Addendum: Rewrite in progress. The unfortunate death of young Amir Locke did not occur at his home. He spent a night at a friend's home and slept on the couch. Police came to murder his friend. Shot at the first Black person they encountered. And that first Black person they met just so happened to be Amir Locke, a legal gun owner who demonstrated per police cam video that he did not point his gun at police.
Rewrite in progress. Karen Brittingham-Edmond Feb 9, 2021, Relaunched Echo echonewstv.com
Another young Black person is murdered while sleeping. This case is much like the Breonna Taylor murder. Amir Locke, per his parents, share on a KARE11 News Conference with Attorney Ben Crump gut-wrenching testimonies about their 22-year-old son's murder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdq7VdmE8Bo
Andre Locke and Karen Wells shared loving testimonials regarding their son's character per the broadcast conference on KARE11 news on Feb 5, 2022. Amir Locke's parents shared how he was a hard worker. And like many young people, young Amir worked as a Door Dash Delivery person. Per a StarTribune report by Chao Xiong titled "Amir, Locke was respectful and curious, parents say: 'My heart ripped out of my body' by video of the shooting." Parent's of Amir Locke further shared in KARE11 Broadcast & StarTribune Newspaper that their son had "a legal gun permit." And that there had been a "dramatic spike in violent carjackings" in the area where he worked."https://www.startribune.com/amir-locke-was-respectful-and-curious-parents-say-my-heart-ripped-out-of-my-body-to-see-shooting/600143135/?refresh=true
According to today's interview with KARE11 media, Locke's parents shared that Amir planned "moving to Dallas to pursue his music career and other endeavors" before the Minneapolis SWAT team pre-dawn no-knock assault. On Wednesday, Feb 2, the incident occurred at approximately 6:30 A.M. Amir Locke was sound asleep on a friends couch, who resided in the same apartment complex Locke lived in with a blanket wrapped around him.
Andre Locke Amir's father shared that his son was always "a deep sleeper." People who experience deep sleep usually must be shaken repeatedly before waking up. And when they do wake up, they are often groggy and a little disoriented. Never violent.
https://www.dignityhealth.org/articles/does-your-child-have-trouble-waking-up-heres-how-to-help
Readers can only imagine the complete horror of waking up to a group of police officers screaming while shooting at you in your friend's home for no good reason. Before Amir Locke could say, what's happening? The police officers successfully did what they premeditated to do. Kill the first Black man or woman they encounter in the apartment. No knock warrants provide the ambiguity that gives police officers a perfect excuse to carry out their mission, especially against Black citizenship. Guilty or not guilty.
Just like any lynch mob would do in the 1940s or 50s.
This conclusion is drawn because had SWAT Team knocked on the door at a decent hour. Amir Locke or his friend would have more than likely opened the door and said, how may I help you officers today. Just like most Black citizenship do. Especially if they were like Amir, whose parents shared that their family has family members who are police officers, unfortunately, the police officers who executed Amir Locke had a predisposed behavior to do so.
100 Black Men of America is a 501C3 men's civic organization made up of Black police officers & black business men seeking to intervene and improve conditions in their communities.
Young Mr. Amir Locke would be alive today along with a long list of other Black citizens if law enforcement would remove this target population of unstable officers & policymakers from our criminal jurisdiction system. Unfortunately, even the data is misconstrued because of the unethical tolerance of murders by police officers and their cohorts. Hence, the public, who are now witnessing the ongoing murders of Black men and women on their TV screens weekly, particularly since the Covid pandemic hit in 2019, are not being reported the actual numbers of murders happening to Black citizenship daily if the truth is told. And something immediately needs to be done to stop overly aggressive biased police officers and their socially backward cliques.
Per "The Lancet, a British medical journal established in 1823 is an internationally trusted source of clinical, public health, and global health knowledge," found per their clinical study titled Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980-2019: published October 2021. Shares data that "more than half of all deaths due to police violence that we estimated in the USA from 1980 to 2018 were unreported in the NVSS." (National Vital Statistics System)
That means that there are many more Amir Locke's and Breonna Taylors being murdered in their bed by groups of overly aggressive police officers and their cohorts than what is being reported. The study also "found substantial differences in the age-standardized mortality rate due to police violence over time and by racial and ethnic groups within the USA." Moreover, the research found that Black citizens of a particular age are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police. (On a side note, per Lancet study Black, 1st Nation, and Hispanics tend to be the primary fatality of said occurrences. But Black citizens are experiencing said violent encounters with police more often.)
Pictured below Kalief Browder, a Bronx high school student who was imprisoned for three years, falsely accused of a crime he never committed.
The study found that "systemic and direct racism, manifested in-laws and policies (such as no-knock warrants, for example,) "as well as implicit personal biases, result in Black" citizenships "being targets of police violence." Because of these systemic findings, a disproportionate amount of deaths caused by police are subsequently undercounted in official statistics. The Lancet Medical Journal study also found that the overwhelming deaths of Black Americans in the United States is a public health crisis.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01609-3/fulltext
Per a CNN report by Omar Jimenez, Feb 4, 2022, young Mr. Amir Locke "was taken to the Hennepin County Medical Center where he died, according to the police." The Hennepin County Medical Examiner stated that Locke died of multiple gunshot wounds, and the manner of death is homicide. CNN report further shares that Crump said in a statement, "Locke, who has several family members in law enforcement and no past criminal history, legally possessed a firearm at the time of his death. As "the case of Breonna Taylor, the tragic killing of Amir Locke shows a pattern of no-knock warrants having deadly consequences for Black Americans," Crump said.
Please keep the family of Amir Locke in prayer and all of the other young adults like Amir & Breonna whose lives are stolen away just for being Black in America.
"In concern of the Negro"
References;
KARE11 News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdq7VdmE8Bo
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/04/us/minneapolis-police-shooting-no-knock-warrant-amir-locke/index.html
https://www.dignityhealth.org/articles/does-your-child-have-trouble-waking-up-heres-how-to-help
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/04/parents-amir-locke-say-he-was-executed-by-minneapolis-police-during-no-knock-raid/
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01609-3/fulltext
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/02/05/frey-suspends-noknock-warrant-use-after-outcry