Story at a glance
- Minneapolis is facing calls to ban no-knock warrants in the city.
- While advocates are pushing for the move, many argue that’s just the first step to meaningful police reform.
- Others argue absolute bans are misguided.
Calls for an all-out ban on the execution of no-knock warrants by law enforcement in Minneapolis are intensifying following the police killing of Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man, by a police officer during a raid last week. But some advocates and legal experts warn a blanket ban may not be enough to avoid such tragedies.
Locke’s parents, Karen Wells and Andre Locke, in a recent interview with CNN said the contentious police tactic — in which officers enter a property without announcing their presence beforehand — is a failure of law enforcement and ultimately caused their son’s death.
“The whole system. He wasn’t killed, he wasn’t murdered, he was executed,” Locke’s mother Karen Wells said during an interview with CNN’s Omar Jimenez Monday.
Locke was shot several times as SWAT officers entered the Minneapolis apartment and encountered him under a blanket on the couch holding a pistol. The raid was carried out in connection to a homicide investigation in St. Paul, and on Monday, Locke’s 17-year-old cousin was arrested in Winona, Minn., in connection to the murder. Locke was never a target of the investigation or search warrants.
Locke’s parents, along with police reform groups, called on Minneapolis to commit to a full ban on no-knock warrants, and local officials and legal experts earlier this week questioned Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey as to why policies he rolled out in 2020 to restrict the practice in the wake of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor incidents fell short.
But while some call for a ban and the city mulls over policy changes, some argue doing away with no-knock warrants is just the beginning.
“Just banning no-knock warrants may not be sufficient because police also use an approach called knock-and-announce with dynamic entry,” said Nila Bala, a senior staff attorney with New York University’s Policing Project.
“Technically, the officers do announce their entry — perhaps hitting the door once and then barging in with a battering ram. It’s effectively like a no-knock warrant because individuals don’t have a chance to gather themselves and actually answer the door. It’s a no-knock under another name,” Bala said.
Bala added that a ban on no-knock warrants alone doesn’t go far enough as they’re not used nearly as much as knock-and-announce with dynamic entry.
Campaign Zero, a police reform group in which one of its co-founders is working with Minneapolis to review and suggest revisions to the department’s policy, has advocated for a ban on no-knock warrants as an initial step, but has called for further restrictions on all other warrant executions, such as requiring at least 30 seconds for a response before entering a property, banning plainclothes search warrant executions and requiring an audible announcement.
Bala agreed it’s necessary to tighten regulations on knock-and-announce warrants to make an impact and stressed it’s necessary to focus on comprehensive reform of policing through legislation at the state level.
“If we don’t have a robust process for holding officers accountable for misconduct, ensuring compliance with any regulations — including banning no-knock warrants — is incredibly difficult. So we have to think bigger than just the warrant and ensure integrity in policing,” Bala said.
No-knock warrants are an exception to the common law knock-and-announcement requirement and are authorized by a judge if police can prove there is probable cause executing a standard warrant would result in the destruction of evidence or cause harm to police officers. The majority of no-knock warrants are executed as part of drug investigations.
Thor Eells, head of the National Tactical Officers Association, a group that trains SWAT officers, told Changing America his organization began to discourage the use of no-knock warrants more than a decade ago after realizing a fair number of SWAT officers were getting shot and killed in the process. The group began teaching and educating that other options should be considered as part of risk mitigation to avoid the confrontations associated with no-knock.
But Eells warned that calls to ban the option, as well as reforms such as setting a minimum 30 second requirement before entry, are misguided.
“If you had information that a terrorist cell was going to commit a terrorist act on par with 911, had the potential to result in thousands of deaths, and the information on that terrorist attack was on a laptop computer in an apartment…and the bad guy’s in there with it, all he has to do is push one button and it deletes everything, clearly a knock-and-announce you lose all evidence and potential information to save thousands of lives,” Eells said, acknowledging it’s an extreme example.
“I recognize that the chances of that happening, hopefully, are pretty remote. But they still exist,” he said.
On the issue of standard warrants, Eells argues the courts’ standard of allowing law enforcement to wait a “reasonable period of time” before entering a property is appropriate as every situation is unique, and putting minimum wait times before entry could put officers and suspects at risk.
“If you try and say ‘well, law enforcement is going to have to wait a minimum of 30 seconds,’ well, I will absolutely guarantee you that in of itself is going to result in injuries to law enforcement and death as well as to suspects, because once the shooting begins, law enforcement is going to respond,” he said.
Eells said what is frequently misunderstood is that law enforcement is subject to suppression hearings, meaning a suspect’s attorney can question whether officers did in fact “wait a reasonable period of time” before entering a property. If officers fail to satisfy the judicial review, evidence, statements from people inside or otherwise can be thrown out.
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