I don’t believe there has been a candid public discussion of the full consequences of a greatly depleted Minneapolis Police Department complement, sworn and civilian. There are a number of consequential results that are only gradually recognized, usually when people start to complain.
For starting context, I think some recap would be in order. Prior to the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, MPD sworn staffing stood at 877. You recall, 2020 was a census year. Minneapolis had reached 430,000 residents. That put the ratio of officers to residents at 2.04 officers per 1,000 citizens. That was slightly behind the national average for middle sized major cities, that averaged about 2.1 to 2.2 per 1,000 residents. Today the MPD average is beneath 1.4.
I was the Deputy Chief of Services during the declaration of Minneapolis as Murderapolis, by the New York Times in 1996. Among other responsibilities I was the chief staffing agent for MPD. In one year, we hired 110, so called Clinton Cops, in four cohorts. We needed them, we had just short of 100 murders that year. That pushed us to 952 sworn, over the budget, but permitted by city council as long as the annual average was within budget. With resources, good strategy, and community support, we began a sustained 20 year reduction in crime.
As we all know, following the Floyd murder, there was a major exodus of police officers from the profession, especially in Minneapolis. In my 40 year police career there were periods of estrangement between the police and particularly communities of color. There were also, periods of cohesion, solidarity, and trust. I had never seen anything as consequential as the murder of George Floyd. The entire profession was tarred with the Derek Chauvin brush.
Nine members of the Minneapolis City Council publicly declared their intent to begin the elimination of MPD. Over the next several years that drumbeat continued from them. There was no distinction made between officers who had served honorably and compassionately and the Derek Chauvins, who had no place on MPD. So they left.
In an earlier meeting I had with Chief Arradondo, he shared with me a looming concern amongst Minnesota police chiefs. State law had been changed to presumptively sustain Post Traumatic Stress Disability claims filed by police officers, as long as one medical professional and one other witness testified in favor of the claim. This has since been somewhat rectified by the legislature when they required attempts at rehabilitation must be made, prior to sustaining a PTSD disability claim.
No doubt there were officers who were genuinely afflicted with PTSD. The officers who were trapped in the 3rd Precinct while the increasingly enraged crowd attempted to breach the perimeter, who called home to say farewells, were likely legitimate claims. Then came the others. Many had been average or above performing officers that felt completely unsupported by the city board of directors. Some saw a chance to put a thumb in the eye of the city and walk away with a generous PTSD settlement. So, they left.
MPD bottomed out in the 550 range. Recently they have climbed back to 600. For context, the St. Paul Police Department is staffed at 575. Minneapolis has 130,000 more residents and 100,000 more 911 calls annually. I love our neighbors to the east, but I would argue that additionally, Minneapolis has a larger influx of daily workers and visitors to the University, professional sports facilities, parks, concert, and theater venues. 600 officers is not nearly enough. The unmet charter requirement of 770 is not enough. In Terry White’s Better Minneapolis podcast, I heard Council President Elliot Payne opine that he had studied the police calls for service, type and quantity, and he believed 275 officers would be sufficient. That is a debate for another day, but IMO, that is not a Minneapolis that would be remotely livable.
While some categories of violent crime have declined, through the focused and prioritized work of MPD, the influx and behaviors of agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has added, as Chief O’Hara has expressed, an unsustainable additional demand for police service. In my professional opinion, ICE activities with regard to law enforcement and the First Amendment protest, are beyond unprofessional. I see them as totally undisciplined, unsupervised, and pointless, unless the point is cruelty and domination.
This adds that unsustainable dimension to the workload of MPD. Though prohibited by city ordinance and values, the federal Administration’s demand that MPD assist with immigration enforcement, is resource impossible. What else could MPD stop doing or delay to accommodate working with ICE? The decision to work with ICE is at least a choice. When an ICE operation goes bad, protest begins to nudge past peaceful, and ICE response exacerbates the danger, MPD response is no longer optional.
Consequences of the Current MPD Staffing Level:
911 and Response Times
In the triage that MPD leadership must perform with dangerously depleted police officer staffing, you should know that 911 response has primacy. A public safety agency must provide fast response to true emergencies the top priority. When human resources are scarce, everything else is constrained. Investigator staffing is reduced (more to follow on this) in favor of uniform patrol for 911 response. Highly desirable community outreach, beat officers, youth programming, such as the Police Activities League, and even the venerable precinct desk officer go on life support.
For all of those sacrifices, 911 response for MPD remains beneath acceptable levels. 911 response time is a core performance measure of public safety, Police, Fire, and EMS.
In 2020 response times to Priority 1 calls, the most critical emergency calls, was about 6 minutes. In 2025 that had risen to 8 minutes and 29 seconds. In the short-term Chief O’Hara’s goal is to bring that closer to 7 minutes. In the event of a domestic assault or burglary of an occupied dwelling is in progress, even seven minutes is a lifetime.
Investigative Clearance Rates
Clearance Rates, the proportion of reported crime “solved”, by arrest or cleared “exceptionally” (i.e. suspect identified but deceased) was reported to and by the FBI in the annual Uniform Crime Report (UCR), now replaced with the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
Clearance rates are affected by a number of solvability factors, i.e. homicide (suspect often known) vs. theft or larceny (suspect rarely known or seen). In present day Minneapolis a major factor is investigative staffing. The one third decline in overall sworn staffing that affects uniformed patrol also affects detective staffing. Again, as the staffing emergency persists, triage must also take place amongst the detective ranks. Some investigative positions were cut to bolster the critically low numbers for 911 response. The triage that took place to accomplish that, in general meant fewer investigators would be assigned to property crimes (i.e. burglary, theft, fraud….). Investigative numbers for personal and violent crime investigation were maintained as much as possible.
