Officer who shot Locke has almost seven years with Minneapolis police

The 34-year-old Minneapolis police officer who shot Amir Locke in a downtown apartment while executing a search warrant Wednesday is a seven-year veteran of the department.

Mark Hanneman joined the Minneapolis Police Department in July 2015 after five years as a police officer in his hometown of Hutchinson, Minn., according to public records and his personnel file released Friday by Minneapolis officials.

Since joining the MPD, Hanneman has worked a variety of shifts downtown and in the city's southeast and northwest precincts. Since late 2019, he has also worked multiple temporary SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) assignments.

Hanneman had been on a SWAT assignment for three days when he shot Locke. His SWAT assignment was scheduled to run until Feb. 26, but he was placed on paid administrative leave after the shooting.

Attempts to reach Hanneman were not successful Friday. According to his file and online documents, his work and academic background have been focused on law enforcement, including recent studies for a master's degree in criminal justice leadership at Concordia University in St. Paul.

His Concordia "capstone" paper, published in February 2021, was titled, "The Delicate Balance: Police in Our Schools." The subject was timely; after George Floyd was killed in police custody in May 2020, Minneapolis Public Schools kicked out police officers deployed as school resource officers (SROs) in their buildings.

Hanneman wrote that given the reality of "over-criminalization," school officers must thoughtfully consider how their actions affect students.

"We must now employ strategies to assess each police interaction within the school based on a variety of factors," he wrote. "This will ensure that the mission of SROs to engage, educate, and enforce is truly accomplished to the greatest extent possible."

He dedicated the 47-page paper to his wife and children, saying it was written "in an unbelievably turbulent period of our lives."

Hanneman started with the MPD on Aug. 10, 2015, at a salary of $28.31 an hour. His MPD file shows three complaints against him that were closed without discipline in 2016, 2017 and 2020. No details were provided.

When he was still in Hutchinson in 2012, Hanneman was one of six officers in a narcotics training course who refused to be interviewed by state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators looking into whether one of them gave marijuana to an Occupy Minnesota protester.

Hanneman was not accused of wrongdoing, according to BCA documents, and Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman declined to press charges, citing contradictory statements by witnesses among other things.

Years before he signed up with the MPD, Hanneman was on a path to a police career. After he graduated from Hutchinson High School in 2005, he attended the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities for a semester before transferring to South Dakota State University in Brookings. He graduated from SDSU in May 2008 with a major in sociology and a minor in criminal justice.

According to the work history on his MPD application, Hanneman was employed as a student officer for the SDSU campus police from September 2006 until he graduated. In the summer of 2007, he listed work on a "park patrol" for the city of Hutchinson.

He supplemented his bachelor's degree with additional law enforcement skills training at Alexandria Technical and Community College. He completed 432 hours of training there and received his diploma in July 2009.

Hanneman began working as a police officer in Hutchinson in February 2010. His application said he started working at the Hutchinson department as a dispatcher in June 2008.

On his application for the MPD, Hanneman said he was a member of the Hutchinson department's "Special Response Team," which he likened to the SWAT team.

"I am certified as a basic operator and my primary role on the team is entry. I have attended a ballistic shield course and have deployed with a shield in the team's operations," he wrote in 2015.

Before college, he worked for three years beginning in February 2004 as an assistant manager at CineMagic Theatre in his hometown, according to his application.

Hanneman also noted that he had volunteered at the RiverSong Music Festival in Hutchinson, where he coordinated "sound, stage and lighting" as chair of the technology committee.