How Minneapolis Looks From the Police Chief’s Squad Car
The Minneapolis police cruiser was heading south toward sections of the city hit hardest by recent immigration raids. I was riding with the city’s police chief, Brian O’Hara. How candidly, I asked him, was he willing to discuss his views of President Trump? “I have my personal opinions,” O’Hara allowed warily. “I don’t think my personal opinions are relevant for my job.”
We were approaching Karmel Mall, a hub of the Somali community in South Minneapolis. The shopping corridor had emptied out in recent weeks as armed federal agents in tactical gear swarmed the city. The sun was setting, and I saw a woman in a headscarf ushering a young boy along the sidewalk in front of her. “I guess,” I said to O’Hara, “I was thinking specifically of when he talks about Somali residents of Minnesota as garbage.”
He threw up his hands. “It’s crazy,” he said. “It’s disgusting, and it’s crazy that the president is saying that.” He used the word a third time: “It’s crazy.”
O’Hara is a police chief pushed past his limits, struggling to quell violence instigated by federal law enforcement. His fury reflects a historical reversal. Since the civil-rights era, the federal government has policed the police, ensuring oversight after brutality is carried out by people wearing badges, whether in Selma in 1965 or Minneapolis in 2020. No more. Now the president and his aides encourage brutality. So was Trump’s racist slur, I asked, relevant to O’Hara’s job? “We’re the police,” he replied with a scoff of incredulity. “We’re the police in the United States. We’re expected to honor the dignity of all human beings, right?”
That he phrased this as a question, not an affirmative statement, is a sign of self-awareness. O’Hara works in the shadow cast by the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, in May 2020. O’Hara became police chief two years later, but to hear him tell it, the killing still affects everything about how he does his job. “Dude,” he said. “When I first got here, the stories people would tell me on both sides, from the residents and the cops …” he said, trailing off. “The violence was just being normalized.”
Now, in the standoff between federal agents and the local community, his officers can’t win. The Trump administration wants local cops to act as bodyguards for ICE agents, O’Hara said, while some protesters won’t be satisfied until his department arrests federal authorities.
It’s an untenable situation, the chief said. “And it’s a public-safety emergency.”
To show me how police are responding to that emergency, O’Hara brought me to the department’s downtown-precinct building. We arrived at a side entrance and passed through a corridor with white-painted cinderblock walls and a bare concrete floor. O’Hara, who turned 47 this month, has a martial bearing, with a broad jaw and a barrel chest. He grew up in a working-class family in a suburb of Newark, New Jersey, where he joined the police force in 2001, just before the September 11 attacks. He looks back on that moment as a high-water mark for the reputation of his profession. “People were along the West Side Highway in Manhattan just giving free stuff to first responders,” he recalled.
Now his officers are under siege from all sides, and the command center at the downtown Minneapolis precinct is their redoubt. It’s filled with curved desks arranged in rows, each equipped with multiple computer monitors. The screens show live video feeds, maps, and dashboards. At the front of the room is a mounted video display with aerial imagery, camera views, and a log of calls for service.
Over the faint sound of police radio communications, O’Hara explained that the command center was designed for disruptive circumstances, such as large sporting events and bars’ closing time on weekend nights. Now it’s being used to manage the strain from ICE activity in the city, which has caused a surge in calls for service. Some of the work is humdrum: When ICE agents arrest a motorist, the car is often abandoned, and his officers have to tow it. Generalized fear creates more urgent calls: Residents have been reporting sightings of people with guns, unsure if they’re ICE agents.
[Read: Police and ICE agents are on a collision course ]
It’s hard to plan for that kind of mass confusion and anxiety, the chief told me. But the department is better prepared because of the changes introduced over the past several years, including an emphasis on de-escalation and advance planning. That’s why he took such offense when Vice President Vance accused police of turning their back on federal agents who were being harassed by protesters outside a Minneapolis restaurant. “The officers were locked in the restaurant, and local police refused to respond to their pleas for help (as they’ve been directed by local authorities),” Vance wrote on X, calling the account one of the “crazy stories” he had heard about the city.
O’Hara told me he had pulled 911 calls to examine the vice president’s claims. He learned that a lieutenant at the command center had received the report, pulled up a view of the restaurant, and saw a small crowd assembled outside. He was preparing to send someone to respond when the protesters dispersed.
“All of these keyboard warriors that don’t know what they’re talking about,” O’Hara said, “it’s just bullshit.”
In the command center, O’Hara introduced me to the lieutenant triaging calls, as well as a pair of community-service officers monitoring cameras. They were trying to establish a coherent picture of the federal crackdown in their city, because the federal government had given them no information about its operations. “Communication has collapsed,” he said.
The Trump administration has described Operation Metro Surge, which began in the Twin Cities in December, as the largest immigration-enforcement operation in history. Federal agents have mobilized so aggressively that their impact is fathomable only to those on the receiving end of it, and to the local police officers overwhelmed by it. In Minneapolis, federal agents outnumber the police at least 5 to 1.
