The Minnesota State Patrol is the primary state patrol agency for Minnesota and serves as the de facto state police for the state. While Minnesota State Patrol troopers have full powers of arrest throughout the state, their primary function is traffic safety and vehicle law enforcement. The State Patrol is a division of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) is the primary law enforcement agency in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. It is also the largest police department in Minnesota. Formed in 1867, it is the second-oldest police department in Minnesota, after the Saint Paul Police Department that formed in 1854. A short-lived Board of Police Commissioners existed from 1887 to 1890.
The Hennepin County Sheriff's Office (HCSO) is the sheriff's office for Hennepin County in the U.S. state of Minnesota. HCSO's main offices are in Minneapolis City Hall in the county seat of Minneapolis.
Anthony Vila Bouza was an American police officer who served in the New York City Police Department and as police chief of the Minneapolis Police Department from 1980 to 1989.
The St Petersburg Police Department (SPPD) provides crime prevention and public safety services for the city of St. Petersburg, Florida. The department was created in 1903. The St. Petersburg Police Department has an authorized strength of 550 sworn officers and 212 civilian support staff. The department serves the fifth largest city in the state of Florida, with a population of 250,000. The St. Petersburg Police Department is one of over 1,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA). Anthony Holloway is the chief of police.
John Mark Harrington is the Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety for the U.S. State of Minnesota, appointed by Governor Tim Walz. He has served since January 2019. Harrington previously served as Chief of the Saint Paul Police Department (2004-2010) and Chief of the Metro Transit Police (2012-2019) in Minneapolis–Saint Paul. He is a former member of the Minnesota Senate who represented District 67, which includes portions of the city of Saint Paul in Ramsey County. A Democrat, he is a teacher and manager at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul.
Richard W. "Rich" Stanek is an American politician and former law enforcement officer who served as the sheriff of the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office from 2007 to 2019.
Occupy Minneapolis (OccupyMN) is a grassroots collaboration that began in October 2011 with a series of demonstrations in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Protesters have staged numerous occupations, most notably of the Hennepin County Government Center plaza.
Thomas Archibald Brown, also known as Big Tom, was an American law enforcement official who served as chief of the Saint Paul Police Department (SPPD) during the Great Depression and became notorious for flagrant police corruption.
Nekima Valdez Levy Armstrong is an American lawyer and social justice activist. She was president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP from 2015 to 2016. She has led a variety of organizations that focus on issues of racial equality and disparity in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area.
The police in Canada's ranks differ according to the different police forces and depend on different laws at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels.
Robert J. Kroll is an American former police officer and member of the Minneapolis Police Department. He was the president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, the police union for the police department, from 2015 to 2021. Over the course of his career, Kroll was involved in three officer-involved shootings, had 20 internal affairs complaints, and was the subject of several lawsuits. Kroll has been a longtime opponent to reforms of the police department, including calls to address racial bias within the force and reduce the number of people killed by police. Kroll has generated controversy on a number of occasions. In particular, his comments following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 resulted in calls for his resignation, including from a number of unions, several former mayors of Minneapolis, and a former police chief. Kroll's comments were "Now is not the time rush to judgement and immediately condemn our officers. An in-depth investigation is underway. Our officers are fully cooperating. We must review all video. We must wait for the medical examiner’s report."
The following is a timeline of race relations and policing in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, providing details with a history of policing in the Twin Cities in the U.S. state of Minnesota from the nineteenth century to the present day. The Hennepin County Sheriff's Office, with its headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, is one of the "largest law enforcement agencies in Minnesota" with division and unit facilities throughout Hennepin County. Twin cities, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, have their own police departments, the Minneapolis Police Department, which was established in 1867 and the Saint Paul Police Department. A union for rank and file officers in Minneapolis—the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis —was established in 1917.
On July 22, 2006, Minneapolis Police Department officer Jason Andersen shot Fong Lee—a 19-year-old Hmong American man—eight times while pursuing him for arrest, killing him at the scene. The police pursuit and shooting occurred near Cityview school in the McKinley neighborhood of Minneapolis. In the shooting aftermath, Andersen was legally cleared of wrongdoing by an internal police department investigation and in state and federal legal cases. The United States Supreme Court in 2010 declined to take up an appeal of the federal case brought forward by Lee's family.
False rumors of a police shooting resulted in rioting, arson, and looting in the U.S. city of Minneapolis from August 26–28, 2020. The events began as a reaction to the suicide of Eddie Sole Jr., a 38-year old black man who was being pursued by Minneapolis police officers for his alleged involvement in a homicide. At approximately 2 p.m. on August 26, Sole died after he shot himself in the head as officers approached to arrest him. False rumors quickly spread on social media that Minneapolis police officers had fatally shot Sole. To quell unrest, Minneapolis police released closed-circuit television surveillance footage that captured Sole's suicide, which was later confirmed by a Hennepin County Medical Examiner's autopsy report.
The police abolition movement gained momentum in the U.S. city of Minneapolis during protests of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and culminated in the failed Question 2 ballot measure in 2021 to replace the city's police department with a public safety department. The measure would have removed minimum staffing levels for sworn officers, renamed the Minneapolis Police Department as the Minneapolis Department of Public Safety, and shifted oversight of the new agency from the mayor's office to the city council. It required the support of 51 percent of voters in order to pass. In the Minneapolis municipal election held on November 2, 2021, the measure failed with 43.8 percent voting for it and 56.2 percent voting against it.
Protests and civil disorder occurred in reaction to the killing of Daunte Wright on April 11, 2021. Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by police officer Kimberly Potter during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, United States. Protests that first began in Brooklyn Center spread to other locations in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area and then to other cities in the United States. Several nights of civil disorder in Brooklyn Center and adjacent cities resulted in sporadic looting and damage to a few hundred properties, including four businesses that were set on fire.
The aftermath of the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis–Saint Paul describes the result of civil disorder between May 26 and June 7, 2020, in the Twin Cities metropolitan area of the U.S. state of Minnesota. Protests began as a response to the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man on May 25, after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds as three other officers assisted during an arrest. The incident was captured on a bystander's video and it drew public outrage as video quickly circulated in the news media by the following day.
Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black American man, was fatally shot on February 2, 2022, by SWAT officer Mark Hanneman of the Minneapolis Police Department inside an apartment in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where police were executing a no-knock search warrant in a homicide investigation. The officer-involved shooting was reviewed by the office of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the office of Hennepin County attorney Michael Freeman, and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Ellison and Freeman declined to file criminal charges against the officer who shot Locke in a report released on April 6, 2022.
Brian O’Hara is an American law enforcement official who is serving as the 54th Chief of the Minneapolis Police Department. He was the first police chief appointed to lead the Minneapolis Police Department after the murder of George Floyd.
