O’Hara to New York Post: Minneapolis has a ‘very detached, bourgeois liberal mentality’

Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Minneapolis has a “very detached, bourgeois liberal mentality,” according to a New York Post story posted Friday as the city this week approaches the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by police.

O’Hara said he became accustomed to a very Democratic city when he worked in Newark, N.J., but that nothing had prepared him for the “ultra-liberal orthodoxy,” as the Post put it, that he found in Minneapolis. O’Hara was Newark’s public safety director.

“Here it’s very, very ideological and a lot of times it’s like reality and facts can’t get through the filter. It’s a very detached, bourgeois liberal mentality … It’s bizarre," he is quoted as saying to the Post, a tabloid generally considered to be a conservative publication.

O’Hara’s comments are part of a story about Minneapolis as it approaches the five-year mark next Sunday since Floyd’s killing by police sparked worldwide protests and riots and arson in the Twin Cities.

After spending a week in Minneapolis, reporter Dana Kennedy writes that the city is “broken, divided and suffering.” Much of the story focuses on the anger and trauma of police officers over abandoning the Third Precinct police station, which was torched by protesters, and the “demonization” of Minneapolis police officers.

O’Hara’s comments irritated some Minneapolis City Council members. Council President Elliott Payne said progressives in Minneapolis are not a monolith, which he said is hard for some “to wrap your head around, especially for people new to our city’s political ecosystem.”

“Some people come into their politics through a more academic process, others through solidarity, others through lived experience,” Payne said. “No matter how people develop their core values, one should have a deeper understanding of the diverse perspectives of our community before engaging in conversations with New York tabloids.”

Council Member Jason Chavez, who lived six blocks from the intersection where Floyd was killed and was inspired to run for the council afterward, said O’Hara’s remarks were “not only disrespectful” but “counterproductive and condescending.”

“These comments directed at our residents fail to meet the moment we are in when people’s rights are under attack from the federal government and our communities are rightfully pushing back,” Chavez said.

Last year, the City Council — which has a majority of members more progressive than Mayor Jacob Frey — diverted $1.8 million from Frey’s proposed police budget, which still left the budget $12 million higher than in the previous year. Council Member Katie Cashman said city leaders have “funded [O’Hara’s] department to the amount he asked of us and have improved recruitment and retention with pay raises.”

Said Cashman: “We expect the chief to be working diligently to reform and rebuild trust with Minneapolis residents, but these disdainful comments do the opposite.”

Sgt. Garrett Parten, a spokesman for the Minneapolis police, released a statement Saturday clarifying O’Hara’s comments.

“As the chief has said previously, policing in the city has become overly politicized, making it difficult to even discuss the need for effective and adequately resourced police without it being viewed through a rigid ideological lens,” Parten said. “That’s the disconnect — not with residents — but with political narratives that overshadow the real and urgent safety concerns residents are living with every day.”

This isn’t the first time O’Hara has ruffled local feathers with comments to a national news outlet. Last year, he told Harper’s Magazine that he was still shocked after a year as chief “by how extreme these ideologies are. Minneapolis is just one of a few blue dots in the middle of a rural red state. For some folks, hating the police has become a political cause. There’s still a very strong movement to defund the police, even in the middle of a five-alarm fire.”