Minneapolis council president asks auditor to probe secretive police ‘coaching’ practice

Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne has asked the city auditor to open an assessment into a secretive process the Police Department uses to close out misconduct complaints, known as “coaching.”

A resolution authored by Payne and passed by a City Council committee last week asks the auditor to examine cases of coaching over the past 13 months, since the city entered into a court-enforceable agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights after the murder of George Floyd. The document asks the auditor to determine whether the closed-door coaching practice is in compliance with the sweeping public safety reforms, including greater transparency, mandated by the settlement.

In an interview, Payne said he was inspired to ask for the assessment after meeting with police-civilian oversight officials in Oakland, Calif., which has been under a costly consent decree for over 20 years and is still not in full compliance. Rather than waiting for the court-appointed monitor to decide, Payne said he wants the city government to use available tools to determine whether coaching is being used within the bounds of the settlement.

“What I want to do is start building a foundation right now — today — for the way the city should operate in a fully compliant way,” he said.

In a prepared statement, interim City Auditor Siddhartha Poudyal said the office will “assess the resolution requesting the review of MPD’s use of coaching and how its use is reported. There is no definitive timeline for that assessment.”

The controversy around coaching focuses on whether the city uses the practice as a rhetorical loophole to keep serious misconduct sealed away from the public eye.

Attorneys for Minneapolis say coaching is a gentle form of corrective action, used to swiftly deal with officer misbehavior, that doesn’t amount to real “discipline,” and therefore isn’t a matter of public record. In public meetings and statements to media, police and city officials long claimed they use coaching in response only to the lowest-level policy violations, like uniform infractions or not wearing a seat belt.

But court documents reveal MPD has used coaching in response to more serious violations, including excessive-force complaints. The city has quietly coached officers for mishandling a gun and firing into the precinct wall, failing to report a colleague’s use of force and letting a police dog off leash and allowing it to attack a civilian, the records show.

The U.S. Justice Department also criticized coaching as part of the city’s “fundamentally flawed” accountability system in charges alleging a pattern of discriminatory policing in Minneapolis. Only 1 in 4 cases referred for coaching through a city oversight office ended up being coached, the charges say, and some allegations were “far from ‘low-level,’” including an officer who “smacked, kicked, and used a taser on a teen accused of shoplifting.”

The city is fighting a lawsuit from Minnesota Coalition On Government Information (MNCOGI), a nonprofit public records watchdog, alleging Minneapolis officials have violated the law by classifying these records as private data. In June, an attorney for MNCOGI presented a Hennepin County judge with copies of internal letters, written by former police chiefs, explicitly referring to coaching as a type of “discipline.” One contained the phrase: “As discipline for this incident, you will receive coaching.”

Those cases predate the 13-month period Payne wants examined.

The city’s lawyers have defended the practice, calling coaching a common nonpunitive “managerial tool” that falls below the threshold of real discipline. In court, City Attorney Sarah Riskin acknowledged that former police chiefs signed those letters, but said they did not write them and they didn’t mean to include language calling coaching “discipline.”

“I think it’s clear that coaching has been used inappropriately in the past,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told reporters last month, following the passage of the new police contract. But he defended the use of the practice to address low-level misconduct and said that he has personally reviewed all 62 cases of coaching since he was appointed in November 2022.

“Every one of those violations has been appropriate,” he added, noting the independent evaluator, Effective Law Enforcement For All (ELEFA), will double-check his work and eventually issue public findings determining whether the department is implementing it correctly.

Payne said he’s spent many hours since being elected in in 2021 in closed-door settlement conferences over police excessive-force lawsuits, and he saw examples of police supervisors failing to hold officers accountable in the field.

Before he killed Floyd by kneeling on his neck, officer Derek Chauvin used similar dangerous tactics on other suspects with impunity, said Payne. One of those was 14-year-old John Pope. Three years before encountering Floyd, Chauvin hit Pope with a flashlight and pinned him down by the neck for 20 minutes. After Floyd’s murder, Chauvin pleaded guilty to newly leveled charges of abusing his power as a police officer to violate Pope’s civil rights. The city also paid $7.5 million last year to settle a lawsuit filed by Pope.

But directly after the incident, Payne said, Chauvin’s supervisor did nothing to flag and correct the aggressive policing tactics. At least six officers watched Chauvin’s actions, but didn’t intervene. Pope bled from his ear and had to be taken to the hospital for stitches.

“In that instance, it didn’t even rise to being a coaching incident, because his immediate supervisor did a use-of-force review and said, ‘Yup, this is an appropriate use of force. Nothing to see here,’” Payne said.

All told, Chauvin faced at least 17 complaints during his tenure as a police officer. He was only officially disciplined once.

Payne said he wants to limit the city’s risk of more bad policing resulting in costly settlements for the city.

“From my perspective it’s about: How do we make it structurally certain that that doesn’t happen again?”

Star Tribune staff writer Liz Sawyer contributed to this story.