One sergeant was fired for pepper-spraying a Vice reporter as he lay prone on the pavement, waving his press credential. Another was terminated for brutally beating Jaleel Stallings, a 29-year-old Army veteran out past curfew. Eight were suspended for using excessive force on protesters, failing to de-escalate encounters or turn on their body-worn cameras. Supervisors also faced steep penalties for not completing use of force reviews on their staff.
Dozens more voluntarily left the embattled agency, before pending investigations could be completed.
Few disciplinary reports were made public in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing, even as a mountain of police misconduct complaints and civil lawsuits piled up. Widely shared social media videos caught some officers indiscriminately spraying chemical irritants outside squad cars and at nonviolent groups, while others shot marking rounds at civilians on their own property. The city has since paid out nearly $50 million to those assaulted by police during that tumultuous period.
Until now, community members were left to wonder whether those involved were ever held accountable. (For 16 months, the only officer formally reprimanded by top brass was Colleen Ryan, who served as an anonymous source for a GQ magazine article criticizing MPD’s “toxic culture.”)
The new heavily redacted documents underscore the sluggish — and often inconsistent — nature of the police oversight process in Minneapolis, where the sitting chief is ultimately responsible for doling out discipline. Chronic complaint backlogs inside Internal Affairs and the city’s Office of Police Conduct Review mean that misconduct investigations can take years. By then, an officer may have been promoted, or even resigned.
Most of the recently posted disciplinary memos were signed by former police chiefs Medaria Arradondo and Amelia Huffman and pertain to blatant policy violations in the chaotic days following Floyd’s death. One is more than three years old.
In Minnesota, such records aren’t public until they’ve gone through the full grievance process.
In a phone interview Thursday, Stallings and his attorney, Eric Rice, characterized the newly published disciplinary memos as more of a reaction to public outcry than a proactive effort to correct rogue behavior.
“I’m left with a bad taste about it,” Stallings said, adding that the repercussions might’ve felt more appropriate had they come sooner. He faced criminal charges and was later acquitted by jury. “They should be held to the same standard of law as I am — if not higher because of their position. That doesn’t seem to be the case.”
Minneapolis police officials declined comment. Sgt. Sherral Schmidt, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, released a statement acknowledging the difficulty of 2020, but urged the public not to overlook the “the environment and conditions officers were working under.”
“The discipline cases stemming from that period are even more complex due to the raw emotion attached to the incidents,” she wrote, pointing to how “officers worked for days on end with little sleep or rest in an extremely dangerous, volatile and often unpredictable environment.”
Assault on Stallings
On May 30, 2020, as fires smoldered on Lake Street and the National Guard rolled in to help regain order after back-to-back nights of looting, officers in an unmarked cargo van went ‘hunting’ for curfew breakers after dark.
Several members of a Minneapolis SWAT team began firing 40mm marking rounds at people gathered in a nearby parking lot. One struck Stallings in the chest.
He returned fire with his legally owned pistol, in what Stallings later described as an attempt to defend himself from unknown assailants. A swarm of officers descended on Stallings, who surrendered once police identified themselves. But officers Justin Stetson and Tyler Klund continued punching and kicking him while he was lying face down, non-resistant. The beating left Stallings bloodied, with a broken eye socket.
That level of force was “not necessary and not objectively reasonable,” then-Interim Chief Huffman wrote in their 2022 disciplinary memos, noting that Stallings’ injuries could’ve been “even more grave.”
She recommended that Stetson be terminated and Klund — who failed to switch on his body camera — be suspended for 120 hours. Stetson was later charged and convicted of assault.
The newly released records detail the actions of several other officers involved in that encounter: Officers Klund and Michael Osbeck Jr. each struck Stallings’ friend Virgil Lee Jackson, Jr., even after multiple colleagues appeared to have him secured on the ground.
Jackson twice yelled “I’m not resisting,” according to the disciplinary findings. Without warning, Officer Michael Pfaff deployed his Taser nine times over the course of 54 seconds. In his report, he admitted to using the device in “drive stun” mode, pressing the electrodes directly onto his body, to “gain compliance.”
However, it did not appear that Jackson was resisting arrest. “If he was moving around, it was related to the strikes that were being delivered by another officer,” Huffman wrote at the time. She issued an 80 hour suspension for Pfaff’s use of force violation and failure to activate his body camera.
(Disciplinary files note that managing the cameras’ battery life was often difficult during the civil unrest, as officers had limited access to charging stations during long shifts.)
Sgt. Kevin Angerhofer, who oversaw all SWAT teams that day, didn’t complete a required supervisory review until contacted directly by Internal Affairs, records show. Even then, significant portions were left incomplete and he later described the task as “checking a box.” Huffman suspended him for 60 hours.
Emails obtained by the Star Tribune indicate that the internal investigation wasn’t launched until after a Sept. 1, 2021 Minnesota Reformer article published about Stallings’ acquittal that included surveillance footage undermining the officers’ original claims.
Crowd control incidents
In another case, later cited by the U.S. Department of Justice as one of the most flagrant examples of MPD retaliating against observers, officers approached a man filming law enforcement actions on Interstate 35W, where a massive crowd had formed to protest Floyd’s death.
Dispersal orders had been given and they screamed at him to leave. When the man refused, Officer Mike Nimlos repeatedly pepper-sprayed him in the face, then pushed him over with a baton.
From nearby, Officer Oscar Macias shot the man in the thigh with a 40mm marking round, then grabbed his cell phone and threw it off the bridge.
His conduct lacked discretion and constituted unreasonable force that undermined public trust, Chief Brian O’Hara wrote in his May 17 disciplinary decision. But O’Hara acknowledged that for almost a week leading up to the incident officers, including Macias, had “worked extraordinarily long hours with little rest and little if any time to take care of personal needs.”
Both Macias and Nimlos each received a 40-hour suspension without pay.
Later that fall — one day after the election of former President Donald Trump — 500 protesters marched onto Interstate 94, shutting down traffic for several hours. As hostilities grew between demonstrators and a phalanx of riot-gear-clad law enforcement after dark, someone in the crowd through a bottle.
Officer Conan Hickey responded by macing a group of people standing in the area where the bottle came from, including a woman recording the scene on her cell phone. Most had their backs turned away from him at the time, disciplinary records show. Hickey didn’t document that use of force or notify his supervisor.
Sgt. Stephen McBride and Sgt. George Peltz, who were each responsible for performing supervisory reviews that day, failed to complete the task, the documents show. Huffman gave all three of them 10-hour suspensions.