ICE’s dragnet is so broad that some of O’Hara’s officers have been caught up in it, stopped while off duty. (One officer in neighboring St. Paul has been stopped twice, according to O’Hara.) The department hemorrhaged officers after Floyd’s killing in 2020 and the protests and rioting that ensued. Now more than 60 percent of new hires are people of color, O’Hara said. “Minneapolis is a much smaller city than New York or Chicago or L.A., so when you send 3,000-plus agents and they’re doing street stops, seemingly randomly all day long, everybody’s going to know someone that’s impacted,” he said.
The police chief said he’s concerned for the well-being of his officers, but that his sympathy extends to federal authorities as well. “They have been set up to fail,” he said. “They’re engaging in urban policing in ways that they are not at all prepared to do. They have no experience. They don’t know where they are; they’re coming from other parts of the country. They clearly don’t have sound arrest-and-control tactical training.”
[Read: Tim Walz fears a Fort Sumter moment in Minneapolis]
He described watching a video of a woman who was stopped while driving and insisted that she had to get to the doctor. She was talking to one agent with her window down when another agent shattered the opposite window. They were pulling her out of the car when two other members of the entourage brandished knives, in an apparent effort to cut her seat belt. “It just looks like complete chaos,” he said.
O’Hara wants to know: “Where is the leadership? How do you not see how unsafe this stuff is?” I asked him if he’d expressed his concerns to Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, who arrived in Minneapolis this week to take charge of the federal effort, and he said he had. “I think he understands,” O’Hara said of Homan, who replaced Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official who had become the public face of the shock-and-awe actions in Minneapolis.
The police chief said he never met with Bovino during the weeks he spent in and around the city. The two saw each other briefly on the scene of the shooting of Renee Good, on January 7; they shook hands but barely exchanged words.
O’Hara and I idled outside the command center as he told me what happened two and a half weeks later. He had returned home from the gym and was preparing to make himself instant cream of rice for breakfast when he received a page that there had been another shooting. He said he was so outraged that he began physically shaking. For weeks, he had been bracing for a moment that would cause tensions in the city to become unmanageable, that would create a recurrence of the unrest that followed Floyd’s killing in 2020. “I thought, This is going to be it,” he told me. “There’s no way we can control this. It’s absolutely outrageous that you just killed someone again.”
He called a watch commander, who confirmed the details and said the victim, Alex Pretti, was receiving CPR. O’Hara got dressed and called the county sheriff and the colonel of the state patrol. He told his assistant chief to notify the National Guard.
The chief had been anticipating a quiet Saturday, at least by the standards of recent weeks. His wife is still in Newark, where she’s a police officer, and their two sons stayed behind with her. I asked him if he had sought out the chief’s job in Minneapolis. “You sound like that’s surprising to you,” he replied with a laugh. “You didn’t get forced into it? Nobody tricked you?” He said the issues he’d been addressing as chief of police and then public-safety director in Newark, including violent crime and poor community relations, were similar to the ones plaguing Minneapolis. He had been drawn to the challenge.
“There was a world-changing event caused by the police here,” he said. But he also admits to being naive, not understanding how deep the damage was and also how resistant some segments of the community are to his mission. Last year, the New York Post quoted him identifying a “very detached, bourgeois liberal mentality” in Minneapolis. He seems to regret how the comments came across, but the politics in Minneapolis do genuinely surprise him. “This is an affluent city; Newark is not,” he said. “This is a majority-white city; Newark is not.” Although there was anger about police tactics in Newark, the basic need for policing wasn’t questioned the way it is in Minneapolis, he said.
[Read: Welcome to the American winter]
I asked O’Hara if he detected newfound public appreciation for his officers. He seemed skeptical. There’s a generalized fear of anyone in uniform, he said, and his department can’t meet the expectations of activists who want local cops to “physically stop federal law enforcement from enforcing federal law.”
The impact on public safety is severe, O’Hara said. Over the past several years, his department has worked with federal agencies to go after hundreds of gang members in racketeering cases, he said. Now the prosecutors he had been working with in the U.S. Attorney’s Office have resigned amid pressure to investigate Good’s widow. The effect is to undermine the administration’s own rationale for its immigration crackdown: welfare fraud under investigation by federal prosecutors. “Remember,” O’Hara said, “this was supposedly about fraud.”
We were driving north, not far from the site where Pretti was killed by two federal agents, and the city was calm. It was 7 degrees. Earlier, O’Hara had joked to me that he had never had to wear long johns to an office job before.
As we made our way to city hall, he was musing about why the streets hadn’t erupted in the way they did in 2020, and he suggested that the biting cold may have had something to do with it. O’Hara allowed himself some optimism: “I feel better today than I did yesterday, and that’s the first time that’s happened since this has started.”
He said it was too early to tell whether the Trump administration had really changed course. Already, however, events in Minneapolis had moved the country into a different phase—one with public displays of state violence, and without guarantees of accountability.
But for Minneapolis, he said, the outcome could be unexpected. Instead of post-traumatic stress, he suggested, there could be “post-traumatic growth.” That sounded like a platitude to me, but he continued, explaining that he had once heard about a study showing that PTSD among prisoners of war in Vietnam was actually less acute than it was among soldiers who had never been captured. We were parked by this time outside city hall, where the police chief’s office is located, behind a small waiting room with a glass case of plaques and trophies. “The idea is that the group of people who are subject to the most intense pressure wind up growing from that experience, as opposed to being victims,” O’Hara said.
He said he thought that was possible in Minneapolis, for residents as well as for the police.