A 17-year-old has been arrested in connection with the police investigation that led to the killing of Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man Minneapolis police shot to death while they executed an early-morning, no-knock search warrant last week.
According to a police affidavit, the individual in custody is Locke’s cousin, and was arrested in Winona, Minnesota, more than 100 miles southeast of Minneapolis.
The investigation and subsequent shooting have come in for heavy criticism, as Locke wasn’t named on the police search warrant, which was carried out by the MPD on behalf of the neighbouring St Paul Police Department.
The 22-year-old was killed within 10 seconds of officers entering the apartment where he lay asleep under a blanket on a couch.
Officers did not knock on the door ahead of time and announce themselves as police before entering the dwelling. KARE 11 reports that Minneapolis police insisted their search include a no-knock raid, even as St Paul hadn’t asked for one.
Locke was holding a legally registered gun, but not pointing it at officers or fingering the trigger, when he was killed.
The documents surrounding the arrest of Locke’s cousin provide new insight into why police encountered him in the first place in the Bolero Flats apartment development.
The MPD searched three apartments total on Wednesday, including the one where Locke was sleeping, as they sought to arrest three individuals wanted in connection with the January murder of a man named Otis Elder in St Paul, according to police documents.
A combination of surveillance video and witness testimony from the murder scene led them to the apartment complex, where police located clothing associated with Locke’s cousin and his associates, as well as a “large amount” of marijuana.
Prosecutors will seek to try the 17-year-old, who reportedly ran from officers and had a loaded gun, as an adult in county court.
The arrests are unlikely to quell tensions in the Twin Cities, where police have been accused, and in some cases convicted, of brutally killing men of colour in split-second interactions, including Jamar Clark in 2015, Philando Castile in 2016, George Floyd in 2020, and Daunte Wright in 2021.
The killings, part of a well-documented pattern of excessive policing against Minneapolis communities of colour, have inspired massive protests for years, which spread around the country in 2020 after Floyd’s murder and helped inspire a nationwide reckoning around race and policing.
Following the killing of Amir Locke, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey has instituted a partial ban on no-knock warrants, though critics allege the mayor has previously overstated the extent to which his administration cut down on using the practice at the MPD.
