(Gregg Pupecki, Headline USA) The Minneapolis Police Department is once again under investigation, this time for the way their officers executed an early morning, no-knock warrant in which an individual not named in the warrant ended up being killed by police because he was holding a firearm.
Amir Locke, a 22-year-old man, was shot by police nine seconds after they entered a private residence using a key. When officers saw someone sleeping on the coach, they all started yelling and shining flashlights at the sleeping man.
As Locke was getting up from under the covers, he was holding a gun and Officer Mark Hanneman, a member of the eight-person SWAT team, fired at the man, striking him three times, twice in the chest and once on the right wrist, according to the incident report from the police.
Under pressure from the community the police department released the body-cam footage that shows the incident. Reports show Locke was a legal gun owner and had a constitutional right to possess a firearm.
The parents of Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man fatally shot by police in a Minneapolis apartment during a no-knock warrant execution, said Friday that he had obtained a gun legally after a conversation with the family, CNN reported. https://t.co/r2igwe4YdS
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) February 6, 2022
The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, a 2nd Amendment rights group, responded to the killing, defending gun owners and describing the situation in which any gun owner might find themselves during a no-knock warrant.
“He is awoken with a confusing array of commands coming from multiple officers who are pointing lights and firearms at him,” said Rob Doar, senior vice president of governmental affairs.
“Mr. Locke did what many of us might do in the same confusing circumstances, he reached for a legal means of self-defense while he sought to understand what was happening,” Doar said.
Headline USA reached out to the NRA but they had no comment. The NRA promotes and defends gun owners on their twitter account, but they have no mention of this incident.
The warrant in question was issued for Locke’s cousin, who was wanted for a murder charge and did not live in that apartment, according to CNN.
Meanwhile there are calls for the mayor of Minneapolis to resign for misleading the public into thinking that his office had already banned no-knock warrants as part of the much publicized police reform in Minneapolis, reported Fox News.
