Congressmember Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, recently proposed federal legislation to strictly limit the use of no-knock warrants by police officers. She named the bill after Amir Locke.
Locke was killed by police in Minneapolis on February 2. Shortly before 7 a.m., several officers burst through the door of the apartment where Locke was sleeping on a couch. Nine seconds later, he was dead. He was twenty-two years old.
The anti-lynching bill named for Emmett Till, who was tortured and killed in 1955, just made it through Congress on March 7 and will now be signed into law by President Joe Biden.
Minneapolis police officer Mark Hanneman shot Locke, who had been sleeping on a couch. Locke was a legal gun owner and had his gun on him; his father later said he carried a gun because he was working as a food delivery driver and feared for his safety.
The gun Locke had hoped would protect him instead gave Minneapolis police officers an excuse to open fire. There was no time to think, no time for questions, no time to find out that Locke was not even a suspect in any crime, nor was he named on the no-knock warrant officers obtained.
Naming federal legislation after Locke does not guarantee that the bill will pass, even when the details of his death—his family insists he was executed—are made clear. In fact, we’ve seen this movie before, and it doesn’t end well.
Consider the horrifying incident of George Floyd’s murder. He was pinned under the knee of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for more than nine minutes before gasping his last breath. Chauvin was convicted of murder in Floyd’s case, and the three other officers who were with him were also just found guilty of violating Floyd’s civil rights.
In the wake of Floyd’s murder, whole swaths of the city of Minneapolis burned as protesters took to the streets in anger and pain. The rest of the world stood in solidarity, with uprisings taking place around the globe.
Floyd’s killing has led to some important outcomes, including the first-ever conviction in Minnesota of a white police officer (Chauvin) for the use of deadly force in the line of duty against a Black person. Plus the three other officers were recently convicted on federal civil rights charges for standing by as Floyd was murdered. It would be wrong to say that nothing has changed since Chauvin murdered Floyd in public, on a Minneapolis street corner.
Still, Floyd’s murder has not led to any substantive changes in policing, neither locally nor at the federal level.
Democratic Congresswoman Karen Bass of California, along with other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, seized upon the widespread outrage that followed Floyd’s death by introducing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in 2020.
The bill contained many long-hoped for reforms to policing that predated Floyd’s killing, including limits on the use of no-knock warrants. Breonna Taylor’s killing was fresh in the minds of many legislators and observers as well, as she was killed by a Louisville, Kentucky, police officer in 2020 during the execution of what The New York Times called a “botched no-knock warrant.”
Despite all of this, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act did not make it through the U.S. Senate. Republican Senators would not sign off on the bill, in part because it called for an end to qualified immunity for police officers; Democrats would not agree to the Republicans’ counter-legislation because it did not call for such a ban.
The breakdown in negotiations at the federal level led journalist Ja’han Jones to declare the debate over the police reform bill a “charade.” Republicans had no intention of actually agreeing to anything that would significantly alter policing in the United States, leaving Democrats with “no other option than to explore further avenues to stop police brutality in this country.”
But what are those further avenues? Jacob Frey, who was the mayor of Minneapolis in 2020 when Floyd was murdered, and then won reelection last year, claimed in 2021 that the city’s police officers would no longer be allowed to use no-knock warrants.
But that wasn’t true, and that’s what led to Locke’s killing in February. Minneapolis police officers insisted on the need for a no-knock warrant in this case, and Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill—the same judge who oversaw Chauvin’s trial—signed off on it. This wasn’t the sneaky action of some rogue cop; it was sanctioned and justified in a court of law.
Maybe Omar’s proposed legislation will find traction in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. Maybe this time, the brutal death of a twenty-two-year-old who was given nine seconds to wake up and comply with police officers will be enough to convince Republican lawmakers that reform is needed.
Let’s remember, though, that the anti-lynching bill named for Emmett Till, who was tortured and killed in 1955, just made it through Congress on March 7 and will now be signed into law by President Joe Biden. That bill has been in the works in some form or another for more than 100 years.
If legislation won’t change policing in Minneapolis and across the country, what will? For answers, look to guides such as the resource guide “Minneapolis Without Policing” put together by the Black Visions Collective.
Or read through Josh Marcus’s recent article for The Independent, which asks—and seeks to answer—whether or not the Minneapolis Police have learned anything in the nearly two years since George Floyd’s murder.
Clearly, it’s a question that we have yet to answer.