The Feb. 2 shooting death of Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man asleep in an apartment when Minneapolis police officers entered on a no-knock warrant, was and remains nothing less than a tragedy. Locke, who was not named in the warrant and was not a suspect in the underlying investigation, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He also happened, for reasons unknown, to be clutching a gun as he stirred beneath a blanket on a couch.
One of the officers, spotting the weapon, took action as he was trained to do in such situations, firing three rounds into Locke.
On Wednesday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman jointly announced that there would be no charges against Officer Mark Hanneman for the shooting. "We would not be able to prove in a court that the officer's use of force was not authorized under the law beyond a reasonable doubt," Ellison said in a statement. "It would be unethical for us to file charges in a case in which we know we will not prevail because the law does not support the charges."
