Twin Cities activists, students, and community members are taking to the streets—once again—to demand change after the police killing of Amir Locke.
Early in the morning on Wednesday, February 2, a Minneapolis Police Department SWAT team burst into a downtown Minneapolis apartment with a no-knock warrant and shot and killed Locke, a twenty-two-year-old Black man who was asleep on the couch with a gun that he was licensed to carry in his hand, though there was no indication he was going to use it.
“I’m really disappointed, but I’m not surprised. I’ve been living in this state for forty-seven years, so I know what the Jim Crow North feels like.”
Locke was not a suspect in any police investigation, and he was not included in the search warrant. He was still under a comforter when officers shot him, less than two seconds after the team of officers kicked the couch to wake him up.
More than a thousand people turned out in downtown Minneapolis on Saturday, February 5 to protest Locke’s killing and to stand in solidarity with his family. His father, Andre Locke, took the microphone for half an hour to tell the crowd about his son.
“Amir was a good kid,” Locke told the crowd. “Amir believed in working hard in whatever he decided to do. Amir believed in respect . . . he was responsible, and he didn’t deserve to have his life taken the way that it was.”
“Why couldn’t my son bury me?” Locke asked.
Activists in the Twin Cities are demanding accountability for those responsible. The officer who killed Locke, Mark Hanneman, has been placed on administrative leave but has not been fired nor charged in the shooting. Activists are calling for consequences higher up the chain of command, as well, by demanding resignations from interim MPD Chief Amelia Huffman and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
Estelle Timar-Wilcox
Students start a march from Central High School toward the governor's mansion.
“Our city just keeps erupting,” St. Paul School Board member and local activist Chauntyll Allen said at a press conference of Black women supporting the Locke family. “We have a mayor who clearly does not understand what leadership is . . . it is your responsibility to fire everybody until you can fire the cop.”
Frey has long faced criticism from Minneapolis activists and residents on his response to police brutality and racism. After the murder of George Floyd, protesters booed Frey off of a street for his hesitancy to commit to dismantling MPD.
Given the history of police brutality in Minneapolis, the killing of Locke has been met not with shock but with a grim anger.
“I’m really disappointed, but I’m not surprised,” Allen said. “I’ve been living in this state for forty-seven years, so I know what the Jim Crow North feels like.”
Anika Robbins, founder of The Anika Foundation and Black Votes Matter Minnesota, said the cycle of police violence and protest has gone on too long without meaningful change. As she put it, “Blood is on your hands, and it has been since the inception of the Minneapolis Police Department over 150 years ago.”
Student activists are bringing energy—and fury—to this cycle of protests, too. More than a thousand students filled the streets in front of Central High School and marched to the governor’s mansion on Monday, February 7, in a walkout organized by Central’s Black Student Union and the local organization MN Teen Activists.
Estelle Timar-Wilcox
Students raise their fists in support of a speaker at Monday's school walkout.
Students circulated a list of demands, including the resignations of Frey and Huffman, a complete ban on no-knock warrants, and the demilitarization of MPD.
Allen came out to the march and said she was grateful to the youth who walked out.
“We need young people in the streets,” Allen said. “We need young people leading this movement. It doesn’t make sense for me to go sit at a table and decide policy without the voice of the young people.”
Standing in the bed of a pickup truck outside of the governor’s mansion, Central High School senior Grace Mutondo demanded better from the state. She spoke of the trauma that Black youth grow up with as they see the cycle of names making headlines for police brutality.
“The thing that hurts more is when we see the ages of these lives that are taken,” Mutondo tells The Progressive. “Amir Locke, twenty-two years young.”
“Black youth [are] not able to grow and fulfill our dreams,” Mutondo continued. “We always have this thought in the back of our mind: Will I make it home today or not? Will I be able to see my mama today or not? I will not settle for that, and you shouldn’t either.”
Locke’s killing happened during in the middle of the ongoing federal trial of the three officers who stood by as Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, and, last December, former Brooklyn Center Police Officer Kimberly Potter was convicted of manslaughter in the death of Daunte Wright, whose shooting last spring sparked a week of tense protests and violent police crackdown in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center.
Estelle Timar-Wilcox
A student organizer stands atop a truck to address students outside the governor's mansion.
The guilty verdicts for Chauvin and Potter, and the promise of change that followed Floyd’s killing, had initially sparked some hope among activists.
“This is 2022,” Allen said at the rally outside the governor’s mansion. “We have come too far. The precedent has been set. We know what justice looks and feels like.”
But despite those victories in court, many of the long-standing demands of Minneapolis’s racial justice movement—like shuttering the police department in favor of a department of public safety—have gone unfulfilled.
Locke’s Aunt Neka Gray said at a press conference that she hopes the city commits to change and breaks the cycle of violence—which it didn’t for Locke.
“Amir won’t benefit from it, but the next person will,” Gray said. “We do not get to hug him and love on him and see him live out his dream, but the next family can.”