By Eric Levenson, Ryan Young, and Cynthia Salinas Cappellano

(CNN) — When Brian O’Hara took over the Minneapolis Police Department in 2022, he saw a department in free fall.

The murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riots in 2020 had fractured the public’s trust in law enforcement. Crime and shootings were rising at startling levels. The police force was demoralized and dropped from over 900 sworn officers to a low of 550 last year, stretched dangerously thin in a city of over 400,000 people.

“It was, essentially, kind of a hopeless situation,” O’Hara told CNN.

“When I got here, the Minneapolis Police Department was functioning more like a Fire Department,” he said. “The officers were traumatized. They were sitting in the station, only going out on calls. There wasn’t that much proactive activity happening.”

Three years later, staffing has begun to recover. Using an aggressive recruitment strategy, the police department surpassed 600 sworn personnel in June – a milestone Mayor Jacob Frey praised in a city news release.

But challenges and criticisms remain, including a recent mass shooting at a homeless encampment, state and federal consent decrees and questions about police’s interaction with federal immigration enforcement.

Now, Minneapolis voters will have their say.

A mayoral election on Tuesday pits Frey, the two-term incumbent, against over a dozen challengers, led by three progressive rivals: State Sen. and Democratic Socialist Omar Fateh, attorney and businessman Jazz Hampton and minister DeWayne Davis. That trio has criticized the city’s public safety efforts and joined forces for a “slate for change” in an election that uses ranked choice voting.

Early polling shows Frey as the favorite, with Fateh his closest competitor.

The election bears some similarities to New York City’s, with both Fateh and Zohran Mamdani as 30-something, Muslim, Democratic Socialists who have proposed rent stabilization policies.

In Minneapolis, police staffing and public safety have been key concerns among voters – for example, they were the first two questions in a mayoral debate hosted by MPR News/Star Tribune last week.

The terms of the debate have generally pitted Frey, who has criticized calls to “defund the police,” against a left-wing critic in Fateh, who has said Frey “failed to implement meaningful reforms to police” and has pushed to shift some responsibilities from police to other departments.

Whoever wins the race will have the power to set the city’s police culture, said Michelle Gross, the president of the activist group Communities United Against Police Brutality. Yet no matter who is in charge, she said, the future success of the police will come from building trust with the community.

“Things are different now, but they’re not all the way different, but we’re getting there,” she told CNN. “And the bottom line is to keep people at the table so we do get there.”

The battle to regain public trust

Jason Fletcher, the founder of Fletcher’s Ice Cream & Cafe, got an up-close view of the Minneapolis police when his shop was targeted by a Molotov cocktail twice within a 24-hour period last week.

The explosive attacks caused damage to his shop, though no one was injured. He said he believes the LGBTQ Pride flag outside his business may be the reason it was targeted.

Fletcher said he didn’t have the “highest expectations” for police, noting its well-known staff shortages and other issues.

“I definitely have seen a lot of the officers that are here, they’re discouraged,” he told CNN. “I feel like they’ve lost the passion for their job, a lot of them, and a lot of them are scared.”

But the job they did investigating the attacks was “really amazing,” he said. Police responded to the scene before he did both times and worked quickly and efficiently to arrest a suspect.

“They were reassuring. Minneapolis arson – the officer, he looked me in the face and said, ‘I’m not gonna go home until this man is behind bars.’ And he didn’t lie,” Fletcher said. “In less than four hours, they apprehended him and made sure they got him off the street.

“In my opinion, Minneapolis police and ATF, they killed it. They did a great job.”

As police chief, O’Hara said his primary goal has been to push a sense of urgency and pride in the department, while still acknowledging its unique challenges.

“We’re the most scrutinized police department on earth. It’s a tough job,” he said. “But if you do come on this job, and you’re coming on for the right reasons, you have an opportunity, once your career is over, to look back on what you’ve done and realize every day of your life you have an opportunity to make a real difference in people’s lives.

“There are people in this community who have real needs, who desperately need the police and they need good police,” he added.

That pitch has helped the department start to rebuild its staff, now up to 620 sworn members and looking to continue growing into next year, O’Hara said. Still, the department relies on an “exorbitant” amount of overtime just to do basic police work and cover all its shifts.

“The amount of overtime that we depend on for those things is not sustainable,” he said. “But the good news for our officers that are here is those numbers are rising, but it is a gradual process. It’s going to take time.”

The politics of public safety

No matter who wins the mayoral election, Minneapolis is still legally required to enact police reforms.

After a jury convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin of the murder of George Floyd in 2021, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department. The DOJ issued a report in 2023 finding the city and police engaged in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights. This January, the city and DOJ agreed to a federal consent decree that requires police reforms and court supervision.

In addition, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights reached a court-enforceable agreement with Minneapolis requiring changes to address race-based policing.

In May, the DOJ under President Donald Trump moved to end the federal consent decree. However, Frey signed an executive order confirming the city’s commitment to implementing the reforms.

Gross, the community activist, said her group has been working with police on its reforms.

“The Minneapolis Police are rewriting their policies, and as part of the condition of doing that work, they actually have to take input from the community, and we have been working very hard to give them very robust input,” she said. “It’s not word-smithing, it’s looking at best practices and looking at what has worked in other departments.”

The hope is these consent decrees and agreements provide a path forward for the city and police.

“These are good things,” she said. “It gives us a framework to make the kinds of improvements we need to make. Unfortunately, we’re still a long way from getting there, but we’ve got a way to get there.”

What the candidates have said about policing

The mayoral candidates have taken different approaches to the politics of policing in recent years.

Four years ago, Minneapolis residents rejected a ballot measure that would have overhauled the city’s police structure, replacing the police department with a Department of Public Safety. The measure, wrapped up in “defund the police” debates, had been drafted amid the national fury over Floyd’s murder but was put to voters as concerns about rising crime drained energy from the protest movement.

Fateh supported the ballot measure. Frey did not.

That contrast has been on display this mayoral election, as Frey has accused Fateh of supporting defund the police measures.

“Here’s the truth: We also need more police officers to be able to handle these situations. When you have less officers per capita than virtually any city in the country, you need to do the necessary work to increase that,” Frey said.

Fateh has countered that he is merely proposing moving some responsibilities from the police to other departments. He has repeatedly cited a study from NYU Law’s Policing Project that found 47% of police calls are “potential” candidates for an alternate response.

“If we’re able to take away nearly half of their caseload, then we can have law enforcement focus on violent crime, on drug trafficking, on human trafficking, clearly the case backlog, not taking away investigators from the caseload or their investigatory work,” Fateh said.

For O’Hara, a transplant from Newark, New Jersey, his first mayoral election in Minneapolis has been a lot to take in.

“I have been surprised by how overly politicized policing is here,” he said. “I’m just not used to it. I’m used to more people being able to agree we need police and we need good police, and we need to address this stuff urgently. Some of it is a little foreign to me.”

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