Minnesota Court of Appeals reverses order for Minneapolis to hire more police officers

The Minnesota Court of Appeals has overturned a district court’s ruling that ordered the city of Minneapolis to hire more police officers.

A group of Minneapolis residents sued the city, saying it and Mayor Jacob Frey were violating the city charter by not employing enough police officers. The charter requires the city to fund a police force of at least 0.0017 employees per resident.

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In July, Hennepin County Judge Jamie Anderson ruled in favor of the residents and ordered the city and Frey to “immediately take any and all necessary action to ensure that they fund a police force of at least 730 sworn officers by June 30, 2022.”

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Monday, the Court of Appeals overruled Anderson’s decision, saying the city’s charter requires the Minneapolis City Council to fund a police force with a minimum number of officers but noting that it’s the mayor who employs the officers. The court added that the charter doesn’t impose a clear duty for the mayor to actually employ that same number of officers that the council has to fund.

The court’s ruling notes that the city’s 2020 budget funded 888 sworn officer positions and the city employed 879 officers, with 25 on continuous leave. By April 2021, the number of employed officers had fallen to 743, with 92 on continuous leave. It also notes that 169 officers left the department between George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, and April 15, 2021.

The city argued that it met its obligations under the charter by continuing to fund more than the minimum number of officers despite the lower number of actual employed officers. In 2021, the city budget funded 770 sworn officers, the court found. As of Feb. 26, 2022, MPD had 627 sworn officers, with 36 of those on continuous leave, according to city data.

“At first blush, the mayor’s duty to maintain the police department by employing officers may appear to be ministerial: he must employ the number of police officers for which funding has been provided by the city council. In application, however, the duty quickly devolves into derivative questions that clearly call for the application of his discretion, particularly in the present circumstances,” Judge Jeanne Cochran wrote in discussing the decision.

Judge Cochran added that the Court of Appeals determined the mayor’s duty “is a discretionary duty, and there is no clear duty to continuously employ a minimum number of officers.”

In response to the ruling, a spokesperson for Frey said the city is still working to hire more police officers.

“Today’s decision does not change Mayor Frey’s continued work to accelerate the City’s recruitment timelines and get more community-oriented officers into the department immediately,” the Mayor’s Office said in a statement.

Judge Francis Connolly also wrote a special opinion in the filing, not dissenting with the court’s finding but calling it “illogical” for the city’s charter to have a duty to fund a certain number of officers but not duty to employ them and recommending city officials consider amending the charter to rectify that disconnect.

Judge Connolly added, regarding his decision to rule in favor of the city, that it “is also influenced by the city’s representations at oral argument that the mayor is making a good-faith effort to hire the specified number of officers that has already been funded. Specifically, counsel for the city stated at oral argument that the city has funds to hire ‘190 new officers over the course of 2022,’ which would consist of ‘160 newly trained cadets and . . . recruits and . . . 30 laterals.'”

The Upper Midwest Law Center, which filed the original lawsuit on the Minneapolis residents’ behalf, said it will appeal the decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Erik Nilsson, the deputy city attorney for Minneapolis, released the following statement:

“Today the Court of Appeals issued a decision confirming that the Minneapolis Charter contains a minimum funding requirement for peace officers, but that the District Court erred when it wrote the words “to employ” into the City Charter. The Court of Appeals confirmed that the Minneapolis City Council has consistently met its obligation when it funded 888 officers in 2020 and 770 officers in 2021. In 2022, the City Council funded 756 sworn peace officers.

“Since the murder of George Floyd, the Minneapolis Police Department has lost almost 300 peace officers. This is an unprecedented loss of manpower that is not easily corrected. The Court of Appeals confirmed that the jobs of recruiting, hiring and training new peace officers are those of the mayor and the police chief and they are fundamentally discretionary. The Writ of Mandamus cannot compel a result to a discretionary action. Therefore, the District Court erred when it ordered a certain number of peace officers be employed by a certain date.

“The Court went on to acknowledge that Mayor Frey and the Minneapolis Police Department are working in good faith to recruit and hire new peace officers as quickly as reasonably possible. This ruling does not change the City’s ongoing commitment to rebuild the police force to the 731 positions we are required by charter to fund and beyond.”

Minneapolis Deputy City Attorney Erik Nilsson