Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said on Sunday that “people have had enough” after this weekend’s fatal shooting of a 37-year-old man by federal agents.
Federal agents in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, on Saturday morning. The shooting came as protests have continued in Minnesota’s largest city over a federal immigration enforcement surge. Earlier this month, Renee Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, and a Venezuelan migrant was shot in the leg by ICE while allegedly trying to flee.
The Department of Homeland Security said agents were acting in self-defense while trying to disarm Pretti, while local officials have pushed back on the account.
O’Hara said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that it’s “deeply concerning the things that are being said.”
“This is an individual that was a city resident. It appears that he was present exercising his First Amendment rights to record law enforcement activity and also exercising his Second Amendment rights to lawfully be armed in a public space in the city,” O’Hara said. “So I think very obviously, there are serious questions that are being raised.”
O’Hara added that “the greater issue is, even if there is an investigation that ultimately proves that at the time of the shooting it was legally justified, I don’t think that even matters at this point, because there is so much outrage and concern around what is happening in the city.”
“This is the third shooting now in less than three weeks. The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year, recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone. And now this is the second American citizen that’s been killed, it’s the third shooting within three weeks,” O’Hara said.
O’Hara added, “People have been speaking out, saying that this was going to happen again, and I think everyone is kind of waiting for folks on both sides to come together and just figure this thing out.”
“This is not sustainable,” he said. “This police department has only 600 police officers. We are stretched incredibly thin. This is taking an enormous toll trying to manage all of this chaos on top of having to be the police department for a major city. It’s too much.”
Asked whether he is calling on ICE to leave Minneapolis, O’Hara said the problem isn’t that “enforcement is happening, it’s clearly the manner in which these things are happening.”
“These tactics are very obviously not safe, and it is generating a lot of outrage and fear in the community,” O’Hara said.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said at a news conference Saturday that Pretti was in possession of a gun and ammunition and alleged he assaulted officers. Asked whether he knows if the weapon was concealed or was brandished, O’Hara said, “I don’t have any evidence that I’ve seen that suggests that the weapon was brandished.”
Trump administration officials have also accused local law enforcement of not doing enough to help ICE officers. O’Hara called those claims “deeply disappointing.” He argued that local police are “doing everything that we can to manage this chaos,” but are vastly outnumbered by the thousands of immigration agents deployed to the city.
Amid the conflicting narratives and tension between local and federal officials, O’Hara said the police department doesn’t have “any official information from federal law enforcement about what has happened,” adding that when officers responded to the scene of Saturday’s shooting, “our watch commander was not given even the most basic information that is typical in a law enforcement-involved shooting.”
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to share information with the public that they are not sharing with us,” O’Hara said.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, also appeared on “Face the Nation” Sunday and pointed to “some failed local leadership,” saying, “you don’t have these kinds of incidents in any other city” with federal immigration enforcement operations.
“Look, we are all just feel sorry about what happened in Minneapolis, and this has happened over and over again,” Scalise said. “They let their city burn down years ago, they have chaos it seems like all the time in places where other cities don’t.”
