She said she spent years lecturing her sons on how to interact with the police: don’t wear your pants loose; always have money in your pocket so that no one can accuse you of theft; keep your hands on the wheel and be polite if stopped.
But a decade after Trayvon Martin’s death, she said, the streets of Minneapolis were filled with people protesting her son’s death at the hands of a police department that promised to do things differently.
Her son, she said, “is now the face of the lack of police reform.”
Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer who co-chairs the mayor’s Community Safety Task Force, virtually offered her resignation at a press conference following Mr Locke’s death. “What we see is business as usual,” she said then.
Since then, she has continued with the group, saying she won’t give up the work she’s done for years just because others don’t follow through. She said she didn’t expect change to happen quickly.
“I haven’t seen so many police departments suddenly pull themselves together after a major incident,” she said. “Maybe it’s the expectation, but I don’t understand that expectation, with the way these police departments have operated.”
On a recent Friday evening, officers Maiya Cain, 25, and Elise Hinderliter, 27, responded to a call at an apartment building in downtown Minneapolis. A 12-year-old boy stood at the lobby door, urging them to hurry.
He had shot his 10-year-old brother in the chest with his father’s gun, apparently by accident. Officer Hinderliter, an emergency medical technician, dressed the wound and attempted to revive the boy, then rode him in an ambulance to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The older brother was huddled in a chair in the hall of the apartment, moaning and holding his forehead.