Nearly two years after the police killing of George Floyd ignited fiery unrest in Minneapolis, a long-awaited report offered a scathing indictment of the city’s response.
The report said some of those tactics appeared to violate policy, based on the firm’s review of extensive body-camera footage from the scene. But it also said many officers weren’t properly trained and had not been given a clear mission or directives from the city’s police chief or other senior leaders on how to deal with the increasingly volatile protests.
The report says that the Minneapolis Police Department eventually set up a command post but that staffers from the OEM were not involved, in part because staffers at the police command post were not adhering to coronavirus precautions “such as wearing masks” during a precarious time in the pandemic. In a statement, Frey acknowledged the failures laid out in the report and said he was working with city agencies to create a plan to implement the more than two dozen recommendations, including the strengthening of the city’s emergency protocols and improved police training on crowd control.“Rebuilding trust between community and local government relies on us taking concrete actions informed by this review,” Frey said in the statement.
Unnamed Minneapolis police officers — among the 90 people, including government officials, city staffers and community members, interviewed for the report — told the firm their impression during the first two days of protests was that “MPD leadership, and presumably the City, attempted to keep the incident low profile and did not request additional resources,” the report says, despite clear indications the situation was growing more tense.
Pressed Tuesday by the City Council on whether he felt Minneapolis officers broke the “chain of command” during the days of unrest, McGinty replied, “Yes.” McGinty quickly added that he was not sure whether “broken” was the right word. “There was a void. There was absolutely a void,” McGinty said. Minneapolis, where that reckoning began, was one of the last major cities to release its after-action report on the Floyd-related protests. The City Council hired Hillard Heintze in February 2021, paying the firm nearly $230,000 to conduct a year-long review of the city’s response — effectively delaying the report until after the city’s municipal elections, in which Frey and the entire City Council were on the ballot.
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