Amir Locke, 22, was a Black man who was killed just before dawn on February 2, 2022, inside a downtown Minneapolis apartment where he had been staying. A SWAT team from the Minneapolis Police Department entered the unit to execute a search warrant connected to a St. Paul homicide investigation, pushing through the door in a rapid rush of shouted commands and flashlight glare.
Locke had been asleep on a couch under a blanket; in the body-worn camera footage described by investigators and reported widely at the time, he jolts awake amid the chaos with a handgun in his hand, and within seconds an officer fires, striking him multiple times. Locke was given aid and transported to Hennepin Healthcare, where he was pronounced dead shortly afterward. 
The warrant that brought officers to the apartment was not issued because police believed Locke himself had committed the St. Paul killing. Records and reporting that followed identified the search as part of an effort to locate evidence and people tied to the January 10, 2022 shooting death of Otis Elder in St. Paul. The person authorities were focused on was Locke's cousin, Mekhi Camden Speed, who was named as a suspect connected to that homicide investigation, while Locke was not named as a target of the warrant. As questions exploded across Minneapolis about why such a high-risk tactic was used, reporting also described friction between agencies over how the warrant was to be served, and the case became one of the most prominent flashpoints in renewed local outrage over no-knock entries. 
In the days after Locke's death, the underlying investigation did produce arrests and charges—not for the shooting in Minneapolis, but for the St. Paul homicide that set the operation in motion. Speed was arrested days later and prosecuted in Ramsey County for Elder's killing. He ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2022 to 195 months in prison—more than 16 years—for his role in Elder's death, a conviction that prosecutors and courts treated as separate from the police raid that ended Locke's life. Another person, Feysal Jama Ali, was later sentenced to prison time for being an accomplice after the fact in the same St. Paul case, as that investigation continued to unwind through the courts. 
For the killing inside the Minneapolis apartment, authorities said there would be no criminal charges against the officer who fired. The shooter was identified as Minneapolis police officer Mark Hanneman, and state and county prosecutors announced on April 6, 2022 that they were declining to file charges, arguing the available evidence could not ethically support a criminal case they believed they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The decision did not end the public fight over what happened in those first seconds of the entry, and Locke's family pursued civil claims accusing the city and the officer of violating his rights; in later rulings, federal court decisions reported in Minnesota news outlets allowed key parts of that lawsuit to proceed, keeping the case alive in the civil system even as the criminal investigation into the shooting itself closed without charges. 
