January 31, 2026

Chief Brian O’Hara discusses a tense week in Minneapolis

PERF members,

At almost the exact same time I wrote to you last week, another preventable tragedy occurred in Minneapolis. Around 9:00 a.m. local time on Saturday, U.S. Border Patrol agents shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti, and I’m sure you’ve all seen video of the incident and read countless narratives about what occurred.

On Thursday, I spoke with Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara about the tactics he’s seen from federal agents, managing his agency’s staffing shortages, and the advice he’d give other police chiefs preparing for a federal immigration enforcement surge.

Chuck Wexler: After Renée Good was shot by an ICE agent on January 7, you said that “this was entirely predictable.” Why did you believe that?

Chief Brian O’Hara: On June 3, there was a series of search warrants executed by the Homeland Security Task Force, and one of them was at a Mexican restaurant on Lake Street, which is the heart of the Latino community. It’s also the same strip of Lake Street where the [Minneapolis Police Department] 3rd Precinct was set on fire in 2020. A large portion of that corridor was burned down and rebuilt.

That June 3 raid wasn’t actually an immigration raid, but HSI was there, the FBI was there, and somebody was there with an ICE windbreaker on. It immediately became a very volatile situation. We had to respond there. Federal agents used less-lethal [force]. As they were trying to leave, they almost lost the scene. We had a really tense situation for several hours that we worried was going to become a riot again. And it wasn’t actually anything related to immigration enforcement.

June 3 was a Tuesday. On that Friday, a similar situation played out in Los Angeles, with riots confined to downtown and all the talk about sending in federal troops. So I knew that that Tuesday we were really, really close to having what happened in Los Angeles happen here. And locally, people kept talking about it as if we [had been] helping ICE on an immigration raid to take people away, which never happened.

So the pressure has been continually building. We’ve seen what has happened in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Los Angeles County. Then things played out differently in other cities—D.C., Memphis, and now New Orleans. I knew the reality of what was happening here politically. This is a very, very engaged community. It is politically left, like Portland [Oregon], and we know what’s happened in Portland.

So the surge finally came here at the end of November and beginning of December. I actually knew something was happening before they got here because we have relationships with the community, and all the workers in the hotels around the airport and surrounding communities are Latino. So I was hearing from the Latino community, “What’s going on? All these federal agents just came in. They’re going to have a surge. Something’s going to happen.” They knew before anybody else did that something was going on.

Things started happening, and it was just chaotic. We had people stopped who were American citizens. We were getting all these . . . reports of use-of-force incidents [from community members] that weren’t reported [by federal agencies]. We tried to follow up. The [feds] would say they didn’t spray anybody, they didn’t tear gas anybody, all these kinds of things. And it was just escalating tensions.

You would see videos of poor tactics [and] questionable methods. I remember we had a woman in her 50s or 60s who was sprayed when she was just standing on the street. We would see some of this stuff, and people would have videos of things, then we would follow up with the command post and they would tell our lieutenant that nobody used any force in some of these places.

It was just overwhelming in volume and incredibly chaotic. There were plenty of scenes where things would happen that looked incredibly unsafe. It looked like policing 20 or 30 years ago.

Chief Brian O’Hara addresses the crowd at PERF’s 2025 Town Hall in Denver alongside Philadelphia Commissioner Kevin Bethel and St. Louis Chief Bob Tracy.

Wexler: Before coming to Minneapolis, you spent more than 20 years policing in Newark, New Jersey. Have you ever seen anything like these tactics in Newark or Minneapolis?

Chief O’Hara: Police in Newark 20 or 30 years ago were not anywhere near as trained [as they are now]. I think Minneapolis today, because of everything that’s happened, is very clearly—from what I’ve seen—the most well trained and tactically proficient, for the average police officer. So I’d say I’ve seen some of this stuff, but I’ve seen it 20-plus years ago.

[What the federal agencies are doing is] not team tactics. It’s not coordinated. It doesn’t look like each of the officers understands what the other one is trying to accomplish. Sometimes it seems like they’re almost working against each other, because it’s so chaotic and undisciplined. And certainly you don’t see any effort at all to de-escalate things.

Wexler: Over the past six years, the Minneapolis Police Department has gone through a tremendous amount of turnover. Where does your staffing stand now?

Chief O’Hara: In 2020, there were 900 officers, and the chief was advocating to hire 400 more to increase the ranks. The pandemic hits, [then] George Floyd, and there’s a mass exodus. By the time I got here two years later, of the 900 officers who were employed at the start of [2020], more than 500 had separated. And we were not hiring enough people to keep pace with regular attrition.

