MINNEAPOLIS — For nearly four years, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and his police chief, Brian O’Hara, were inseparable. They stood together at news conferences in the middle of the night to lament gun violence and in the middle of the afternoon to argue for police funding. They applauded new police department recruits and mourned the victims of the Annunciation shooting.

As much as any figure in the city, Frey tied his career to O’Hara. That faith carried through independent investigations into the chief, criticism of his leadership and budget management by the Minneapolis City Council, and swirls of rumors about O’Hara’s sexual relationships that remain unsubstantiated.

On Monday, Frey met with O’Hara in City Hall and the relationship fractured.

“It was painful,” Frey said. “But it wasn’t hard.”

Frey presented O’Hara with a report that showed O’Hara interfered with an independent investigation by the law firm Forsgren Fisher McCalmont DeMarea Tysver into alleged sexual relationships with city employees. Investigators found that O’Hara had deleted a contact card off his work cellphone of a material witness in the investigation and that he discussed the investigation after being told explicitly not to.

“I explained to him what those violations were and explained to him my take on what happened, that I would be looking at discipline up to and including discharge,” Frey said. “I gave him the investigation itself, the report ... I then gave him some time to read it and he ultimately tendered his resignation.”

Frey said O’Hara’s actions were a “breach of trust and a violation.”

“A police chief is charged with conducting investigations,” Frey said. “I can’t have violations of an investigation by the very person that’s charged with conducting them of other people.”

O’Hara’s resignation came amid what was expected be a bruising reconfirmation process.

Council Member LaTrisha Vetaw was among the first to question, publicly or privately, whether O’Hara deserved to be renominated for a second term. In March, she met with Frey to relay concerns about the chief’s 22 pending misconduct complaints and his financial management of the department.

“The mayor told me that it was nothing to be concerned about, so I was willing to meet with (O’Hara),” Vetaw said in an interview. That sit-down was scheduled for Wednesday morning. It never happened.

But her reservations only grew after O’Hara’s recent presentation at a City Council hearing where he struggled to answer basic questions about why MPD overspent its budget in numerous categories.

“I’m glad he resigned, because Minneapolis police have been doing a fantastic job at trying to build up community support and trust — and things like this certainly sets us back,” Vetaw said, noting that his actions reflect poorly on the whole agency.

Frey acknowledged that he had heard rumors about O’Hara and was alerted to various allegations against the chief, but defended his process. He noted that while O’Hara resigned for interfering with an investigation, the investigation found there was “insufficient evidence” O’Hara had a sexual relationship with any city employee.

“We don’t make decisions based on rumors,” Frey said. “That would be making decisions based on optics and anonymous allegations — no chief would last longer than a week and a half.”

The mayor added that his office takes every complaint seriously and “investigate where it’s appropriate.” The allegations of sexual relationships were made in an anonymous complaint more than a year ago, which Frey called deeply disturbing.

“Within seconds of learning about it I instructed a full and independent investigation into the allegations,” he said. “I also instructed that if those allegations are proving true, tell me immediately so I can do something about it. They weren’t substantiated.”

Frey added that when a substantiated allegation against O’Hara was brought to him, he took action that led to the chief’s resignation.

Three members of the City Council said Wednesday that the resignation underscored a lack of transparency and accountability with Frey’s administration.

Council President Elliott Payne said that Frey knew about an investigation that began in 2025 about O’Hara’s conduct, and said he assumes Frey also knew about a follow-up probe into whether O’Hara interfered with the first investigation, without informing members of the council.

“This has an overarching implication for all police accountability,” Payne said. “Accountability is built on trust and transparency and when we don’t have active collaboration between the administration, whether that’s the mayor or the safety commissioner, we cannot do our job effectively.”

Council Member Robin Wonsley said the serious nature of the allegations, and the fact that investigations were opened, were grounds for O’Hara to be put on administrative leave.

“Mayor Frey has yet to explain or defend his choice to allow Brian O’Hara to remain the acting chief of police while these claims were being investigated or why he even nominated him for a second term,” Wonsley said.

City officials also never informed Effective Law Enforcement for All (ELEFA), the independent monitor tasked with overseeing court-mandated police reforms, about the substance of the allegations, according to sources with knowledge of the probe.

Frey said Wednesday there was nothing new about the three council members criticizing him. “That’s just a day that ends in ‘y,’” Frey said. “What’s new?”

Early warning signs

The City Council unanimously appointed O’Hara as chief in 2022, amid a wave of reform around policing in the city in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020. O’Hara was hard-charging and independent-minded. He did not always build constructive relationships with other high-profile public safety leaders, including Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, but he was extremely popular with wide swaths of the city.

Cedric Alexander, O’Hara’s former boss, said Frey failed to heed repeated warnings regarding O’Hara’s “problematic behavior” in 2022 and 2023, and scoffed at the mayor’s decision to allow him to resign.

“The signs were there very early on,” said Alexander, who served as the city’s first community safety commissioner. “I went to (Frey) a number of times and Jacob turned a deaf ear to it.”

In an interview, Alexander recalled how he raised the alarm that O’Hara regularly bucked his authority, blew off meetings with other department heads and disrespected MPD front office staff. Officers also anonymously filed complaints that O’Hara failed to turn on his body-worn camera or file a use-of-force report after an arrest early in his tenure, incidents later verified by the Minnesota Star Tribune.

When Alexander elevated concerns regarding O’Hara’s conduct, either in the street or the office, Frey “downplayed everything, he did not want to hear it,” Alexander said, noting that he felt unsupported in his desire to manage O’Hara. “Now he’s acting all brand-new to all this.”

Although some of the rumors were based on anonymous allegations, there seemed to be “a preponderance of them.”

“Everybody heard about these improprieties before this guy was hired, after he was hired,” Alexander said.

Frey acknowledged there were concerns over O’Hara’s tactics and said he and Toddrick Barnette, the current embattled community safety commissioner, “addressed issues with the chief as they arose.” But he added that some of O’Hara’s tactics can be “interpreted as a sense of urgency and getting things done and some of it can cross the line.”

David Schultz, Hamline University distinguished professor of political science and legal studies, said Frey’s “political fortunes” will continue to reside with the police department and noted how choppy those waters have been during the mayor’s three terms in office.

“Frey has staked a lot of his career around policing but (that) has cut in multiple directions,” Schultz said. “He presided over George Floyd’s murder and the burning of a police station. He defended police against the ‘defund’ movement and was reelected to a second term with a charter amendment giving him more power over police.

“He has seen two consent decrees and a crime wave. O’Hara is the latest episode in terms of how his career is defined by his relationship to police.”

Frey said his decision to nominate O’Hara for another term earlier this month was based on the totality of evidence he knew at the time, including the unsubstantiated allegations against O’Hara and the work he had done to hire additional officers, rebuild the police force, reform the department and handle crisis.

Knowing what he knows now, he would have done things differently, he said. But he added that no one can predict the future “before an investigation comes out, a report comes out” and he did not want to leave the department in limbo by waiting to seek another term for O’Hara.

The feedback he has received from constituents has been a mixture of sadness and understanding. Many viewed O’Hara’s response to high-profile incidents like the shooting at Annunciation Church and School and Operation Metro Surge as empathetic and reflective of how residents of the city felt.

“This is not easy stuff and he did it really well,” Frey said. “I think people see that. They respected that. And those same people understand that when there’s tampering with an investigation it violates the trust that is essential to being chief.”

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(Sarah Nelson and Elliot Hughes of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.)

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