t pointed. And it wasn’t used, even though there was a break-in at night, a man asleep who had no idea the people who just burst into the apartment were police, and no reason to believe that his life wasn’t in imminent danger at the hand of the burglars.

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.

The prosecution was in the hands of Keith Ellison, who had already demonstrated that he would prosecute cops when he took down Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd. And Ellison, if anything, was too inclined to go after cops, particularly when public pressure to do so ran hot.

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

To the public, any shooting by a cop of a black person was suspect by default, which was only fair in the sense that cops had long been given the benefit of the doubt for far too long in far too many scenarios where the shoot was bad, very bad, even flagrantly criminal, and yet the cop walked away from the needlessly dead body without scrutiny.

In this atmosphere, the assumption leaped over the nuance that a shoot might have been wrong, but still not a crime, And indeed, even shoots that were clearly proper were publicly condemned as crimes based on no more information than the fact that a cop pulled the trigger and the bullet ended in a black body. Absurd rationalizations abounded to pretend these were bad shoots, because the only thing that mattered was finding a way to blame the cop and beatify the “victim.”

Here, the Reasonably Scared Cop Rule came into play, as Officer Hanneman saw a man with a gun who could, in a split second, turn it at him and kill him. The scenario raises many flaws with how a theoretically rational system goes wrong, from no-knock nighttime warrants being handed out like candy to the constitutional right to possess a weapon to the expectation that someone on the Good Guy Curve is expected, as he’s awakened from sleep, to process that the burglars are cops who will kill him if he tries to defend himself. Of course, if they were burglars and he defended himself, he would be a hero. If not, he’s dead. Amir Locke did nothing wrong, but he’s dead.

Locke’s mother, understandably, struggled with the decision not to prosecute her son’s killer.

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.”

No doubt Hanneman will be haunted by his killing Amir Locke. No one, no cop, should take a life without being haunted by it, good shoot or bad. And for the reasons Wells expressed, it was a bad shoot. Amir Locke did nothing wrong. He was the good guy here, a man exercising his right to protect himself, a man awoken from sleep by unknown men breaking into an apartment at night. When a person does nothing wrong, they aren’t supposed to die for it.

But Officer Hanneman was not unreasonable in believing that the sleeping guy in an apartment being raided under a judicially authorized no-knock warrant presented in imminent risk of death, and so he shot first and killed him. This is what the law permits, making a choice favoring police over the non-cop when the decision is made whether to pull the trigger. This situation is untenable. The outcome is bad. What it was not is criminal.