(gentle music)
- Good evening and welcome to the Washington Week Extra.
I'm Yamiche Alcindor.
Last week, 22-year-old Amir Locke was shot and killed
by a Minneapolis police officer executing
a no-knock search warrant.
A body cam video released by the city shows police barging
into the apartment where Locke appears to be sleeping
on a couch and starting to get up.
Police say they announced themselves and that Locke was shot
after he pointed a loaded gun in the direction of officers.
It's not clear from the video if the gun was pointed
at officers or if anyone ordered him to drop it
before he was shot.
In an interview with CNN,
Locke's family said he was legally owning that gun,
and they described his death
as a failure of law enforcement.
- Do you blame the officer or the system
that put this officer in this position in the first place?
- I believe that the no-knock warrant is
what caused Amir's death.
- The whole system, everybody.
He wasn't killed, he wasn't murdered, he was executed.
- They are also calling for the city
to make substantial changes to their policies.
- Nothing that they can do can bring our son back,
but the best thing that they can do at this point
with no-knock warrants and prosecuting the officer
who decided to play God.
What they can do is fire him, prosecute him,
and just tell the truth.
"We messed up."
- This comes after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis
which led to widespread protests during the summer of 2020,
and no-knock warrants have long been a standing issue
that extends beyond Minneapolis.
Two years ago in Louisville, Kentucky,
26-year-old Breonna Taylor was shot and killed
after police officers entered her home
with a no-knock warrant.
The backlash from her death eventually led
to Breonna's Law, a total ban
on these warrants in Louisville.
Joining me to discuss policing and politics, Omar Jimenez,
national correspondent for CNN.
He as you saw on video,
he recently interviewed the Locke family.
Errin Haines, editor at large for The 19th,
a nonprofit news site focused on gender and politics.
And Philip Rucker, deputy national editor
for the Washington Post.
Thank you all for being here.
Omar, I wanna start with you.
Talk about the discrepancy
between what the police are saying happened,
and what Amir Locke's family is saying.
And where do things stand now with the case
and with the officers involved.
- Yeah, so this is a discrepancy we see
in a lot of these cases, kind of the initial account
by police and then what we later learn as documents
and as body camera video come out.
In this particular case, the person
that the police encountered initially as they described it,
they described him as a suspect.
Well, as we learned later on, Amir Locke was not named
in any of the search warrants.
As you mentioned before, you were coming to me,
police have said that this gun was pointed
in the direction of the shooting officer,
but based on what they've released so far,
there's no way for us to verify that at this point.
So that discrepancy while it is bad, it's not quite as bad
as what we saw in George Floyd's case
where it was initially described
as a man who had a medical emergency
with no mention of any sort of police restraint,
which as we later learned was incredibly far from the truth.
Where things stand right now,
the case is under investigation by state authorities
as they typically do in these police-involved shootings.
The officer is placed on routine administrative leave,
but in the meantime, the family
and their attorneys are urging not just state lawmakers
but even called on President Biden to institute a ban
on no-knock warrants.
President Biden, they want him to do it
at the federal level for federal law enforcement,
and then at the state level there is a push
by some lawmakers to at least further restrict the use
of them, but we haven't seen
that legislation materialize word for word just yet.
- Yeah, and as you talk about no-knock warrants,
the warrant for Amir's case,
for Amir Locke's case was released this week on Thursday.
Talk a bit first for people maybe who aren't familiar
about what exactly no-knock warrants are.
And then talk a bit about why police say they needed
to use it in this case.
- Yeah, so a no-knock warrant.
I guess the best way to put it is the difference
between a standard search warrant and a no-knock warrant.
Standard is sort of what you would call
a knock-and-announce.
You knock, "Police," you give it a second for them
to potentially interpret the fact that there are police
at the door, and then you go in.
A no-knock warrant is when you don't do that,
or you announce after you've crossed the threshold
of an actual residence or apartment.
And then in this particular case why the officers felt
like they needed to do it, they were searching
for property tied to a homicide case
out of nearby St. Paul, Minnesota.
This was a Minneapolis apartment that they were going into.
