Longtime Minneapolis police spokesman John Elder resigns

Minneapolis police spokesman John Elder, the longtime public face of the department for television, radio and newspaper audiences, announced his resignation this week.

A statement put out Thursday said that Elder was leaving to assume a leadership role with an unnamed "neighboring law enforcement agency."

With his departure, the statement said, the city's communications department would "continue to work with MPD, the Office of City Clerk and other enterprise departments to ensure transparent, proactive, and responsive police information is provided to the media and public."

Garrett Parten, an officer who previously served as a spokesman under Elder, will assume his duties full-time.

According to an online biography, Elder, who has a master's degree in public safety administration from St. Mary's University in Winona, is in his fourth term as a council member in New Hope and will be up for re-election next year. His 30-plus-year career in law enforcement has included stints in that north metro city's police department, as well as with the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office and Lakeville police.

He leaves at a particularly turbulent time for the department, which is the subject of two separate investigations looking into allegations of brutality and excessive force by its officers, and could be replaced if a controversial charter amendment passes later this year.

Elder was first hired for the role of public information officer, or PIO, in December 2013 by former chief Janeé Harteau, taking over for longtime spokeswoman Cyndi Barrington. At the time, he had been with the department for two years, working as manager of its intellectual properties unit.

In 2019, he and several others received the Chief's Award of Merit for compiling a history of the MPD for its official 150th anniversary book.

He would serve on and off as the department's primary spokesman for two chiefs over the next nearly eight years and eventually rose to the position of director of communications.

In that role, he responded to countless crime scenes over the years. But the moment that is likely to stick out in the minds of most came after the killing of George Floyd in police custody in May 2020, when he sent out a news release saying Floyd had "physically resisted" arrest and died after "suffering medical distress" — without mentioning that he was being restrained by police.

Hours later, a bystander video of the encounter went viral, showing that Floyd had in fact died after being pinned to the ground by the knee of a now-former city police officer. Critics later seized on the original statement, arguing that it was an example of what they saw as the department's attempts to obfuscate the truth after controversial police killings.

In a previous interview with the Associated Press, Elder said that he missed initial notifications about the incident and hadn't visited the scene, as he usually did after major events. He said he released the initial news release after being briefed by supervisors.

Afterward, the City Council voted to shift police media duties to city communications staff, but Elder remained on as the MPD's conduit for briefing the media on ongoing investigations and other department affairs while continuing to operate with more or less the same autonomy as before.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Libor Jany • 612-673-4064 • @StribJany