Stop the War on Black America

A few days ago, police in Minneapolis, Minnesota broke into a apartment with a no-knock warrant and within nine seconds, shot and killed Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man, who was asleep on the couch in the living room. This happened in the same city by the same police force that murdered George Floyd in 2020, and under the same hypermilitarized no-knock raid tactics that led to the murder of Breanna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.

Amir Locke was not named in the warrant, and had no criminal record, but police have justified the shooting by saying he was holding a firearm, for which he had a permit and was legally allowed to carry, and which body cam footage shows was pointing at the floor. In short, another innocent Black person has been killed by police in their sleep, thanks to bad law enforcement policy, egregious mistakes, and a culture of irresponsibility, that has led to the deaths of thousands of other Black Americans at the hands of an overfunded and unaccountable police force.

This weekend, protestors in Minneapolis marched in below-freezing weather to voice their pain and frustration at the paramilitary organization that has invaded their city and caused untold damage to their communities, the Minneapolis Police Department. In response, the Mayor’s office has put a moratorium on police conducting “no-knock raids”, which have been outright banned in several states.

The fact is, no-knock raids are one of the worst, highest-risk, and lowest reward tools that police departments use as a means of terrorizing the communities they are ostensibly tasked to protect. Unambiguously, no-knock raids are a violation of the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure, as there is no reasonable expectation that armed vigilantes can kick in your door unannounced in the middle of the night and start firing indiscriminately if THEY feel threatened. 

Obviously, no-knock raids are fundamentally incompatible with any law-abiding society, particularly one that glorifies the idea of defending your own home with a legally owned personal weapon. And ironically, but unsurprisingly, gun advocacy groups that are predominantly white like the NRA, refuse to criticize militarized police tactics even when they are blatantly antithetical to the idea of personal defense, because the people who are killed in no-knock raids are more often than not, Black or Hispanic.

In fact, there is almost no evidence to suggest that no-knock raids aren’t simply another weapon in the War on Black America, considering that they were explicitly instituted as part of Richard Nixon’s ‘War on Drugs’, but were fast-tracked into common use by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. At the time of Nixon’s resignation, there were approximately 1,500 no-knock raids performed annually, but in the decades since, that number has climbed to 60-70,000 every year. And more than 90% of no-knock raids are over small-time drug offenses, mostly for marijuana. The New York Times found that between 2010 and 2016, 81 civilians were killed in the execution of no-knock warrants, half of whom were a member of a minority group. 

And despite these raids being described by law enforcement as the last-resort, and the strictest, most regulated form of policing because of how serious and potentially unconstitutional they are; legal advocates believe there is effectively no regulation, and that they are a colossal civil rights failure. Some police departments, like the Chicago PD routinely perform no-knock raids on the wrong address, which they blame on bad tips and not double checking their information before kicking down an innocent person’s door. And these cases of lazy and violent policing cost millions in settlements which comes directly from taxpayers, not police officers or their departments.

Essentially, citizens are being traumatized and terrorized, and then paying for it out of their own pockets. A noteworthy detail in the killing of Amir Locke is that the warrant that led to his death was served on behalf of a neighboring city’s police department, which explicitly did not ask for a no-knock warrant. But the Minnesota SWAT team that carried out the raid said they wouldn’t do it unless they got one. 

And as a result, another law abiding Black man, a legal and uninvolved gun owner, not named in the warrant, not guilty of any crimes, and given no chance to defend himself, has been killed by a lawless, unaccountable, overfunded, and hypermilitarized police department that just this year received close to $200 million dollars in a proposed budget, a 15% increase from last year. The truth is, we are nowhere close to ending this War against Black Americans, and in fact, we’re moving in the other direction.

RESOURCES

NATIONAL POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT
nlg-npap.org
National Police Accountability Project (NPAP) is a 501(c)(3) organization and a project of the National Lawyers Guild, which was founded in 1937 as the first racially integrated national bar association. In 1999, NPAP was created as a non-profit to protect the human and civil rights of individuals in their encounters with law enforcement and detention facility personnel. The central mission of NPAP is to promote the accountability of law enforcement officers and their employers for violations of the Constitution and the laws of the United States.

ANTI POLICE-TERROR PROJECT
antipoliceterrorproject.org
The Anti Police-Terror Project is a Black-led, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color. We support families surviving police terror in their fight for justice, documenting police abuses and connecting impacted families and community members with resources, legal referrals, and opportunities for healing. APTP began as a project of the ONYX Organizing Committee.

CAMAPIGN ZERO
campaignzero.org
Campaign Zero, a project of We the Protesters, is a policing policy  movement associated with the broader Black Lives Matter movement which aims to reduce police violence. The organization provides a platform to disseminate existing research to derive best practices to reduce policing-related deaths.

END ALL NO-KNOCKS
endallnoknocks.org
#EndAllNoKnocks is a project of Campaign Zero, a national platform of data-driven policy solutions to end police violence in America. The project focuses on the many victims of senseless no-knock raids across the country and the work that needs to happen to restrict the execution of ALL search warrants.

ACLU
https://www.aclu.org/
In a country devastated by the deaths and injuries of hundreds of people, many of them unarmed, at the hands of police officers, drastic changes are needed in our approach to public safety. Such excessive force by police is particularly disturbing given its disproportionate impact on people of color. CLRP envisions and fights for a country where law enforcement treats all communities with dignity, employs restraint on police power, and uses only the degree of force necessary to maintain the community’s safety.