Goddamn! A life of a Black person brutally cut short by police… again.

Early Wednesday morning, February 2, Minneapolis pigs shot dead 22-year-old Amir Rahkare Locke. He was murdered nine seconds after the cops quietly broke into his apartment before announcing themselves. Locke was asleep on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, when he was suddenly awakened by a pig kicking the couch and the others screaming at him at the same time—their guns pointed at him. Amir died of multiple gunshot wounds after one pig opened fire—the police claim they shot him because they saw he had a gun. Karen Wells, Amir’s mother, said, “My son was executed on 2/2 of 22, and now his dreams have been destroyed.”

Amir had committed no crime, had no criminal history, and his name was not on the warrant the police were acting on. He was a DoorDash driver with a license to have a gun to protect himself. But none of it mattered. Amir was a young Black man in America—so he lived with a death sentence over his head.

The pigs claim they announced their presence before they entered. The lawyer for Amir’s family called that out as a lie, saying, “You’ve all seen the video, there is no announcement prior to entering that threshold. They barge in before they identify themselves and they give Amir no time to save his own life.”

This is the same police department whose pigs carried out the slow-motion murder of George Floyd in May 2020. That murder triggered a “beautiful uprising” of millions of people across the country against police terror and systemic racism against Black people . (In fact, Amir’s execution took place as the three police accomplices to Floyd’s murder are currently on trial.) The murder of Breonna Taylor, a Black emergency room technician fatally shot by Louisville cops two months before George Floyd, had added fuel to the outrage. Breonna’s murder was very similar to Amir's. Cops used a no-knock warrant to bust into her apartment—and then when her boyfriend fired his gun thinking they were being invaded, the pigs opened fired and killed her.

Two days after Amir Locke was killed, the Minneapolis mayor announced a “moratorium” on police use of no-knock warrants. No-knock warrants were supposed to have been banned by the same mayor in the summer of 2020, replaced by “knock-and-announce” warrants. But there was a loophole that allowed the continuing use of no-knock warrants in “special circumstances,” and, in fact, the use of no-knock warrants by the Minneapolis police has not changed.¹

On Friday, a protest caravan went throughout downtown Minneapolis, clogging traffic and blaring horns. And on Saturday, hundreds of protesters took to the streets chanting “Amir Locke” and “no justice no peace,” and carrying a banner saying “Justice for Amir Locke and all Stolen Lives.” At least 500 people rallied at Government Plaza in frigid weather.

Also on Friday, the Minnesota governor authorized the National Guard to “provide public safety assistance if needed”—meaning preparing whatever repression is needed, including military-level repression which the Guard is trained in, to put down protests against Amir Locke’s murder they consider to be “getting out of hand.”

To anyone who thinks that the terror and murder by the pigs under this system can be ended through more “reforms” and demands to “defund” the police—the truth is that this oppressive system we live under cannot do without its cops and sheriffs to maintain the status quo, especially targeting Black and Brown people, through the most vicious and ever-present repression. Bob Avakian gets into this sharply and scientifically in “Police and Prisons: Reformist Illusions and the Revolutionary Solution” and “Abolition—Real and Illusory.” And in “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating,” he gets into how the period we are living in now could be ripened into a situation in which a revolution aimed at uprooting the source of all this madness could be carried through and won—and the work that needs to be done to make that happen.