Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted earlier this spring prior to Chief Brian O’Hara’s resignation on May 26, 2026, and has been edited for length and clarity.
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Little did erstwhile Jersey guy Brian O’Hara know when he arrived in Minneapolis in 2022, but his new city would soon capture the entire world’s attention, and with it, that of another Jersey guy, Bruce Springsteen. In regular times, The Boss writing a song about your city might be a feather in the cap for a Jersey-born police chief now living in flyover country. But when the song is a grisly protest anthem about the federal government running roughshod over said city, it hits differently.
In Jersey, O’Hara worked his way from patrol officer up the Newark Police Department ranks to deputy chief, then to public safety director, and eventually to mayor Ras Baraka’s police-reforming deputy mayor. Then, for about 30 seconds, he retired. But before his retirement cake had even cooled, O’Hara was enticed back into uniform by, of all things, the task of rebuilding and reforming an embattled police department in a Midwestern city he’d only visited once.
With officer numbers way down and public trust eroding, O’Hara came to the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) staring down a major challenge. What he wasn’t counting on was that one presidential election later, Springsteen’s gravelly voice would rocket to No. 1 on iTunes in 19 countries, singing about a different challenge entirely. “Streets of Minneapolis” was released within days of Alex Pretti’s death in late January (and just over two weeks after Renee Good’s), both at the hands of federal agents during Operation Metro Surge. Springsteen dedicated the song to Minneapolitans, many of whom, including Chief O’Hara, had experienced firsthand the dystopian scenes he had sung about.
Now, with Metro Surge mainly in the rearview and Springsteen’s anthem still charting, a new set of challenges bubbles. Reports about misconduct complaints filed against O’Hara, 30 total during his tenure, have circulated. And, while eight complaints have been dismissed by the Office of Community Safety wholecloth, 22 remain open. The complainants, who could be anyone—not just MPD officers or Minneapolis residents—remain anonymous, as do the actual complaints, unless disciplinary action is deemed necessary.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey continues to voice support for O’Hara, and the chief is bullish that he will remain in his post for at least another four-year term beginning in August. But the city council, who confirmed him unanimously for his first go-round, are now split about his future leading the MPD.
With all that in mind, we headed to O’Hara’s office inside City Hall in late March, then connected with him a few weeks later on the phone after The Minnesota Star Tribune ran the misconduct allegations on the front page. In our conversation, the 47-year-old was candid, even fighting back tears on a few occasions, as he revisited the fog of ICE, the heartbreak of the mass shooting at Annunciation, the new turmoil brewing, and how, despite it all, he’s still most focused on rebuilding the MPD.
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You could be retired right now. You literally had your party and everything. But you were drawn to this job three years ago.
Three and a half years.
But who’s counting, right?
I’m still standing. I’m still here. The people of Minnesota have been just unusually kind to me ever since I came here. We’ve been through so much. Your mind kind of fixates on the most recent stuff—Metro Surge and, right before that, Annunciation, which was the worst mass shooting in the U.S. in 2025. But at the same time, the job is to try and both rebuild the police department and reform it.
Let’s start there. After George Floyd and the events of 2020, the MPD lost more than 300 officers, public trust was bad, and department morale was worse. That’s a problem you’ve been trying to solve while dealing with all this other really impossible stuff. Are you solving it?
I don’t know of any other major city police department that has had to rebuild after having such a tremendous loss of staff while being expected to implement really monumental reforms. I’d say probably about two-thirds of the police officers that work in patrol were hired after 2020. So, the department is changing pretty rapidly. It’s an entirely new generation, a lot more diverse in just about any way you could think of. There’s a lot of second career people. A lot of people from all over the world.
Making the MPD look more like the community it serves?
The department when I got here was 80% white, but we’re hiring over 60% people of color. The community service officers are nearly 30% women. I would argue the most diverse place in the city is our training center or our locker room. Most of the time I’ve been chief, month after month, the department has gotten smaller. It’s only in the last year that we’ve turned it around. We ended last year hiring 125 more people for sworn positions than what we lost. In Minnesota, it takes time to get those people through the relevant college classes to get the state license, and then they have to go to the police academy.
You came in with a mandate for big change. Did that rock the boat internally?
