Minneapolis police chief resigns after scandal over sexual misconduct investigation

A two-year justice department investigation concluded in 2023 that the department engaged in a pattern of excessive force and years of unlawful discrimination against Black Americans.

Frey, at the Tuesday press conference, credited O’Hara with rebuilding public trust in the department, but said that trust needed to extend to the person leading it.

“Everyone makes mistakes, including me, but what I can’t allow is a breach of trust,” Frey said. His comments were a reversal from his position earlier this month when Frey said O’Hara was “the right leader for this moment and for this city”.

Announcing his support for the chief to serve another term, he added: “Minneapolis didn’t ask for small steps, we demanded real, measurable change. And under his leadership, that’s exactly what we’ve been seeing.”

O’Hara is credited with reversing a stem of resignations from the police department, and heading off a call from some Black lawmakers for it to be disbanded, a proposal rejected by voters in 2021.

More recently, he has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement surge into Minneapolis, which saw the deaths of two unarmed US citizen protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in January by federal officers.

He condemned the shootings in a 25 January appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, during which he said Minneapolis residents had “had enough” of the violence.

“This is the third shooting now in less than three weeks,” he said. “The Minneapolis police department went the entire year last year, recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone.

“And now this is the second American citizen that’s been killed, it’s the third shooting within three weeks.”

The June 2025 murders of Democratic Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband; and a mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic school in south Minneapolis two months later, also came during O’Hara’s tenure.

“We saw Chief Brian O’Hara encountering some of the most difficult moments that our city has ever faced, and he did so with poise,” Frey said on 7 May at the nomination event, noting that the number of Minneapolis police department officers had climbed from 550 to more than 640, applications were up by 200%, and that crime had fallen across the city.