No charges in Locke shooting is right call

The Feb. 2 shooting death of Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man asleep in an apartment when Minneapolis police officers entered on a no-knock warrant, was and remains nothing less than a tragedy. Locke, who was not named in the warrant and was not a suspect in the underlying investigation, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He also happened, for reasons unknown, to be clutching a gun as he stirred beneath a blanket on a couch.

One of the officers, spotting the weapon, took action as he was trained to do in such situations, firing three rounds into Locke.

On Wednesday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman jointly announced that there would be no charges against Officer Mark Hanneman for the shooting. "We would not be able to prove in a court that the officer's use of force was not authorized under the law beyond a reasonable doubt," Ellison said in a statement. "It would be unethical for us to file charges in a case in which we know we will not prevail because the law does not support the charges."

That decision is entirely appropriate and serves to further reinforce the principle that in the American system of justice the law is to be applied impartially in line with the facts. Minnesota in the past several years has proven that police officers here are not above the law. Neither are they below it.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on George Floyd's neck until he died, was tried and convicted and now is serving out a 22-year prison sentence, a tougher sentence than guidelines required. Kimberly Potter was a Brooklyn Center police officer when she shot Daunte Wright, saying she mistakenly fired her gun instead of her Taser. She was convicted on two manslaughter charges but received a lighter than standard sentence in part because she was not found to have acted intentionally.

Viewing this range of outcomes Minnesotans can have confidence that when officers come under scrutiny, they will be held to account for their actions — but only for their specific actions, under the specific circumstances they faced. That confidence is tested in a situation such as the Locke shooting. Hanneman was confronted with a split-second decision, having to weigh not only the risk to his own life, but to fellow officers' lives as well.

Not charging was the right call, but that doesn't make the tragedy any less painful. Locke was blameless. He had no criminal record. He had a legal permit for his gun.

It is right that Ellison took pains to point out in a statement Wednesday that "Amir Locke's life mattered." The young man, he said, was just starting out, with a job and dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. He was considering a move to Dallas to start a music career. He came from a "loving family" that included members in the military and law enforcement. He was not, Ellison said, a suspect, "he was a victim."

There were other victims too, Ellison said. Locke's death shattered his family, left a hole in a community that has suffered too much grief already over lives lost to violence. Hanneman's life has been altered forever by the knowledge that he shot and killed an innocent man.

As the Star Tribune Editorial Board noted at the time, the problem is not that rules weren't followed. They were. The problem is the rules themselves.

Rather than a fruitless pursuit against one officer who went by the book, the better and more lasting way to honor Locke's life is to finally take action to ban no-knock warrants with very few exceptions. St. Paul police have managed to do without no-knocks since 2016, without jeopardizing public safety. Minneapolis has defaulted all too often to no-knocks and was, in fact, carrying out the warrant for a St. Paul investigation on Feb. 2. It was the Minneapolis Police Department that insisted on the no-knock.

"This is all very sad," Ellison told an editorial writer. "A young man is dead and no one will be charged. But we have to look at the facts in the case." He called Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey's recent ban on no-knock warrants an important step and an improvement over Frey's previous attempt to restrict such warrants.

"But there is still a Department of Justice review coming," Ellison said, referring to a DOJ investigation into the Minneapolis force that was opened in the wake of Floyd's death. "A ban on no-knocks should be part of what Minneapolis has to agree to, because [otherwise] one mayor can implement it and another can reverse it."

There should be other, more lasting reforms, he said. "It's not always the individual officer in the moment," he added. "It's the larger decisions, made higher up, that led to him being there."

That hard work goes beyond any one city or any one mayor, Ellison said. Reforms are needed at every level including state and federal. "We're all part of the problem — and potentially part of the solution," he said. "We have much more work to do to ensure equal justice under the law."