As soon as you start doing things differently, as soon as you start moving people around, for sure, there are going to be some people who decide, this is my time to go. And that happens.
The city charter requires, what, 731 officers?
But it’s not enough. I would like to get at least 1,000 officers. We’ll probably be at about 650 by the end of the year. It just takes time in Minnesota.
How did your evolving department handle the profound challenge of Metro Surge?
Those were tense times but certainly there were very positive signs. We had officers out at the vigil sites from the beginning trying to engage in dialogue with people, and trying to engage in the right way. There are some people who were not receptive to it, but there were a lot of people—random residents—who were helping de-escalate things and helping bring police into the conversation and helping people understand the difference between our officers and what we were trying to do and what was happening.
Federal agents were wearing vests that said ‘POLICE.’
We were in a difficult position because you had the administration saying that we were not doing enough to protect federal law enforcement and, in very real ways, having conversations about sending federal troops, and saying that the mayor and I were inciting an insurrection. After Ms. Good was killed, there were federal agents driving around in the vicinity, still doing stops and potentially inciting a second incident. It was escalating the entire time. If something did explode here, would we be able to maintain public safety? It was really overwhelming.
Especially since it felt like sowing chaos was maybe part of the point?
It was being encouraged. No one in charge was saying, “Hey, let’s be careful. We don’t want the city to burn down.” No, the opposite. Minneapolis is a small city. It was totally overwhelmed by thousands of federal law enforcement. Chicago, Los Angeles, they could get far more city police officers to a scene than you could have ICE agents. When we were going to these shootings, there were hundreds of them and 20 of us.
During all this, the community seemed to go from afraid to pissed.
After three weeks of shootings and no end in sight, rightfully pissed. After the Good shooting, we did not want our officers in riot gear. I was out there myself without anything on. It was a risk because federal law enforcement was still escalating things, and for the most part, everything was fine, but it deteriorated in the last 15 minutes and several officers got injured. A couple of state troopers got injured. But I think had we approached that thing from the beginning the way you might traditionally do this, we could have inadvertently escalated things just by showing up a certain way.
How did you navigate the challenge of people in federal positions (that supersede yours) effectively encouraging ICE’s antics?
Even though it seems like they weren’t abiding by, at the bare minimum, professional standards, we needed to maintain our professional standards, and we also needed to maintain respect for the process and respect for the rule of law. We needed the system to still be able to function properly. But it was such a delicate balance between trying not to give them a justification for taking the city over through the Insurrection Act and also trying not to do anything that violated the community trust.
What was this like?
It was tough for sure. There was a lot of hate and just racist shit being said on social media. And my wife wound up being targeted by some of it, and she wound up being harassed personally. That part was disturbing. And I was talking to lawyers because there was concern with the Insurrection Act that people were talking about arresting me. So, I just imagined, what if my kids see on TV that dad has been arrested and is at the Whipple building? It sounds insane, but that’s where things were.
I mean, that literally happened to your old boss, Newark mayor Ras Baraka, last summer. Has the recalibration of what extremes are possible changed your outlook on this job?
It’s hard. It was hard not being able to see my kids during this whole thing. It has been tough on my family. My youngest son now, whenever I see him, when I leave, he says he misses me and, “Dad, when can I see you again?” That type of thing is really hard because my sons live in New Jersey. When they were younger, they were more resilient and happy, regardless. Now that they’re older, that makes it a little bit more challenging. But I tried to keep it in context that it is such a blessing to be a part of this. What we’re doing here is really meaningful. I think I’m setting a good example for my sons that will live on, but I certainly don’t mean it’s easy.
Now that the proverbial smoke has cleared, it seems like Minneapolis writ large lived up to the moment. Did the MPD?
One of the things I was afraid of was that the cycle of 2020 would happen, which is not just damage to the city but also a mass exodus of police and crime escalating very quickly. We had several officers put in PTSD claims. Thankfully, we got through it, and we continued to rebuild. This past week was the first since 2020 that we met our goal and responded to priority one calls, on average, in less than seven minutes. That literally has not happened once, for a week, since 2020.
Progress.
