Minneapolis police shot and killed Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man, on Feb. 2 at about 6:48 a.m. while serving a no-knock warrant for the apartment where he was staying. Police claimed that he pointed a firearm at them before they shot him three times—while he was wrapped up in a comforter on a couch.
The police weren’t even looking for Locke.
Though his weapon was legally owned, details like that shouldn’t matter. The ability for police to enter a home without knocking first is ludicrous, especially since they cited safety for the reason of the no-knock warrant.
Safety for whom? They killed a young man who was not the person that they were looking for, but also using means that should have been outlawed nationally after the police murdered Breonna Taylor in March 2020 while also serving a no-knock warrant. Louisville Metro Council voted to outlaw the use of no-knock warrants in June 2020, though the rest of the state still allows them.
Sadly, 47 states still allow no-knock warrants in some form or another. Oregon, Florida and Virginia are the only states where they are currently prohibited.
How many times do the actions of the police have to come under scrutiny before anything fundamentally changes? Has anything fundamentally changed since the protests over the murder of George Floyd in May 2020?
While some states have enacted certain restrictions on the use of choke holds or have required the use of body cameras, other states have granted the police more money and authority that they can use over people, particularly when cracking down on protestors.
The push to defund the police has been used by conservatives when pointing their fingers at crime statistics, while a majority of Democrats have blamed the movement to defund the police for the loss of election seats in Nov. 2020.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act failed to even make it to the floor of the Senate last September after passing in the House along party-line votes—as Republicans opposed the elimination of qualified immunity and the creation of a national database to track police misconduct.
Politicians have continued to blame cuts to police spending for rising homicide rates, despite the rise in homicides happening nationwide, including cities that increased their police budgets. In the handful of cities where police funding was modestly cut—such as here in Portland, where the police budget was cut by less than 4%—some are restoring that funding.
The logic seems to go that if crime goes down, the police must be doing something right and deserve more funding. Conversely, if crime goes up, then the police request more funding to lower crime rates. No matter what the statistics about crime show, they always request more funding.
So if the rate of homicides rose in the cities that cut police funding, as well as in the cities that increased police funding, why do we continue to give so much money to them? These same institutions continue to create an us-versus-them mentality—and, according to a 2005 Supreme Court ruling, the police don’t even have a constitutional duty to protect anyone.
So what do we do now? Body cameras didn’t prevent Locke from being killed. Even if some kind of justice is brought to those who shot him, what about the judge that signed off on the warrant?
And what about his family? Justice is needed, but a family member lost to police violence can’t be brought back.
While more people are paying attention to the police and their blatant disregard for human life, this feels insufficient. Awareness of the actions the police make, while important, falls short of sparking meaningful legislative change by the politicians who continue to prove how useless they are.
As police killings continue, local and national news stations continue to show us videos of a cop rescuing a dog from a car—or cops playing basketball—all to make us forget the harm they cause to the community. The narrative will continue to push feel-good stories that make people passive to police violence and unchecked power.
Will this debate over police budget cuts and abuses of power ever make any significant progress? Why the hell does this continue to happen? Or, like the debate for a $15 minimum wage, will the conversation go on so long that $26 would be more accurate for today’s cost-of-living—and, similarly, our current solutions to curbing police violence will be made obsolete?
We need real and significant change, as well as direct and tangible action to prevent this cycle of police killings and abuses of power. This has already persisted for far too long.