The Inside Man

In the coming weeks, Minneapolis police chief Tim Dolan will face a tough reappointment process. But for this hockey-playing son of the city’s north side, tough is just another day.

Photo by Jesse Knish

(page 1 of 4)

MINNEAPOLIS POLICE CHIEF Tim Dolan swings his unmarked cruiser around a corner onto north Broadway Avenue as smoothly and steadily as a parade float. The chief, 54, with a compact physique and youthful face, grew up on the city’s north side. This street was on his paper route back when he prowled the neighborhood on a Schwinn.

“I was out early every morning,” Dolan recalls. “I had a route from Broadway to 26th and from Emerson to Washington.” This was in the ’60s, he adds, when the main drag had a Woolworth’s, a Mickey’s Diner, and a Broadway Diner. “They would all feed me, the diners and stuff. I would get a burger at Mickey’s, a doughnut at Broadway.”

Presently, the chief is AWOL from a meeting back at city hall. But he’d rather drive. “I loved working the street as a patrolman,” he says. “It’s still the best job in the police department. It’s an adrenaline junkie’s job. You’re driving around with the window open. You’re not punching the time clock. You have enough free time to do things proactively that you want to do. And you wonder what people do in the chief’s office. I mean, what can they possibly do?”

What Dolan has done as chief has been the subject of much scrutiny lately. He is expected to face a public hearing and a vote by the Minneapolis City Council regarding reappointment sometime in the next few weeks or months. (His contract has expired, but he can stay on without a vote until the end of June.) Most predict that the chief will be reappointed, but that outcome is hardly a sure thing given the rocky nature of his first three-year term. Dolan oversaw several hefty police-misconduct settlements, was accused of racial bias, drew fire from city council members angry about a multimillion-dollar budget overage, and recently found himself “shocked and embarrassed” after one of his officers was arrested for bank robbery. He also roused the ire of the rank and file for meting out more discipline than his predecessors. Things hit bottom last year when the police union tried to bring a criminal charge against the chief for boarding his dog at the department kennel. The charge went nowhere, but, for Dolan, it was a real you-know-they-hate-you-when moment.

It’s not a pretty picture. But then, it’s rarely been pretty for Minneapolis’s police chiefs, who take on one of the most high-profile jobs in the city. Dolan ascended to the office in May 2006, after his predecessor, William McManus—who came to Minneapolis from Dayton, Ohio—declined to seek reappointment and moved to San Antonio, Texas, after little more than two years on the job.

It’s unlikely that Dolan will be packing up for Texas or anywhere else. He’s a product of the MPD, having served on the department for 27 years. And he comports himself like the local he is. He’s earnest and understated, with a voice so measured that sometimes you have to lean in to hear him. He prefers a police uniform to fancy suits. He works hard, but doesn’t describe his efforts in grandiose terms.

Having presided over years of declining crime and the city’s lowest murder rate in a quarter century, it seems obvious that the chief is adept at practical police work. He’s less so when it comes to the public-relations part of the job, however, which means he’s been caught off guard by how some of his decisions have played on the street and at city hall. “I was never someone who was interested in politics,” says Dolan. “I said before I took the job, I am not political. But I tell you, after being the chief for a while, if you aren’t somewhat political, you will get slaughtered in this job. It’s a very tough environment. I’m still learning. I’ve stepped on plenty of land mines.”


ONE MORNING, roughly a year ago, a motorist named Derryl Jenkins was stopped for speeding on Minneapolis’s north side. Video captured by a dashboard camera (and later broadcast repeatedly on television news) shows that, while Jenkins offered no resistance, Officer Richard Walker wrestled him to the ground. Additional officers arrived on the scene and proceeded to kick and punch Jenkins, who lay motionless face-down in a snow bank. It was one of a string of brutal arrests caught on camera and made public last year, including the arrest of Rolando Ruiz, who screamed in agony while being tasered in the neck to the point of unconsciousness.

These are the sorts of incidents that make a chief want to crawl under a rock. “There seems to be no end to the challenges of managing officers,” says former MPD chief John Laux, who served from 1989 to 1994 and was the last chief to come up through the ranks before Dolan. “You can be busting proud one day for some of the heroic and outstanding work they do. Then somebody steps out of line and it’s history repeating itself. You try to put a lot of things in place to prevent that, recruiting and training and all the things you do to try to get the right people wearing that uniform. There just seem to be those events you wish would never happen. They are unprofessional and, in a few cases, criminal, but always disappointing.”

The MPD has a long, nagging history of misconduct troubles. And it’s been expensive: Over the last seven years, the city has paid an average of $1.5 million per year to settle legal claims against the department. Payouts by St. Paul, which typically sees one-third as many murders and has 600 officers compared to Minneapolis’s 880-person force, are markedly less, averaging $167,000 over the last seven years. Dolan dismisses any comparison, calling the adjoining cities “two different worlds.”

Booker Hodges, head of the NAACP’s Minneapolis chapter and a deputy sheriff in Dakota County, says that Dolan has generally done “a good job of managing the department.” Hodges once served with Dolan on the Police Community Relations Council, part of a 2003 federal mediation agreement that required Minneapolis police and various community representatives to meet for five years with the goal of alleviating long-standing tensions. “My problem with Chief Dolan is that the city continues to pay out these exorbitant amounts in lawsuits when they could curb this behavior,” Hodges says. As a result, the MPD has a serious image problem. “People are saying that the police just beat everybody up,” Hodges says. “They lie on reports and make stuff up.”

It’s hard to say whether payouts linked to allegations of police misconduct have declined under Dolan. Such claims can take years to wend their way through the court system. But thus far, claims filed early in his term, between 2006 and 2008, have cost the city an average of $539,000 per year. Dolan sees signs of a positive trend, but acknowledges that improvements are “going to take time. It’s a change process.”