Parents of young black man killed by police in Minneapolis demand 'justice'
In this image taken from Minneapolis Police Department body camera video, 22-year-old Amir Locke can be seen wrapped in a blanket on a couch holding a gun moments before he was shot by police, the February 2, 2022 in Minneapolis.
PA
Text by: RFI Follow
3 mins
In the United States, a video shows the death of a black man during a police intervention in Minneapolis, two years after the death of George Floyd suffocated by a police officer in the same city.
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The sequence barely lasts 10 seconds.
It was filmed by the camera carried by one of the police officers.
We see an intervention unit entering an apartment without knocking, opening the door with the key, then announcing itself loudly.
A few meters from the entrance, a man seems asleep under blankets on a sofa.
Under the cries and in the agitation, he sits up with a pistol in one hand.
Three shots were then fired by the police.
The man collapses.
Amir Locke, 22, will not survive his injuries.
A police statement explains that the weapon was pointed in the direction of the agents, which the images do not make it possible to establish with certainty, specifies our correspondent in Washington,
Guillaume Naudin
.
“
A mother should never see her son executed like this
,” his mother told a press conference, promising to fight for “
justice
”.
The young man's father pointed out that his son had no criminal record and had a gun license.
For him, the police "
could have done otherwise
", in particular by ordering him to drop his weapon before shooting.
“
They didn't give him a chance.
»
This death revives the memory of the murder of
George Floyd, who died of suffocation
after almost 10 minutes of agony, his neck held under the knee of a
police officer from this same city of Minneapolis
.
The scene had been fully filmed and shared.
This case had led to protests in the city, across the United States and beyond.
A questionable method
To ease tensions, Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison "
promised
" to conduct a "
rigorous and fair
" review of the facts.
"
Amir Locke's life mattered
," he added in a statement, referring to the iconic Black Lives Matter slogan.
Without prejudging the conclusions of the investigation, Democratic Governor Tim Walz for his part noted "
the need to go further in the reforms
" of the police adopted after the death of George Floyd, in particular "
about search warrants
".
The agents intervened with a so-called "no knock" warrant, "enter without knocking", in which the name of Amir Locke did not appear.
It was issued as part of a homicide investigation opened in the nearby city of Saint Paul and authorized officers not to announce themselves, according to Minneapolis Police Chief Amelia Huffman, quoted by NPR radio.
These warrants have been implicated in several cases of police violence and Minnesota had restricted their use after the major demonstrations of the summer of 2020. They "
continue to steal innocent black lives
", denounced the lawyer for the parents of Amir Locke , Ben Crump, who also represented the family of George Floyd.
As #BreonnaTaylor showed us, no-knock warrants have deadly consequences for innocent law-abiding Black people!
@MinneapolisPD executed a no-knock warrant yesterday at 6:48am, killing Amir Locke while he was wrapped in a blanket on the couch.
Now we demand #JusticeForAmirLocke!!
pic.twitter.com/FLKqR0eszP
— Ben Crump (@AttorneyCrump) February 4, 2022
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