Last week in Minnesota, yet another murdering pig walked free for killing yet another young Black man for no reason other than yet another “mistaken” no-knock warrant. 

Adding insult to injury, the state attorney general told people not to lose hope and to keep working “to make the system one we can proud of.”

“Proud of”? Read the story below and see what YOU think.

Amir Locke was a 22-year-old Black man, an aspiring musician who was planning to move to Texas in a few days to be close to his mother. The police claim they had busted into the apartment Amir was sleeping in because they were looking for an alleged homicide suspect. This was on February 2, 2022. Amir had no criminal history, and his name was not on the warrant the police were acting on. As they entered the apartment, Amir was sleeping on the couch. The cops kicked the couch, and the startled Amir picked up his gun (which he had a permit for). One of the pigs, Hanneman, immediately opened fire, hitting Amir three times and killing him.¹

The police claimed that Amir Locke was engaged in “evasive movements” and did not comply with “verbal commands” and that he raised the barrel of his gun toward the cops. This is not what their own body cam video shows. And it is not even what one of the other pigs on the scene said—that when Locke was told to show his hands, he retreated under the blanket and began “vigorously moving around.”

Locke’s mother, Karen Wells, called the police killing of her son “an execution.”

On April 6, prosecutors said no charges will be filed against Mark Hanneman, the Minneapolis cop who killed Amir Locke as he and other SWAT police carried out a “no-knock” warrant on February 2, 2022.

Minnesota Attorney General Says the Pig Was Justified… but Don’t Lose Hope!

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman, whose offices reviewed the Amir Locke case, said they determined that Hanneman was “justified” in firing his weapon. Publicly, they shed crocodile tears, saying they were critical of no-knock raids. They said “Amir Locke’s life mattered” and called his death a “tragedy.”

But the fangs and reality—that the life of a young Black man like Amir doesn’t matter to this system and their police—came out when Ellison and Freeman said “there is insufficient admissible evidence to file criminal charges in this case. Specifically, the State would be unable to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt any of the elements of Minnesota’s use-of-deadly-force statute that authorizes the use of force by Officer Hanneman.”

Ellison then said, “This is not the time for people to feel like there’s no hope” and “People should carry forward and continue to try to make the system one we can all be proud of.”

This is nothing but an insult and huge slap in the face to the family of Amir Locke and all the people furious at the senseless pig murder of Amir. Think about the utter outrage of this statement. Ellison first tells people that the system has decided that yet another murdering pig will not be punished. That the system is not even going to pretend that it will try to prosecute the cop who murdered Amir Locke. But  then, according to Ellison, the people are supposed to put hope in this very same system and somehow try to “make it better.” Just think about the absurdity of what Ellison is saying, that the people should have “hope,” after endless attempts at reforms like police review boards and community policing, and after millions of people rose up around the world against the murder of George Floyd, there has been NO STOP to the pigs killing people and NO STOP to them walking free.

All a murdering cop has to say to justify murdering someone is that they “feared for their life.” And the U.S. Supreme Court, with its outrageous doctrine of "qualified immunity," has made it very difficult to sue murdering cops for violation of people's civil rights even in the most blatant cases.²

The Right to Bear Arms Is Supposed to Apply To EVERYONE… Not Just White People

Then there is the question of Amir Locke’s right to bear arms. If someone is sleeping on the couch and a gang of people suddenly crash through the door, is it understandable that the person might think they have to defend themselves? And Amir Locke had a permit for the gun he grabbed. What about his Constitutional right to bear arms?

In “SOMETHING TERRIBLE, OR SOMETHING TRULY EMANCIPATING: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed, A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution,” Bob Avakian talks about “the reality that for white supremacists and fascists generally the Second Amendment, the ‘right to bear arms,’ has been regularly upheld and given the backing of the law and the courts, and the support of the police and other institutions of the state; while for Black people, other oppressed people, and generally those opposing the oppression and injustice of this system, the ‘right to bear arms,’ even in self-defense, has been actively opposed and suppressed.”

What if this had been a case, not of Amir Locke, but a white guy in a white neighborhood? First of all, would the cops have knocked on the door instead of busting in? Would the cops have been a lot less trigger-happy if they were looking for a white suspect?

A NewsOne article titled “Violent White Folks Who Were Taken Into Custody With Loving Care By Police” (September 7, 2021) gives a number of examples of how the cops—who, when it comes to Black people, “shoot first and ask questions later”—handle white people very differently. A self-described Trump-supporting white supremacist with a huge swastika tattooed on his chest caused a racist disruption in a Florida restaurant. He threatened to sexually assault one woman and then physically attacked another. The police came and nicely took the racist into custody, even joking with him as they eased him into the cop car. An armed white man, suspected of injuring a cop, barricaded himself in a home, leading to a standoff with the police. He was eventually, peacefully, taken into custody. There is the example of Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white man who massacred nine people at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. The police not only peacefully took him into custody when they caught him but even bought a Burger King meal for him.

But remember Philando Castile, the 32-year-old Black man who was murdered in a police traffic stop for merely telling the cops that he had a legal registered firearm with him?

Oh, and then there’s the National Rifle Association (NRA), which will loudly protest whenever some fascist somehow runs into some restrictions on his/her right to brandish guns to threaten protesters or ordinary Black people, Latinos, immigrants or other people of color. Yet somehow the NRA didn’t speak out about Castile’s right to bear arms. And they didn’t speak out about Amir Locke’s right to bear arms.

In her book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, Carol Anderson writes, “Guns are not the key variable here. It’s Black people. Their legal status—enslaved, free Black, denizen, Jim Crowed citizen, or citizen of ‘post-racial America’—did not change the way the Second Amendment worked against their rights.”

The fact is we need a revolution to get beyond this madness. But right now, there cannot be one set of rules for white people, and one for everyone else; and the fight for all civil rights supposedly “guaranteed” by the Constitution must be waged as part of building toward that revolution.