Over the weekend, a speaker at a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis encouraged the crowd to burn down police stations and continue looting and rioting they way the city experienced during the 2020 BLM riots.
The protest came after 22-year-old Amir Locke was killed by Minneapolis police during a no-knock raid while serving a search warrant last week. Body camera footage showed police unlocking the door to the apartment and then shouting "Police!" as they entered. Locke was asleep on the couch and wrapped in a blanket. Within nine seconds, police shot Locke after seeing he was armed with a handgun. Locke was not named in the warrant, according to Fox News.
The protest, which was attended by about 1,000 people, was peaceful. But, some wanted to take things further.
"Feel your anger fully. Be mad! BE MAD! Because your anger is justified. Build barricades, burn precincts, reappropriate what they've stolen from you for thousands of generations!" one speaker said on Saturday.
"Power to the looters! Power to the rioters!" the man continued.
Feel your anger! #JusticeForAmir #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/VdjiQK2rGm
— Iman (@ImanHassan612) February 6, 2022
The same speaker said the reason why former police officer Derek Chauvin is in prison for the killing of George Floyd is because of the mass lawlessness Minneapolis and St. Paul, along with much of the country, saw in 2020.
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A speaker at the #BLM protest in Minneapolis for #AmirLocke condemns peaceful protest & urges violence. He attributes Derek Chauvin’s conviction to mass arson & violent riots. pic.twitter.com/0QkvBkF0LF
— Andy Ngô ?????? (@MrAndyNgo) February 6, 2022
In contrast, Locke's father called for peace and said they [the family] do not hate police officers, but the bad ones need to be rooted out.
"There’s great officers that are white. There’s great officers, period," Andre Lock said. "But they have bad seeds. They have the bad seeds and those bad seeds are the ones who don’t need to be in our communities."
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