Eight seconds after a Minneapolis SWAT team entered the apartment where Amir Locke was sleeping on a living room couch, Officer Mark Hanneman shot him dead. A joint report that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman released yesterday uses footage from six body cameras to break those seconds down into tiny pieces, describing what each officer was doing and what he could see at any given moment. The bottom line: Ellison and Freeman say criminal charges will not be filed against Hanneman or any of the other officers who participated in the deadly February 2 raid, because they reacted appropriately to what they reasonably perceived as a lethal threat—the handgun that Locke picked up after the cops stormed into the apartment.
At the same time, Ellison and Freeman describe Locke as "a victim" and concede that his reaction to the pre-dawn, no-knock raid "was not per se unreasonable." In fact, they say, "We recognize that Mr. Locke may have been sleeping and that he, like others in the apartment, may have perceived the officers' entry to be someone breaking into the apartment. We do not dispute this and believe that it is possible that is exactly what happened here."
