Justice for Amir Locke
Like you, we are still heartbroken by the murder of Amir Locke by Minneapolis Police in a no-knock raid one week ago. He should be alive today.
Our hearts go out to Amir's family and friends. No one should have their loved one stolen from them, especially by the very people employed to protect them. We know that this is not an isolated incident, but part of a much larger pattern of violence by MPD.
The Talmud tells us that whoever destroys a single life is considered to have destroyed the whole world, yet here we are, again, witnessing another life taken for reasons many of us do not understand.
Jewish Community Action has often viewed our work on criminal justice reform through the lens of teshuvah. We ask that formerly incarcerated people should be returned to their full status in society after they’ve completed their sentence. We seek accountability constantly as part of the process of working for justice because we know that the first step to teshuvah is remorse. One who has caused harm must be accountable for wrongdoing to even begin the process.
A week after Amir Locke was killed in a procedure that MPD’s leadership had claimed they no longer practiced, those in charge - the Interim Chief and the Mayor of Minneapolis - have yet to provide answers to pressing questions:
Why did city leaders wrongly call Amir Locke a suspect in their initial press release? Why has the officer involved not been fired? Why did the MPD insist on a no-knock warrant when Saint Paul, who initiated the warrant, did not? Why was the public misled by the Mayor and others by announcing he had banned no-knock warrants in 2020?
We must speak truth to power, and demand accountability before there is another Amir Locke.
This week, we supported our community and joined our organizing partners in demanding accountability. We helped our members connect with protests, we had hard conversations with people feeling despair that nothing will change. We’ve tried to stay hopeful, but we’ve been organizing in response to police violence for a long time.
We’ve been writing about it since 2014, we organized our members to respond after the police killing of Jamar Clark, after Philando Castile, after Justine Damond, Thurman Blevins, George Floyd, Daunte Wright. And Amir Locke.
We hope every day to never have to respond again. And each time our members respond, each time they organize for accountability, we hope that this new moment will be when real change can begin. We know we can’t just keep doing the same things over again and expect anything to change.
That’s why this week we also supported Amir Locke’s family and community members, along with a grassroots coalition of Minneapolis residents, clergy, artists, and members of George Floyd Square in filing ethics complaints, the city’s own accountability mechanism, against the Interim Chief and Mayor.
We hope for answers to our questions, transparency and accountability, and that we may find justice together.