And part of their reasoning was they felt it was safer
for them to go in, in a no-knock warrant.
They were worried about the destruction of property tied
to this particular homicide case.
And so they used that as reasoning to then push in
as we saw in the body camera video that was released.
The only issue was it happened as Amir Locke was asleep.
He was startled or appeared to wake up as they came in,
and as his family has argued,
he had no idea what was going on.
No one could have known what was going on,
and to quote one of their attorneys, he said,
"No law abiding gun owner could have survived
that situation."
And that of course becomes the main crux
of the issue for no-knock warrants.
How safe are they really when even law abiding citizens
are put in these particular situations?
- Well, as you said, safety, and one more to Omar
before I brought it out.
You talk about that issue of safety here.
What is the argument against no-knock warrants?
What have activists been saying?
Those who have been successful, those who are still fighting
about the safety of these warrants?
- Well, because you look at cases that have happened.
You mentioned Breonna Taylor coming to me,
the outcome there where you're going
and you're executing a no-knock warrant at off hours,
early morning, in the middle of the night where someone
on the inside, if you don't have that knock, "Hi, police,"
might assume it's just an intruder and treat it as such.
While police are then met with more force
than they might have meant on the other side of things.
So the critics say it's not safe for either side
of the door, makes things more dangerous for police
because now these people are more willing to use force back,
and then vice versa.
And with Breonna Taylor's situation, of course
that translated into policy in Louisville, Breonna's Law.
And we've seen some states take that approach as well.
Oregon, Florida, Virginia became the latest in late 2020.
The state of Kentucky didn't, but Minnesota is trying to
at least make it harder to obtain no-knock warrants.
At least that's what we've been hearing initially
from some state lawmakers.
And Minneapolis itself tried to restrict these
in the aftermath of what happened to Breonna Taylor
to basically reserve them for high-risk situations only
to be approved by supervisors.
But that was the policy in place prior to this.
So it remains to be seen whether Minneapolis mayor,
Jacob Frey says and uses this moment
to take that even further.
- Yeah.
And Errin, you've written about Breonna Taylor,
you wrote about George Floyd.
People thought in this country.
I think a lot of people thought George Floyd
was the tipping point, but now here we are
almost two years later back talking
about the Minneapolis police,
back talking about an African-American man
who has been shot, who has been killed by police.
Talk a little bit about the frustration
that you hear when you talk to civil rights activists,
when you talk to people who are impacted by these shootings,
and where things stand in terms of people's minds
when you see something like this happen again and again.
- Yeah, and listen, Yamiche, here we are.
I mean, this shooting happened
at the beginning of Black History Month.
It happened in a month that marks the 10 year anniversary
of really the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.
And so really it is a marker and a reminder
of how much progress remains to be made on the issue
of communities of color in particular feeling
like they are safe and are being fairly treated
by members of law enforcement, and what can be done
to mitigate the killing of black people by police
and by vigilantes.
As you mentioned, I wrote the first national story
on Breonna Taylor a couple of years ago.
Her case, as Omar mentioned, again raised the issue
of no-knock warrants, and just the idea
that black people are unsafe, even in their own homes
from law enforcement.
Raised the issue of legal gun ownership,
something that came up in the Philando Castile case.
Minneapolis did put at a moratorium on no-knock warrants,
but this is an issue, again, it still has not been addressed
at the federal level.
Police reform that was being discussed
in Congress went nowhere last summer.
It's important to point out as Omar did that states
and local jurisdictions are attempting
to do what Congress is not doing in terms of police reform
whether you're talking about ending no-knock warrants
to banning choke holds, expanding the use of body cameras,
keeping police from being first responders on issues
of mental health that can turn into deadly encounters.
But listen, voters that I talked to headed
into the 2020 election after that summer
around the national reckoning of race
that brought a diverse group of Americans into the streets
by the millions.
What they were saying was that this was one of the issues
that they wanted addressed by this new administration.
They wanted a federal response to what would be done
to stop the really unrelenting killing of black
and brown Americans by law enforcement and vigilantes.
They wanted something to be done,
and the government really should be who intervenes
so that there was a uniform policy
across this country rather than states
and jurisdictions figuring this out on their own.