So at the rate we were going for my first two years as chief, it was mathematically impossible to ever increase the ranks. That started to turn around a year ago. I’ve gotten some better controls over the hiring process internally. And we’ve had some success trying to rebrand the agency and restore some of the sense of legitimacy in the community and a sense of pride in our employees.

When George Floyd happened, a few days later, the police station was abandoned and burned. A large part of the city was caught up in fires and looting. The next month, June 2020, we wound up having as many shootings in a month as what used to be typical for half a year. So crime was very much out of control.

When I came in, there was a normalization of what was going on. There was almost a numbness, because the cops had been painted with a broad brush. They came to work day after day wondering who was not going to show up. They were questioning the profession and the department that they had invested the majority of their adult lives in.

Some of their kids were getting harassed at school because a parent is a cop in Minneapolis. They stayed in the station because they couldn’t stop to use the bathroom. They couldn’t stop at a restaurant to get something to eat. They were refused service a lot of times. That’s just a lot to go through.

When this stuff happens, I have to mobilize the department. I have to cancel days off. We get tens of thousands of people protesting day after day. I have to call mutual aid. I had to [request] deploy[ment] of the National Guard in the city last Saturday.

When all these things happen, cops are still humans. Who’s missing their child’s 10th birthday? Who couldn’t go to their kid’s game? Who’s having a tough time in their marriage, and this is not helping? Who has a parent who’s elderly and can’t see them?

This is having a real impact on a department where we don’t have a bench. There’s no buffer. If one of these [recent] incidents had resulted in widespread looting, burglaries, and fires, we would’ve lost control, and I think we would have wound up in the same cycle we had in 2020—crime rises dramatically and cops leave in droves.

I don’t think it’s possible to sustain any of that, and that was my fear each time I got a call that there was a shooting, then another shooting, then another shooting.

Wexler: From the outside, it seems like the community has developed some trust in your officers as they protest the presence of federal law enforcement. Does it feel that way to you?

Chief O’Hara: That’s true, but it’s not universal. We are called to these scenes constantly, and we respond if there’s a public safety issue—violence, potential violence, threats, property damage. Our officers place themselves between the community and federal law enforcement.

Oftentimes, there are people who say that because we are there, we are protecting ICE. The reality is that we are trying to protect everyone. We are trying to de-escalate the situation. We are trying to slow things down. We are trying to prevent violence and prevent damage to our residents’ community.

There’s been chaos at a lot of these hotels. There’s been damage. Sometimes protesters force entry into the hotels. Last night (Wednesday) we arrested 67 people outside of a hotel for an unlawful assembly. When we do that, some people say, “Well, you’re just protecting ICE.”

We don’t want a federal agent to get killed, and we don’t want anyone in the community to get killed either. No one wins when someone loses their life, and it doesn’t matter which side you’re on.

In this city, it’s the Latino community and the Somali community that have been the hardest hit. They are the ones that have been targeted, and I am very confident that the Latino and the Somali communities in this city have never had as much trust in the Minneapolis police as they do today.

Wexler: Reportedly there have been as many as 3,000 federal agents in the area, and there are only 600 Minneapolis police officers. How have you been triaging calls and determining when a response is needed?

Chief O’Hara: It’s difficult to tell with the data, but we’re estimating this has led to a 10–15 percent increase in calls for service. I’ve had to staff entirely new positions to triage these. I have a lieutenant on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week to screen ICE[-related] calls. During the day, there are so many calls that he’s assisted by a sergeant.

We staff an operations center with access to all the cameras citywide. When these calls come in, we get up on the cameras, we do callbacks, and we use drones to try to independently verify as best we can what is happening in real time so that we can prioritize and deploy personnel.

When things are getting out of hand and there’s a large crowd or there’s an officer-needs-help situation, we have learned that we cannot handle that in the way we typically would if it were a sheriff’s deputy or Minnesota state trooper who needs help. We need to have awareness of what’s going on at the scene. We need to rally a group of officers with a supervisor. They need to have a plan [and] a mission, [then] go in, do what has to be done, restore the peace, and get out.

That’s what we’ve learned, and it’s taken a tremendous toll on everybody. Because while we’re doing all of these things, we still have to do conventional police work. This is still a major city, and the police department is severely understaffed.

On a regular day before this happened, we cannot make minimum staffing on patrol in any of the precincts without overtime. We have half the number of investigators in our Investigations Bureau today [that] they had in 2020.

