Minneapolis city official is named interim director of police civilian review agency

Minneapolis officials announced Wednesday the appointment of an interim director for its police civilian review agency, two weeks after it was rocked by the announcement that its director was leaving for unexplained reasons and the director of the city’s Civil Rights Department, which oversees the review process, was being terminated.

Carolina Amini will assume the position of interim director of the Office of Police Conduct Review (OPCR) beginning March 6, replacing John Jefferson. Amini currently manages the implementation of the city’s settlement agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, which had sued the city for its failure to rein in police misconduct.

Amini “is a dedicated public servant who has a proven track record of working on behalf of those seeking justice,” said City Operations Officer Margaret Anderson Kelliher, who is serving as the city’s interim civil rights director.

Mayor Jacob Frey fired civil rights director Alberder Gillespie two weeks ago after Kelliher recommended her termination. While Gillespie was accused of a litany of problems in connection with civilian review, officials have offered no details on Jefferson’s departure, which happened the same day.

At the heart of the civilian review process is the Community Commission on Police Oversight, created by the Minneapolis City Council in December 2022 to replace another citizen oversight body that the city essentially scrapped.

The new commission is composed of 15 citizens, two appointed by Frey and 13 by the council. It will supply three commissioners to sit on panels, along with two police supervisors, to consider citizen complaints of police misconduct and recommend discipline if warranted to Police Chief Brian O’Hara.

The job of the OPCR includes conducting an intake of citizen complaints, doing investigations and preparing reports of its findings for the commission panels. It then schedules the panels to hear the cases.

The Star Tribune reported last November that in its first six months of operation, the oversight commission had considered only two cases out of the hundreds of complaints filed with the police department and OPCR. A city website intended to keep citizens apprised of data about complaints against officers had not been updated in eight months.

“We were in a holding pattern for a while,” Jefferson said at the time.

Amini has worked for the city for more than eight years, according to the release announcing her appointment. She started her career with the city attorney’s office, working with victims of crime, and transferred to the Civil Rights Department where she served as an investigator and investigations manager. She later returned to city attorney’s office to work on the settlement.

In her statement Wednesday, Kelliher said: “The work of OPCR is critical to advancing the city’s ongoing work to achieve the highest standards in policing.”

The Minneapolis Police Department has come under intense scrutiny since four officers were convicted and went to prison in connection with the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man. A settlement last year with the state Human Rights Department set out deadlines for the city’s adjudication of complaints against police. Minneapolis also faces an upcoming consent decree with the U.S. Justice Department, which found last year that the police department had failed to discipline officers who engaged in excessive force.