Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Chief Selection topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Community members urge deeper public role in police chief selection after AIFA report
Summary
Public commenters at the June 15 Community Commission on Police Oversight meeting pressed the commission to demand community-driven chief selection and more aggressive follow-up on a monitoring report, saying the city’s consent-decree work is lagging and discipline processes remain incomplete.
Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality, told the commission the city must give the public a substantive role in picking the next Minneapolis police chief and avoid repeating past single-candidate selections. “Our mayor is a terrible picker of police chiefs,” Gross said, asking CCPO to call for community interviews and multiple finalists.
Several other public commenters echoed that theme and tied it to findings in the monitoring report released the same day. Nasim Tajik said the city remains about three months into year three of the consent decree yet has not completed core items from year one, and urged the city’s monitor (referred to in the transcript as “Alifa” and elsewhere as AIFA) and CCPO to press for completion of the discipline matrix, a field training officer standard operating procedure, and a reduction in the OPCR/IIA backlog.
Connor Wells highlighted timelines and accountability, saying deadlines matter: “These small steps need associated deadlines,” he told commissioners, and raised a specific claim in the AIFA preview that former Chief O’Hara sometimes took far longer than the allotted 30 days to review IIA cases.
Jana Williams, who invoked a high-profile case she has followed closely, said accountability has been delayed in some investigations and criticized officials who she says have not acknowledged possible cover-ups in individual cases.
Why it matters: multiple public speakers framed the chief selection process and monitoring work as interlocking issues: who is chosen as chief affects whether and how fast the police department completes the consent-decree obligations, and whether the discipline and training systems that drive cultural change will be implemented in practice.
What’s next: Commissioners voted to task CCPO’s community engagement committee with drafting questions for an upcoming public hearing and asked the interim police chief to respond to those questions at a future meeting. The full commission also passed a resolution reaffirming its commitment to reform and requesting city enterprise assistance for public engagement.
Sources: public comments delivered to the Community Commission on Police Oversight, June 15, 2026 meeting.