So overtime is exorbitant without all this stuff. When we have protests, counter-protests, and critical incidents, it is immediately an emergency. We cancel days off. We hold everybody over for extended tours. We call for mutual aid. And for close to two weeks now, we’ve had the National Guard on standby. Last Saturday, we had the Saint Paul police and more than a dozen suburban towns in the city, and that’s who was answering 911 calls while we were trying to prevent civil unrest.

It’s been as dire as it could possibly be. And I have worried that even with all of that, it might not be enough.

[The other agencies] are limited in their resources, too. The state troopers are tired, because they’re not just responding to Minneapolis; they’re responding at times to Saint Paul or one of the suburbs and dealing with unlawful assemblies at a hotel.

Everyone’s just stretched so thin and is so overwhelmed by all the things that are happening.

Wexler: What has been your goal when communicating with the public and the media?

Chief O’Hara: This is a town where the community is very engaged. All the major media are here, and the focus has been on Minneapolis the whole time I’ve been here. The community is very much focused on the Minneapolis police. What are we doing? What are we not doing and why?

Before I came to Minneapolis, I was the person put out [in public] to manage the consent decree [in Newark]. I was the person who had to go before the community, host town hall meetings, and get yelled at and blamed for things, when half the time I didn’t even know what people were talking about and didn’t have any control over [it]. I was the person who had to deal with people’s frustrations and explain to the cops in Newark, who were very much opposed to any change, why change was needed.

So these are some of the same topics that I’ve spent years and years talking about internally with cops, thinking about how do we make things better for our people and the community.

And because of this job here and the intense, intense scrutiny I’m under on a regular day, I’ve had experience dealing with that. I’ve definitely made mistakes, but I think that the only way you get experience is by making mistakes and learning from them.

Chief O’Hara appears on CBS Face the Nation. Source: CBS/YouTube

Wexler: What advice would you give a police chief who finds out a federal immigration enforcement surge is coming to their city?

Chief O’Hara: Take a look at what the policies are. Different cities have different ordinances. Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and other cities have had separation ordinances for decades. Some places don’t. Some places are in different political environments.

So the context may be different, but if you’re in a similar context, with a lot of [federal law enforcement] coming in and a potential for backlash from the community, you want to be aware of your policies. How are you going to handle things if there’s an increase in calls? How do you typically handle protests? How are you going to handle protests related to immigration enforcement activities?

How is the community going to view us if we show up in these spaces? What are our parameters going to be? If the community sees us showing up to do “crowd control,” are they going to have a problem with it like they do here?

How can we try to educate the community about our policies and practices so they can’t say we’re taking one side or the other? This is an incredibly polarizing issue. Some people here have had the expectation that we could stop ICE from enforcing federal law. There just isn’t a shared reality because of the way politics have unfolded in the country.

Do outreach to immigrant communities that you think might be targeted. What’s happened here is they’ve withdrawn completely from public spaces. A lot of them don’t send kids to school. They don’t go to church. They’re not going to businesses. The business community here is suffering. Do outreach to the faith community. Here, it’s the Latino pastors. I’m constantly meeting with Latino business owners. There are also the Somali organizations that are closely tied to the masjids. I meet with them every month.

Communicate what your policies are and what your practices are so that you know the community is still going to trust the police enough to call 911 if they need them. Otherwise, you’re going to have a real problem if you have large portions of the community that are afraid to call the cops. They’re not going to cooperate with investigations. They’re not going to report crime. And that makes everyone in the community less safe.

Wexler: You’ve been working to rebuild an understaffed and demoralized police department for several years, and in the past eight months you’ve dealt with political assassinations in the region, a school shooting, and now this surge in federal immigration enforcement. How do you manage yourself?

Chief O’Hara: There have been times when there’s been so much happening around the clock that I haven’t been able to maintain any sense of a routine. But I try to consistently do something every day. I try to do some kind of physical activity in the morning just to have some sense of normalcy.

And I try as best I can to get some rest. It’s been tough getting sleep. Sometimes I crash and wake up a few hours later and there are a dozen text messages. Something else is happening, and I’ve missed phone calls from the mayor and assistant chief.

It’s like the airplane rule—when the mask comes down, you have to put your mask on first before you can help anybody else. And that’s the opposite of how cops are trained. We’re first responders. We’re here to help everybody else. And it’s very, very easy to miss that, especially when there’s such a long duration with no end in sight. But if you don’t, you’re going to wind up blowing a fuse.

So it’s been tough, but it’s been a little easier lately to try to maintain some sense of routine, some sense of normalcy, and make sure I get some sleep no matter what’s going on.

Thanks to Chief O’Hara for taking time out of his extremely busy schedule to share his perspective with our members.

Best,

Chuck