No Knock

In all of my listening to Gil Scott Heron over the years, I never knew that he had a 1972 recording called "No Knock" about no-knock warrants, like the ones that were used in police killings of Breonna Taylor in March 2020 or Amir Locke this week in Minneapolis (and many other people in this country, mostly Black). I'd say it's one of Scott Heron's works that is considered to be proto-hip hop, with a musical accompaniment to rhyming and rhythmic words but not a tune.

There's nothing new, as if we didn't already know that. Fifty-plus years of no-knock warrants and predictions of death and destruction.

In doing a not-very-thorough search, I didn't find any particularly thorough histories of how no-knock warrants and raids came to be allowed around the time that Scott-Heron wrote and performed this piece. As a person who lived through the time period, I know that it came from the Nixon administration (and later the Reagan administration) and the War on Drugs. I'm aware that Radley Balko's book Rise of the Warrior Cop is probably the place to look. But I'm still a bit surprised that there doesn't seem to be an easily findable full post online somewhere devoted to the history. 

This Vox article gives some cursory background, and this post by Balko on the ACLU site from 2013 gives one slice of detailed information. That's probably the best piece there is about how it came about in the early 1970s, and how it was undone for a while in the mid-’70s. But it doesn't get into how it was brought back later. (That's in his book, I assume.)

For any readers outside the Twin Cities, you should know that Minneapolis's mayor, Jacob Frey, had already supposedly "ended" no-knock warrants well before Amir Locke's killing, but as with all things Frey, he didn't really do what he said. 

So when he says he's really going to do it now, he is not to be believed.