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(gentle music) Good evening and welcome to the Washington Week Extra. I'm Yamiche Alcindor. Last week, 22-year-old Amir Locke was shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer executing a no-knock search warrant. A body cam video released by the city shows police barging into the apartment where Locke appears to be sleeping on a couch and starting to get up. Police say they announced themselves and that Locke was shot after he pointed a loaded gun in the direction of officers. It's not clear from the video if the gun was pointed at officers or if anyone ordered him to drop it before he was shot. In an interview with CNN, Locke's family said he was legally owning that gun, and they described his death as a failure of law enforcement. Do you blame the officer or the system that put this officer in this position in the first place? I believe that the no-knock warrant is what caused Amir's death. The whole system, everybody. He wasn't killed, he wasn't murdered, he was executed. They are also calling for the city to make substantial changes to their policies. Nothing that they can do can bring our son back, but the best thing that they can do at this point with no-knock warrants and prosecuting the officer who decided to play God. What they can do is fire him, prosecute him, and just tell the truth. "We messed up." This comes after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis which led to widespread protests during the summer of 2020, and no-knock warrants have long been a standing issue that extends beyond Minneapolis. Two years ago in Louisville, Kentucky, 26-year-old Breonna Taylor was shot and killed after police officers entered her home with a no-knock warrant. The backlash from her death eventually led to Breonna's Law, a total ban on these warrants in Louisville. Joining me to discuss policing and politics, Omar Jimenez, national correspondent for CNN. He as you saw on video, he recently interviewed the Locke family. Errin Haines, editor at large for The 19th, a nonprofit news site focused on gender and politics. And Philip Rucker, deputy national editor for the Washington Post. Thank you all for being here. Omar, I wanna start with you. Talk about the discrepancy between what the police are saying happened, and what Amir Locke's family is saying. And where do things stand now with the case and with the officers involved. Yeah, so this is a discrepancy we see in a lot of these cases, kind of the initial account by police and then what we later learn as documents and as body camera video come out. In this particular case, the person that the police encountered initially as they described it, they described him as a suspect. Well, as we learned later on, Amir Locke was not named in any of the search warrants. As you mentioned before, you were coming to me, police have said that this gun was pointed in the direction of the shooting officer, but based on what they've released so far, there's no way for us to verify that at this point. So that discrepancy while it is bad, it's not quite as bad as what we saw in George Floyd's case where it was initially described as a man who had a medical emergency with no mention of any sort of police restraint, which as we later learned was incredibly far from the truth. Where things stand right now, the case is under investigation by state authorities as they typically do in these police-involved shootings. The officer is placed on routine administrative leave, but in the meantime, the family and their attorneys are urging not just state lawmakers but even called on President Biden to institute a ban on no-knock warrants. President Biden, they want him to do it at the federal level for federal law enforcement, and then at the state level there is a push by some lawmakers to at least further restrict the use of them, but we haven't seen that legislation materialize word for word just yet. Yeah, and as you talk about no-knock warrants, the warrant for Amir's case, for Amir Locke's case was released this week on Thursday. Talk a bit first for people maybe who aren't familiar about what exactly no-knock warrants are. And then talk a bit about why police say they needed to use it in this case. Yeah, so a no-knock warrant. I guess the best way to put it is the difference between a standard search warrant and a no-knock warrant. Standard is sort of what you would call a knock-and-announce. You knock, "Police," you give it a second for them to potentially interpret the fact that there are police at the door, and then you go in. A no-knock warrant is when you don't do that, or you announce after you've crossed the threshold of an actual residence or apartment. And then in this particular case why the officers felt like they needed to do it, they were searching for property tied to a homicide case out of nearby St. Paul, Minnesota. This was a Minneapolis apartment that they were going into. And part of their reasoning was they felt it was safer for them to go in, in a no-knock warrant. They were worried about the destruction of property tied to this particular homicide case. And so they used that as reasoning to then push in as we saw in the body camera video that was released. The only issue was it happened as Amir Locke was asleep. He was startled or appeared to wake up as they came in, and as his family has argued, he had no idea what was going on. No one could have known what was going on, and to quote one of their attorneys, he said, "No law abiding gun owner could have survived that situation." And that of course becomes the main crux of the issue for no-knock warrants. How safe are they really when even law abiding citizens are put in these particular situations? Well, as you said, safety, and one more to Omar before I brought it out. You talk about that issue of safety here. What is the argument against no-knock warrants? What have activists been saying? Those who have been successful, those who are still fighting about the safety of these warrants? Well, because you look at cases that have happened. You mentioned Breonna Taylor coming to me, the outcome there where you're going and you're executing a no-knock warrant at off hours, early morning, in the middle of the night where someone on the inside, if you don't have that knock, "Hi, police," might assume it's just an intruder and treat it as such. While police are then met with more force than they might have meant on the other side of things. So the critics say it's not safe for either side of the door, makes things more dangerous for police because now these people are more willing to use force back, and then vice versa. And with Breonna Taylor's situation, of course that translated into policy in Louisville, Breonna's Law. And we've seen some states take that approach as well. Oregon, Florida, Virginia became the latest in late 2020. The state of Kentucky didn't, but Minnesota is trying to at least make it harder to obtain no-knock warrants. At least that's what we've been hearing initially from some state lawmakers. And Minneapolis itself tried to restrict these in the aftermath of what happened to Breonna Taylor to basically reserve them for high-risk situations only to be approved by supervisors. But that was the policy in place prior to this. So it remains to be seen whether Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey says and uses this moment to take that even further. Yeah. And Errin, you've written about Breonna Taylor, you wrote about George Floyd. People thought in this country. I think a lot of people thought George Floyd was the tipping point, but now here we are