One year after a member of the Minneapolis Police Department fatally shot Amir Locke, the young man’s parents have filed a federal civil lawsuit against the officer who pulled the trigger, the city and other members of the SWAT team present at the time of his slaying.
The claim says the 22-year-old did nothing wrong and was startled by officers who barged into the apartment he was a guest in as they executed a no-knock search warrant.
Locke was not named on the search warrant document and was killed within seconds of law enforcement team’s entry. The officer, who killed Locke, Mark Hanneman, asserts he felt threatened by the victim and acted in self-defense.
On Friday, Feb. 3, civil rights attorney Ben Crump released a statement regarding a 35-page federal lawsuit he and his associates filed on behalf of Karen Wells and Andre Locke in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota. He named the city of Minneapolis and the officers connected to the Feb. 2, 2022, event (including Hanneman) as defendants in the complaint, claiming his clients’ son was deprived of his civil rights under the Fourth and 14th Amendments.
The attorneys, including co-counsel Antonio Romanucci and Jeff Storms, add Hanneman violated policies, procedures, and training implemented by the city to prevent tragic police-involved shootings like this.
“The City of Minneapolis, as we’ve seen clearly and painfully in recent years, has a history of using excessive and unjustified force, particularly against Black men,” Crump wrote in a prepared statement. “The Black community in Minneapolis is 19 percent of the population, but 63 percent of the cases where Minneapolis Police use force.”
“Amir Locke should not have died one year ago, and we will use this lawsuit to fight for justice and for much-needed change in the way Minneapolis trains its officers,” the civil rights lawyer said.
Early in the morning on the day Locke died, he was sleeping…
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