What did this mean? In 2019 there were 161 sworn officers assigned to investigations downtown and at the precincts. In 2025, there were 91. That is a 43% decrease in sworn investigative staffing. The impact has been mitigated with the addition of non-sworn investigators. The union, the Police Officer’s Federation of Minneapolis, acceded to allow civilian investigators to fill bargaining unit positions, in this emergency. While helpful, there are a number of things civilian investigators cannot do. They cannot obtain and serve a search warrant. Often-times when probable cause is developed or an arrest warrant obtained for a suspect, the investigator may need to make a physical arrest. That of course can be dangerous and must be performed by sworn and trained officers.
Chief O’Hara has done his best to maintain staffing for the investigation of crimes against person. Two of the unquestionably serious crimes against person are homicide and robbery. Robberies sometimes become homicides (as does domestic abuse). By way of comparison, I was a robbery investigator from 1986 to 1989. We had a Robbery/Homicide Division with Robbery and Homicide Units. Each Unit had 8 teams of two detectives. Compared to today, this is what we have:
As you can see, MPD has held the number of homicide investigators almost constant. The Robbery Unit is about 1/3 of what it was in 1989. The consequence is fewer robbery cases are assigned and solved. When I was in the Robbery Unit, my supervisor, Lieutenant Dick Huss, read all the incoming cases and decided which had sufficient leads to possibly solve, and assigned it. Even then, we did not have the resources to investigate every case. In my case, I would be assigned about 100 cases a year.
Property crimes have fared far worse. This past fall, MPD leadership presented to the City Council on the reality of current MPD clearance rates. I attach them for 2024 and by way of comparison national clearance rates for 2023 (FBI reports are usually a year behind).
As you can see, in 2024 the MPD clearance rate for homicide at 68.1%, well exceeded the national average for 2023 at 57.8%. This shows that the priority MPD placed on closing homicide cases paid off.
Unfortunately, but as expected, there were necessary trade-offs such that success in homicide clearance was at the expense of other types of crime. The MPD 2024 robbery clearance rate of 16.6% was well below the national 2023 clearance rate of 27.6%.
The most striking consequence in property crimes is that the 2024 MPD Auto Theft clearance rate was 1.4% versus a 2023 national clearance rate of 8.2%.
Budget and Overtime
The fact of being 1/3 understaffed results in a lot of salary budget savings. This is however burned through and more because of required overtime. In December 2025 Chief O’Hara stood before the Minneapolis City Council to account for being 19.6 million dollars over budget. The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office came in 14 million over budget in 2024, mostly supporting public safety in Minneapolis. Among other things, you cannot walk away from a homicide scene. It might require patrol officers staying overtime to manage an unruly crowd at the crime scene. It might require homicide investigators to work 24 hours.
This was all before Operation Metro Surge by ICE. Already MPD is reportedly 1.9 million over budget in overtime in 2026. HCSO is over budget roughly 600 thousand for that same period. That is without providing any officers to assist with ICE enforcement operations. It is almost entirely a result of having to provide officers to try and keep the peace after ICE operations spark chaos and mayhem. We need look no further than the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents, barely a week apart. After the killing of Alex Pretti, Chief O’Hara was forced to cancel all days off and call back to duty all officers, excepting those that had just completed the dogwatch/overnight shift.
The Wellbeing of Officers and the Viability of MPD
Lastly, some officers have earned very large amounts of salary and overtime. The vast majority of this was involuntary. Officers have long been required to give back and be compensated with overtime for one regular off day every month. The combination of very inadequate staffing and critical events, now including ICE operations, has stretched many MPD officers to the breaking point. Chief O’Hara has repeatedly characterized this situation as unsustainable.
Should these circumstances spark another exodus of officers from MPD under likely very legitimate post-traumatic stress disorder disability claims, MPD and public safety in Minneapolis may become unsustainable. We must not let that happen.
Last year when the City Council redirected funds from the successful MPD recruiting initiative, it was extremely short sighted. Nevertheless, the efforts of the Chief and community have sustained robust and diverse recruit classes.
One thing we can do differently from the years following the George Floyd killing and the defund the police rhetoric, is to not alienate police officers. Given the stress that exists and is unrelenting, I have asked a number of our more level-headed elected officials not to miss the opportunity to publicly support the officers of the MPD. I was not optimistic the DSA bloc would appreciate the need. We, the community, should look for opportunities to do the same. They need to know they are appreciated and they are us, not them.
Here’s a shout out to our 3rd Precinct Inspector Gomez, the kindest, most relational officer I have ever known to lead our precinct and I never let an opportunity pass where I can praise and celebrate him. During one of the encampment fires he risked his life to go into that burning place to make sure everyone was out. And last week he made a lady who had just been burnt out of her apartment extremely appreciative when he climbed up some slippery ice encrusted stairs with burned out holes after the fire was put out to retrieve her purse, her son’s ashes and his picture that he found intact still hanging on the wall. She wept as he held her in his arms.
I’ve heard only the best about Inspector Gomez.
Thank you so much for reminding all of us how incredibly important our law-enforcement officers are and how unappreciated they remain in parts of our communities. We must continue to support our Minneapolis police officers, now more than ever.
Elliott Payne is a first class fool