- Yeah.
And Phil, Errin just broke down the sort
of politics of this.
So many voters are looking at President Biden,
looking at Democrats and saying,
especially I will say African-American voters
and saying policing reform was stalled,
voting rights is stalled.
What are the politics specifically when it comes to policing
for President Biden and the impact that this could have
on Democrats trying to hold onto control here in D.C.?
- Well, Yamiche, those two agenda items have been stalled.
And I think a lot of Democrats are frustrated by that,
and demoralized by that, and thought that
by electing a democratic president and a democratic majority
in the House and the Senate that these agenda items
would be front and center,
and that these reforms would be passed into law.
That there would be policing reform,
that there would be voting protections in the form
of voting rights passed by the Congress.
And that has not happened.
There are a lot of frustrations by activists,
as well as by some elected Democrats
that President Biden has not used the full weight
of his office to push these issues on Capitol Hill.
Remember, when he first came into office,
he was prioritizing the pandemic, he was prioritizing
some of the fiscal bills, first the stimulus bill
for pandemic relief, and then spent months
in negotiations with Senator Joe Manchin,
Senator Kyrsten Sinema, and trying
to win over Republican support
for his Build Back Better initiative
and for infrastructure at the expense,
according to many democratic activists,
of a full-throated push for voting rights,
and for policing reform.
We've in recent weeks heard President Biden give
powerful speeches about voting rights.
And he has talked over the course of his presidency
about how much he values policing reform,
but we haven't seen the energy and the momentum
on Capitol Hill to push these forward.
And you also haven't seen the democratic majorities,
however slim, in the Congress actually pass these laws.
- Yeah.
And Omar, last question to you.
Amir Locke's family, they're calling for federal legislation
to ban no-knock warrants, but as Phil just pointed out,
as Errin just pointed out, there hasn't been much happening,
anything really happening in the last year
as it relates to policing reform.
What's your sense after talking to them, after talking
to activists on the ground there in Minneapolis
about how much they see the federal government
as a place where they can see change or whether
or not this is gonna be really something focused
on local communities because policing is of course so local?
- I think it's been the latter, where of course,
they've made calls to President Biden,
of course they've made calls to the Department of Justice
to get involved.
And they have in some cases where right now in the middle
of the federal prosecution for the other three officers
in the George Floyd case, not Derek Chauvin,
who's convicted at the state level.
And the Minneapolis police department is
under a current DOJ probe right now
for their patterns and practices.
So some of those appeals have been successful,
but as far as concrete policy and action,
it's really come down to trying
to lobby their local officials
and put a lot of pressure there.
I mean, look, in Minneapolis
in particular we saw a really huge movement
to try and dismantle the police department
in favor of sort of encompassing it
within a wider public safety department
to the point where it was able to get put
on the November ballot.
And it failed but it was a very close vote.
And a lot of that energy wasn't so much defeated
as "Wow, we put everything into it and now look,
the people's spoken, it's over."
It's more that "Look how many people voted for this."
The energy to try and reform our police department,
our public safety approach is there, it's just a matter
of trying to channel it.
And the last thing I'll say is there were a lot of ideals
of what policing should look like,
especially after George Floyd
because many people saw the conviction of Derek Chauvin
and the energy around that sort of being the tipping point.
But the ideals have taken a long time to catch up
with reality.
And these practices and policies that are getting put
in place are taking a while to become common practice
for a lot of these police officers who have made a career
out of doing things a certain way.
And I think that's sort of the trouble that we're running
into right now, not to mention the fact
that there was a pandemic,
that last year was the deadliest year for law enforcement.
That was the deadliest year for people out in the streets
as homicide numbers spiked.
That context matters when you're trying to reform yourself
at the center of it all.
- Yeah, yeah.
Well, an important topic that we'll keep covering.
We'll have to leave it there tonight.
Thank you so much to Omar, to Errin, to Phil
for sharing your reporting.
And make sure to sign up for the Washington Week newsletter
on our website.
We'll give you a look at all things Washington.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Goodnight from Washington.
(gentle music)