Note: This article was first drafted in April 2022 with the final edit being made in September. Mr. Graham Harwood, chief editor of the Chicago Policy Review, did some editing to the first three paragraphs

George Floyd is well-known among the public, thanks to the media’s relentless report on this case. However, few people may remember the names of other police shooting victims whose lives are just as valuable as Mr. Floyd’s. For public policy students and professionals, we carry the responsibility of understanding the implications behind social events so that we may craft fair and reasonable policies that will move society forward. For we who care about criminal justice especially, it matters to know those names of victims in order to better honor them, memorialize them, and walk in the shoes of Black communities to understand their anger, fear, and expectation for the country. The list of police victims is long and now, we are writing down another name on this blood-stained paper.

For Black residents in Minnesota, February this year opened with a tragedy. 22 year-old Amir Locke’s dreams of becoming a musician like his father were suddenly cut short. On the morning of February 2, Minneapolis police officers stormed into his apartment. Seven minutes later, he was shot to death. Officers justified their actions by saying the Amir put his hand on the trigger and posed serious threats to their safety. The leaked body camera footage, however, failed to corroborate the officer’s story that Mr. Locke posed any danger. Moreover, the officers woke Amir Locke up while he was sleeping, where he naturally reacted by attempting to protect himself in the situation of a home intruder. Amir Locke protected himself with the gun he legally owned and maintained a license for.

In the case, MPD officers adopted a no-knock warrant, which distinct from a normal home search, officers would need not to announce their presence or identity before they rushed in with it. However, St Paul Police Department asserted that they did not request MPD to use a no-knock warrant. In criminal procedure, a no-knock warrant is designed for special situations where should officers knock first, evidence of criminal activities will be in the risk of being destroyed or that the suspect is likely to inflict greatly bodily harms on officers or innocent outsiders (Samaha 2018). Barely awake, Amir was certainly not intending to wash away any “evidence” nor would he pose any imminent danger to officers. Therefore, from a legal standpoint, MPD’s decision to conduct a no-knock raid was both improper and unreasonable.

The case ushered us to ponder one important question: are police officers allowed to behave with impunity in law?

The criminal justice system is designed by the Founders to balance citizen’s legal right of acting according to their free will and the government’s responsibility to maintain public safety. Therefore, personal freedom is highly valued concept in any statue that invasions of liberty by a public entity shall only be used in the rarest cases and under the most deliberate considerations (Samaha 2018; Balko 2014, Chapter 2). In the Fourth Amendment, this philosophy could be read as every law enforcement agent must have evidence that a crime is afoot before they stop, frisk, search, or arrest a suspect. That is, police cannot make any move based on their pure instinct or guesses and that what they do must be based on evidence (i.e. “probable cause”). This is the concept of reasonableness and the paramount principle of any court’s judgment.

However, misbehaved officers are rarely held accountable for their crimes. In the State of Minnesota, officers indicted for charges, such as domestic abuses or assaults on civilians, are often allowed to keep their police licenses so that they can walk away without consequences by leaving their former police department and finding a new one. Moreover, because of qualified immunity, which protected criminal officers by arguing that their specific situations haven’t been discussed in preceding case rulings, it’s almost impossible to convict officers who committed killing acts. Ultimately, bad apples are allowed to repeat their mistakes, and the problem is never solved.

The issue of police unaccountability was partially at fault for a few case decisions that the Supreme Court decided in the last century, where the Justices stood firmly at the side of officers and constructed an image of police-justice alignment, notwithstanding that officers' behaviors in those cases were inappropriate. In Graham v Connor, the influential case that decides that the “objective reasonableness” test shall be applied in all situations where the police deploys forces, the Court argued that officers' conducts complied with the Fourth Amendment given the imminent situation that pushed them to use force (note: the objective reasonableness test says that the legitimacy of police use of force in a given situation is decided by another officer who has no personal interest in the case being discussed). The impact of this case is long-last as it completely negates the importance of community inputs in criminal cases that involve police use of force, hereby putting officers on an unprecedentedly high position that can influence how judges think. Considering the wide influence of warrior mentality training and solidarity culture, under Graham, an officer, even if without involvement of the case, was more likely to side with their colleagues who wrongfully committed killing acts than making reasonable, objective judgement as an outsider.

The issue of excessive force was evident in Graham because of two important reasons: how could an old person with diabetics and in low blood sugar able to pose dangers to officers, and how could the behavior of entering a store and leaving within a few minutes be deemed “suspicious”? It’s not hard to understand why justices decided this way. In more than one situations, the Justices contended that the public would have to understand that policing is an dangerous job as officers were frequently forced to make split-second decisions in their daily jobs.

Graham v Connor is not the only case where the Court’s favoritism toward police officers influenced their final decision. This “subjectivity” could also be seen in many other famous Fourth Amendment-related verdicts, such as Adams v. Williams (1972) and Kuha v. City of Minnesoka (2003).

There is an easy fix for this systematic problem: bringing community voices to the judicial procedure. Community members should be more than witnesses and play more roles than telling judges, prosecutors, and public defenders what they saw, heard, and knew about the case. Rather, they should possess a stronger power in the decision-making processes of courts at all levels by informing judges their perspectives and living experiences. The logic is simple: since courts' rulings will have direct impacts on lives of community members, communities should have a say in the procedure as well. One way to do that is forming an issue/case committee comprised of community leaders, community members, and scholars who specialize in the case-related area. The committee will be responsible for advising the judges/justices. Specifically, the issue committee will be in charge of telling judges/justices what community members think, what current research has discovered, as well as what benefits and costs may arise, should they decide the case in one way or another.

With a supervising body like the issue committee, there will also have a higher level of public trust on judicial authorities and more positive public perceptions of the legitimacy of the local and federal courts, given that community members can now see how their opinions are represented in case decisions. Although very little research has been done on this topic, it is possible that this approach will achieve similar outcomes as the community policing model-more communications, stronger trust, less recidivism, and less unfair rulings. Furthermore, the model will also increase judicial transparency and accountability, reduce biases and racial discrimination in decision makings, and shut down the distance between judicial officials and the communities they swore under the oath to serve.

I want to wrap up this article with these three asks: what makes a criminal-legal system successful, what population should the system serve, and lastly, how can we make the end meet? I believe answering these questions will move the system forward by strengthening regulations and redefining its relationship with the public.

Additional References

  1. Adams v. Williams. 407 U.S. 143 (1972).

  2. Joe, Samaha. Criminal Procedure. 10th ed. Boston, MA: Cengage Group, 2018.

  3. Graham v. Connor. 490 U.S. 386 (1989).

  4. Kuha v. City of Minnetonka. 176 F. Supp. 2d 926 (D. Minn. 2001).

  5. Stoughton, Seth W. “Principled Policing: Warrior Cops and Guardian Officers.” The Wake Forest Law Review, Rev. 611 (Nov 2016), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2830642.

  6. Terry v. Ohio. 392 U.S. 1 (1968).