Sometime in or about December 2021, 17-year-old Mekhi Camden Speed, a known gang member, and two other black males were linked to a stolen Mercedes that was used in a spree of armed robberies in the Minneapolis/St Paul area, and later, in January 2022, the men were tied to the homicide of Otis Elder, 38, a black man shot to death inside the City of St. Paul.[i]
In February 2022, officers with the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) served warrants on three apartments in the same building, on behalf of the St. Paul Police Department, looking for Mr. Speed, et al., now wanted for murder.
Given the nature and severity of the underlying crimes, in an effort to mitigate the risks to the law enforcement entry team and to preserve critical evidence believed hidden inside one or all of the three apartments, MPD police investigators applied for and received “No Knock” warrants from the issuing judge.
These warrants, despite the bad press and unpopular notoriety they have endured lately in the press, have always been a useful tool to ensure that police gain a tactical advantage to the predictably dangerous criminals inside. They are authorized by judges only when the affiant for the warrant clearly articulates objectively reasonable grounds for this legal exception in the law.
In Hudson v. Michigan, the Supreme Court observed that officers don’t need to knock and announce if there is a threat of violence or reason to believe providing notice will inspire occupants to destroy evidence.[ii]
During the search of one of the three apartments, pursuant to a legally-obtained search warrant predicated on actual, fact-based probable cause, police encountered Amir Locke, who was sleeping on a sofa inside one of the apartments while armed with a handgun. When police surprised the young man, who was covered by a blanket, he began to arise from his slumber exposing the gun visible in his hand. A police officer, reacting to the imminent threat of grave bodily harm or death presented by the armed subject rustling from under the covers, nullified the threat using deadly force.[iii] A tragedy, indeed, but where does the blame for this needless loss of life really lie?
Nothing would have pleased the radical, anti-police Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison more than the opportunity to have announced the indictment of Officer Mark Hanneman on criminal charges stemming from the incident in question; instead, he was forced to ruefully admit that there was “insufficient admissible evidence to file criminal charges.” He added that “they could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Mark Hanneman, who fatally shot Locke,” had committed any crime(s).
The grief and frustration for Attorney General Ellison, who is himself shrouded in controversy and is widely known for his animus toward law enforcement, must have been unbearable.
Ironically, Mr. Ellison himself made a statement that should actually be applied to justifying the officer’s decision to use deadly force: “Locke’s gun appeared to be ‘pointed in the direction of’ Hanneman’, though it was unclear whether Locke was actually aiming it. We don’t know what was on [Locke’s] mind. It could have been an inadvertent moment,” Ellison declared. In the less than one second that it took these events to unfold, how was Officer Hanneman supposed to glean far more and with greater clarity, than Mr. Ellison, who was still incapable of divining Mr. Locke’s intentions from the evidence with the luxury of intense scrutiny and ample hindsight.
Much like was the case in the deaths of Breonna Taylor, whose demise is cited in the articles covering Locke’s shooting, as well as the deaths of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, Daunte Wright and, yes, George Floyd in Minneapolis, the common theme in all these cases is the underlying culture of crime that seems to pervade communities of color in urban America and the widely ignored fact that police were lawfully doing their jobs. Even the highly controversial dynamics underscoring the death of George Floyd, which somehow led to the convictions of four officers on largely fabricated facts and manipulated evidence, still bears the undisputed truth that Floyd, a convicted felon and career criminal, was committing an alleged crime, which summoned police to investigate; moreover, he was high on a cocktail of life-threatening drugs when he physically resisted arrest. Chauvin’s trial was a showcase of unqualified opinions by folks who lacked the subject matter expertise to offer such assertions.
Police are not randomly targeting people of color based on a systemically racist system imbued with violent proclivities much as “the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”[iv] They are not reacting as they do because the players are black.
Law enforcement tactical operations and criminal investigations are fact-driven. Police can prepare operationally only based on the facts known at the time the operation is planned and executed. They only follow the law when conducting these probes into alleged criminal activities.
The man who put a bullet in the femoral artery of Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly of the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department during the Breonna Taylor search warrant, should have been criminally charged with felony-murder in Taylor’s death. The fact that he was cleared by prosecutors was solely a product of racial identity politics. The scapegoated officer, Brent Hankison, who was unjustly charged on contrived allegations of “Reckless Endangerment,” was later justly – and quickly – cleared by a jury of his peers.[v] Tragically, had they not taken the extra, unmandated step of knocking and announcing their presence and intentions, Mattingly may never have suffered the near-fatal injury to his leg, having surprised the sleeping couple, rather than alerting them to the fact that “police with a search warrant” were entering the apartment.
While I will not deny that Ms. Taylor and Mr. Locke’s deaths were tragedies that might have been averted, the fault does not lie with the legal system or the officers who were mandated to take action in the wake of serious crimes; the elephant in the room is that no one seems to admit that personal responsibility among those that create these highly dangerous and damaging scenarios that lead to police action have great culpability for the logical consequences of their actions.
Why is no one asking Mr. Speed why he chose to participate in the crime wave that led police to search those three apartments in Minneapolis that day that Locke was regrettably placed in such a precarious situation?
Targeting the police who find themselves in these untenable situations is tantamount to accusing the attending physician instead of the cancer when someone perishes from this terminal disease. But no one seems to see the truth in this war on police that has waged in the media since Black Lives Matter raised its fist in the air and created an alternate reality that seems to have all but hypnotized the left and the MSN, as well as having fortified parasites like Benjamin Crump, Al Sharpton, and the likes of Ilhan Omar.
No one has ever accused police officers of getting rich by exploiting their position as public officials, like frequently is the case among our elected officials; the vast majority of police officers are leaders in their community and go on to highly successful late-life careers in other professions when they retire. Most are decent family men and women who hold themselves to higher than average standards because the daunting responsibility with which they are tasked requires it.
For some to leverage these lies and leftist propaganda to disparage law enforcement and persecute and target men and women who risk their lives everyday and frequently sacrifice it in service to their communities is insane. And, if left uncorrected, the long-term consequences of this delusional campaign to defund and disband police will have a dire and frightening denouement – one that I promise will be worse than predicted.
SOURCES
[i] O. Jimenez (8 February 2022) Teenager wanted in connection with no-knock warrant that led to Amir Locke’s death was his cousin. CNN. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/08/us
[ii] M. Schwartzbach, Esquire (Undated) Knock-and-Announce Rule and No-Knock Warrants. NOLO. Retrieved from https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/warrants-the-knock-notice-rule.html
[iii] S, Hoanglong (11 April 2022) Amir Locke shooting: More bodycam video released by Minnesota BCS. Fox9 KMSP. Retrieved from https://www.fox9.com/news/amir-locke-minneapolis-police-shooting-body-camera-footage-bca
[iv] 1 Peter 5:8
[v] A. Almasy (4 March 2022) Ex-officer Brett Hankison was found not guilty of endangering Breonna Taylor’s neighbors in a botched raid. CNN. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/03/us/brett-hankison-trial-closing/index.html