We’ve got our challenges, but we’ve made significant improvements, particularly with immigrant communities. We probably have better relationships and more connections in those communities than the department ever had before. It’s still going to take time. It’s not going to happen fast enough for people. I think it’s still very fragile. But I think all indications are that we are on the right path. People tell me that their interactions are night and day different today versus the way it was in 2020 before the civil unrest.
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So, what you’re saying is the MPD is acting more compassionately now?
Officer Hassan Robertson and I stopped a car. It was midnight in the middle of the surge on a Saturday. We were on Lake Street, and the car ran a red and kind of took off. We pulled the car over, and it was this South American family with a baby in the back. The woman looked like she hadn’t eaten in weeks—she was just bones. They had come out to try and get food real quick and were rushing to get back in the house. You didn’t need a translator to understand these people were terrified, and we calmed them down and just helped them—Hassan and I helped them fix the child seat and just kind of sent them on their way. I don’t understand how you could interact with people, as a human, and not be affected by just how terrified they were.
We’ve forgotten so many things about human dignity. The man in St. Paul, who was the wrong guy and they brought him out in freezing temperatures in his underwear. I don’t care if it’s a murderer, you don’t do that in front of cameras. What is wrong with you?
It feels like many police chiefs would have been less outspoken than you were during Metro Surge.
The safe way to do it.
Whereas, for a while there, you were a regular guest on national newscasts.
It was scary for me. Everyone has been afraid to speak out—like other individual chiefs or members of different organizations. It was disturbing. If we’re not going to speak out against what we know is obviously really wrong and disturbing, then what’s the point here? When I was talking to the press, I was just praying that, as the police chief in uniform trying to calmly and clearly explain things as a matter of fact and a matter of law, that someone with some power would hear me and tell somebody in Washington like, “Dude, this has got to stop.” And it’s a shame. It took two people dying and a third person getting shot before anybody stepped in.
Coming out of Metro Surge, you found an increasingly hostile City Council and a whole new set of misconduct complaints.
I had no idea until there was a media inquiry that the number of complaints against me literally doubled since the surge. And I think people can draw their own conclusions from that. There was a whole lot of hate that we took as a department and that I took personally. We had people on one extreme that believed that we were not doing our duty to fight alongside ICE, basically. And then we also had people on the other extreme who thought we should be arresting federal law enforcement. We can’t manage the politics of these incidents, and the reality is that it was an extremely politically charged crisis. We did the best we could to thread the needle and balance things and keep people safe, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t extremes on both sides that were critical of our every move.
What about the complaints that stemmed from earlier in your tenure?
I was aware in the beginning that there were internal complaints being made against me from police officers. There were even people joking about complaints that could be made. I remember one that was going around was “the chief wears a white T-shirt with his uniform,” and technically, that was against the policy here—to have a white T-shirt visible under your uniform—which is just ridiculous. The reality is there is no way that you can have any kind of meaningful change and not have some level of blowback. If you’re not getting pushback, then you’re not changing a damn thing that matters. And, if you’re coming in and changing the people in charge and moving different people around, you’re taking away people’s informal power.
What has the reaction been around Minneapolis?
I know people have been reaching out to the mayor and their council members. I have a whole box of cards and handwritten letters people have sent. We’ve all been through a lot here together. I was invited down to Annunciation for Mass on Thursday. When I went to the Children’s Mass for Christmas, it was in the school, but when I went this past Thursday, Mass was actually in the church, and it’s the first time I’ve walked over to where those kids were that day. It was heavy. There are a lot of people in the community who’ve been really loving and supportive. My wife and I had dinner with a family on the north side last night, and they really believe the work that we’re doing has impacted their lives personally.
Whether you’ll get a second term has become a big topic. Mayor Frey has continued to give you his full support publicly, but some members of the City Council appear more dubious about your future. You’ve said you want to stay beyond August, but what if that doesn’t happen?
This job is temporary. Whether I’m here until August or whether I’m here another four years, it’s temporary. I’m not entitled to this, and it could end at any time. But, at least for the time that I’m here, I want to try and make every minute of it mean something. I think by and large, people see constitutional policing as the standard here now. And, unquestionably, every single day the police department is becoming more diverse and more reflective of the values of the community. So, yeah, I think regardless of whether I’m still here, the department has the structure that it can continue down that road and continue to improve.
