Chief O’Hara came to Minneapolis to rebuild trust. But he’s shown contempt for the politics.

Brian O’Hara was heralded as a transformational leader when he took control of the beleaguered, battered Minneapolis Police Department in late 2022, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police.

Two and a half years into the job, his relationship with the city is complicated.

The City Council unanimously confirmed O’Hara, the first permanent police chief appointed after Floyd’s killing.

O’Hara had implemented a federal consent decree mandating police reforms in Newark, N.J., and often spoke of applying to be MPD chief as if it was a heavenly calling.

“I think I’m here on purpose,” O’Hara told WCCO Radio before he began the job. “I think things in life happen for a reason.”

Leaving behind two sons and an “unbelievably supportive” wife who’s a police lieutenant in Newark, he became the first outsider to lead MPD in 16 years. He hit the streets before he even started the job: Two months before he formally began the job, O’Hara jumped out of a squad car during a ride-along and chased down a man who was arrested for having an illegal weapon and crack cocaine.

“Suddenly I realized … what the hell am I doing?” O’Hara told an Axios reporter while recounting the chase, laughing.

Now, O’Hara sometimes seems to wonder the same thing out loud: What the hell is he doing here? Particularly when he’s being interviewed by national media outlets. A few days before the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s killing, the New York Post published a story in which O’Hara expressed frustration with Minneapolis’ “very detached, bourgeois liberal mentality.”

It wasn’t the first time he dissed his new digs.

Last year, he told Harper’s Magazine he was shocked by Minneapolis’ “extreme ideologies,” saying, “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.”

Asked by reporters Monday to clarify his comments in the Post, O’Hara said it‘s almost controversial to acknowledge that policing is essential.

“My commitment to the people of this community is to do absolutely everything we possibly can to keep people alive here and try and reduce crime, and to me, those are things and decisions we should be making free of any ideological lens,” he said.

A segment of Minneapolis would agree with his sentiments — and can point to reforms made under his tenure as progress. But for others, including activists harshly critical of police before and after O’Hara’s arrival, it was the latest in a series of missteps.

“There’s nothing bourgeois about demanding accountability,” said Michelle Gross, whose Minneapolis organization fights police brutality and has called for O’Hara’s resignation.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, founder of the Racial Justice Network and former president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP, said O’Hara seems exasperated with “the progressive class.”

“I felt like he was operating more like a beat cop masquerading as a chief, especially when he would go out and help chase suspects and just different things that, from my perspective, were inappropriate in light of the internal reforms and structural reforms that needed to happen inside of the Minneapolis Police Department,” she said. “How do you have time to be on the street chasing suspects when you have all of this work to do to address the longstanding challenges within the Minneapolis Police Department?”

O’Hara promised to build a police department “so good, so respected, that people of all races and backgrounds will want to be a part of this positive change.”

But he arrived in Minneapolis and found what he has called a hopeless, demoralized, traumatized, numb department, passively reacting to calls “like we were the fire department.” One cop told an Indigenous leader that MPD officers were taking a “hands-off” approach to policing, allowing open-air drug dealing, to avoid a confrontation that could spark protests.

O’Hara told PBS that Minneapolis police officers had “experienced an incredible amount of trauma” and were fearful.

“And so, to some degree, while people were leaving the job, I think there was definitely, on some level, a retreat from doing police work, from doing proactive police work,” he said.

The rank-and-file were resistant to change in the beginning, he told the Star Tribune in July. Less than a year into his tenure, O’Hara was targeted with three ethics complaints, alleging he cursed out an Edina detective, failed to report using force, and was untruthful about the hiring of Virginia officer Tyler Timberlake, who had a checkered past.

In a sign that O’Hara was on thin ice with officers, the president of the police union, the Minneapolis Police Officers Federation, alleged that O’Hara was present during Timberlake’s final interview and “fully aware of his history.”

O’Hara told the Star Tribune the ethics complaints were evidence of pushback to change because they were lodged by police officers, not citizens. Two of the three complaints were anonymous.

“I do think there’s a bad history here with people weaponizing the complaint process,” he said in July. “It‘s ridiculous. I didn’t understand how bad it was until I got here. ... Cops have learned to use the system to their advantage, which they will do anywhere we let them.”

On Tuesday, the independent evaluator overseeing the city’s state-mandated reforms said MPD has made significant progress toward reforms in the first year of monitoring. Activist groups dispute that.

“We understand that change takes time,” Gross said. “However, the progress being claimed by the city is not being felt in the streets.”

On Wednesday, after the Trump administration moved to dismiss the federal consent decree agreement with Minneapolis that would mandate reforms, O’Hara said he will continue to work in Minneapolis, assuming the next mayor reappoints him when his full three-year term expires in January. He would have to be reappointed by the mayor and approved by the City Council; Frey and all 13 council members are up for re-election in November.

“I have been 100% committed,” O’Hara said during a Wednesday news conference. “And it has taken a lot out of me, quite honestly.”

O’Hara, who declined an interview request for this story, has racially diversified the department‘s upper echelons, created a new Bureau of Internal Affairs and a new Bureau of Constitutional Policing, and recently appointed two civilians to two high-ranking positions leading those bureaus.

One of his big blunders was signing off on the hiring of Timberlake, who had been involved in a use-of-force controversy that smacked of Chauvin’s treatment of Floyd. The officer was later let go by MPD, and he sued O’Hara for defamation.

And O’Hara considered resigning last fall amid fallout over the department‘s handling of a neighbor dispute that prompted activists to call for his firing, saying MPD failed a Black man who begged for help for months before he was shot by his white neighbor.

The irony of O’Hara’s criticism of Minneapolis is that he’s taken stances many would consider progressive: He said President Donald Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters was a slap in cops’ face; he called former officer Derek Chauvin a “national embarrassment” and said “some are attempting to rewrite history” of what he did to Floyd; he hired the city’s first Somali American female officer and first officer who’s not a U.S. citizen; he changed MPD’s uniform policy to allow hijabs and headscarves; and he doubled down on the city’s policy of not helping federal agents deport undocumented people.

When he was elected secretary of an influential group of law enforcement leaders, the Police Executive Research Forum, he was lauded for his progressive solutions by the group’s executive director, Chuck Wexler. The group has pushed police to change how they use force.

Gregory Hestness, a retired deputy chief of the Minneapolis Police Department and retired chief of the University of Minnesota Police Department, was on the chief search committee, and he said O’Hara “clearly stood above” the other candidates.

Cops are always suspicious of outsiders, he said, and some MPD officers initially dismissed O’Hara as a “social climber trying to build his resume.” But O’Hara has prioritized “being present” — from going to roll calls to homicide scenes.

“It‘s a job where you’re guaranteed not to please everyone,” Hestness said. “He’s got a more difficult tightrope to walk than most, and I think he’s doing a pretty good job of it.”

Making moves like putting civilians in executive roles is not popular with the rank-and-file, but a necessary one, said a retired MPD executive who did not want to be named because he said MPD has a history of retaliating against those who break the “blue wall of silence.” He said O’Hara has won over many officers, in part, with money: $18,000 retention bonuses and historic 22% raises.

“Cops are happy with him,” he said. “It‘s tough. You need a courageous individual. These people are … powerful. They will destroy you, destroy his reputation and they will run him out of here."

Restoring trust will be more difficult, he said, if not impossible.

“When it comes to building that community trust ... that is a challenge that no police chief will be able to fix in three or four years,” he said.

Reporters Liz Sawyer and Louis Krauss of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.