almost two years later back talking about the Minneapolis police, back talking about an African-American man who has been shot, who has been killed by police. Talk a little bit about the frustration that you hear when you talk to civil rights activists, when you talk to people who are impacted by these shootings, and where things stand in terms of people's minds when you see something like this happen again and again. Yeah, and listen, Yamiche, here we are. I mean, this shooting happened at the beginning of Black History Month. It happened in a month that marks the 10 year anniversary of really the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. And so really it is a marker and a reminder of how much progress remains to be made on the issue of communities of color in particular feeling like they are safe and are being fairly treated by members of law enforcement, and what can be done to mitigate the killing of black people by police and by vigilantes. As you mentioned, I wrote the first national story on Breonna Taylor a couple of years ago. Her case, as Omar mentioned, again raised the issue of no-knock warrants, and just the idea that black people are unsafe, even in their own homes from law enforcement. Raised the issue of legal gun ownership, something that came up in the Philando Castile case. Minneapolis did put at a moratorium on no-knock warrants, but this is an issue, again, it still has not been addressed at the federal level. Police reform that was being discussed in Congress went nowhere last summer. It's important to point out as Omar did that states and local jurisdictions are attempting to do what Congress is not doing in terms of police reform whether you're talking about ending no-knock warrants to banning choke holds, expanding the use of body cameras, keeping police from being first responders on issues of mental health that can turn into deadly encounters. But listen, voters that I talked to headed into the 2020 election after that summer around the national reckoning of race that brought a diverse group of Americans into the streets by the millions. What they were saying was that this was one of the issues that they wanted addressed by this new administration. They wanted a federal response to what would be done to stop the really unrelenting killing of black and brown Americans by law enforcement and vigilantes. They wanted something to be done, and the government really should be who intervenes so that there was a uniform policy across this country rather than states and jurisdictions figuring this out on their own. Yeah. And Phil, Errin just broke down the sort of politics of this. So many voters are looking at President Biden, looking at Democrats and saying, especially I will say African-American voters and saying policing reform was stalled, voting rights is stalled. What are the politics specifically when it comes to policing for President Biden and the impact that this could have on Democrats trying to hold onto control here in D.C.? Well, Yamiche, those two agenda items have been stalled. And I think a lot of Democrats are frustrated by that, and demoralized by that, and thought that by electing a democratic president and a democratic majority in the House and the Senate that these agenda items would be front and center, and that these reforms would be passed into law. That there would be policing reform, that there would be voting protections in the form of voting rights passed by the Congress. And that has not happened. There are a lot of frustrations by activists, as well as by some elected Democrats that President Biden has not used the full weight of his office to push these issues on Capitol Hill. Remember, when he first came into office, he was prioritizing the pandemic, he was prioritizing some of the fiscal bills, first the stimulus bill for pandemic relief, and then spent months in negotiations with Senator Joe Manchin, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, and trying to win over Republican support for his Build Back Better initiative and for infrastructure at the expense, according to many democratic activists, of a full-throated push for voting rights, and for policing reform. We've in recent weeks heard President Biden give powerful speeches about voting rights. And he has talked over the course of his presidency about how much he values policing reform, but we haven't seen the energy and the momentum on Capitol Hill to push these forward. And you also haven't seen the democratic majorities, however slim, in the Congress actually pass these laws. Yeah. And Omar, last question to you. Amir Locke's family, they're calling for federal legislation to ban no-knock warrants, but as Phil just pointed out, as Errin just pointed out, there hasn't been much happening, anything really happening in the last year as it relates to policing reform. What's your sense after talking to them, after talking to activists on the ground there in Minneapolis about how much they see the federal government as a place where they can see change or whether or not this is gonna be really something focused on local communities because policing is of course so local? I think it's been the latter, where of course, they've made calls to President Biden, of course they've made calls to the Department of Justice to get involved. And they have in some cases where right now in the middle of the federal prosecution for the other three officers in the George Floyd case, not Derek Chauvin, who's convicted at the state level. And the Minneapolis police department is under a current DOJ probe right now for their patterns and practices. So some of those appeals have been successful, but as far as concrete policy and action, it's really come down to trying to lobby their local officials and put a lot of pressure there. I mean, look, in Minneapolis in particular we saw a really huge movement to try and dismantle the police department in favor of sort of encompassing it within a wider public safety department to the point where it was able to get put on the November ballot. And it failed but it was a very close vote. And a lot of that energy wasn't so much defeated as "Wow, we put everything into it and now look, the people's spoken, it's over." It's more that "Look how many people voted for this." The energy to try and reform our police department, our public safety approach is there, it's just a matter of trying to channel it. And the last thing I'll say is there were a lot of ideals of what policing should look like, especially after George Floyd because many people saw the conviction of Derek Chauvin and the energy around that sort of being the tipping point. But the ideals have taken a long time to catch up with reality. And these practices and policies that are getting put in place are taking a while to become common practice for a lot of these police officers who have made a career out of doing things a certain way. And I think that's sort of the trouble that we're running into right now, not to mention the fact that there was a pandemic, that last year was the deadliest year for law enforcement. That was the deadliest year for people out in the streets as homicide numbers spiked. That context matters when you're trying to reform yourself at the center of it all. Yeah, yeah. Well, an important topic that we'll keep covering. We'll have to leave it there tonight. Thank you so much to Omar, to Errin, to Phil for sharing your reporting. And make sure to sign up for the Washington Week newsletter on our website. We'll give you a look at all things Washington. Thank you so much for joining us. Goodnight from Washington. (gentle music)