MINNEAPOLIS — Nearly six years after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the city’s elected leaders are again locked in a bitter stalemate over the future of public safety.

The City Council narrowly voted on Thursday to reject Mayor Jacob Frey’s community safety commissioner, Toddrick Barnette. The position was created in the wake of Floyd’s death and the violent fallout that ensued, with an intent to improve coordination and calm widespread concerns about the culture of the Police Department. The job is one of the highest paying in the city.

Barnette, a respected former Hennepin County judge who was first appointed commissioner in 2023 on a 12-1 vote, was rejected last week by a 7-6 vote led by the more-progressive members of the council. Frey has vowed to veto the decision.

The fight over Barnette and looming questions about the future of Police Chief Brian O’Hara raise fundamental questions about the mayor’s public safety agenda just weeks after much of the city unified against an aggressive immigration crackdown by thousands of federal agents. The latest standoff finds Frey and detractors right back in the unhealthy dynamic around policing that has defined city politics since Floyd’s killing.

Frey said in an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune on Friday that last week’s vote didn’t occur in a bubble. He said the decision bore similar underpinnings to the roiling anger that followed the events of May 25, 2020, the day Floyd was killed.

The mayor said he believed council members were trading votes with a simple political goal: Reject one or two of his appointees, no matter the merits.

“The beginnings of this go back to there was a group that came outside my house and asked me to defund the police,” Frey said. “I said no. The next day a veto-proof majority of the City Council said yes. That was the original sin. The fault line.”

He said the language of the debate might have changed, but fringe groups with political sway still exert power. He said the groups flood social media and act as gatekeepers over who passes the test when it comes to holding the Police Department accountable.

“Powerful, vocal, activated, engaged, organized, moneyed,” Frey said. “These are highly involved people. ... They get their people elected based on that.”

Council President Elliott Payne, who voted against Barnette’s reappointment, said two ballot questions for the city in 2021 were critical to how he views the mayor.

The first question asked whether the mayor should be given more administrative power over all city departments by eliminating the executive committee that included several council members. Voters approved it. The second question asked whether the Police Department should be removed to create a department of public safety. Voters rejected it.

Payne said that since the people of Minneapolis gave Frey much wider authority, the mayor has failed to exert the new power in any meaningful way against the Police Department. That includes overseeing Barnette, who reports to Frey.

“That’s the tension,” Payne said. “The mayor cares about political popularity as a priority over operational excellence and performance.”

A lack of oversight?

The vote against Barnette was one of the tools the council had to voice opposition to the Police Department going $20 million over budget in 2025.

But each council member said they had numerous reasons for rejecting Barnette.

Jason Chavez pointed to the Office of Community Safety asking the council to give violence prevention contracts to the Rev. Jerry McAfee after McAfee made threatening and homophobic remarks against the council. Robin Wonsley said her vote stemmed from the mismanagement of city tax dollars and delayed progress on police reform.

Payne said his vote was also about discontent with Frey’s performance and lack of respect toward the council. He had worked for years on a mental health responder program within the city and said he has brought policy ideas around public safety to Frey for consideration.

“It’s extraordinarily frustrating to bring those ideas to the administration, to the mayor, and just have them ignored,” Payne said. “And so now I have this really blunt tool, which is a once every four years vote up or down on his nominees.”

Frey said he doesn’t feel his relationship with the council is as contentious as it seems. He said that when they meet individually, there is often substantive agreement on most issues.

Frey acknowledged that “the buck stops with me” when it comes to the ballooning budget inside the Police Department. But he said the money was necessary because of understaffing, numerous public safety crises and vocal calls by council members for more policing in critical areas, such as domestic abuse.

“The same council members that are complaining about a lack of service are the ones that are [now] complaining about a lack of paying for it,” the mayor said.

Council Member Michael Rainville stood alongside Barnette during Frey’s news conference on Thursday to show his support. In an interview Friday, Rainville said those who voted to remove Barnette did so because they are upset Frey won re-election over Omar Fateh last November.

“It’s retribution,” Rainville said. “It’s one way of getting even, I guess. An odd way.”

He said he’s been impressed by the job Barnette has done and that he viewed him as “smart as hell,” honest and someone with “great relationship-building skills.”

He added that council members who voted against Barnette’s reappointment wrongly blamed the commissioner for problems in the city.

“He got other jurisdictions to help us with our policing, but he also told the truth,” Rainville said. “When he told them things they didn’t like, instead of understanding that was the truth and trying something different, asking different questions … they blamed him. They blamed the messenger.”

Clarity on community safety

In 2022, Cedric Alexander became the first person appointed the city’s community safety commissioner. He resigned after one year on the job. He said the lack of clarity from the City Council and City Hall as to what was expected of him was part of what led to his departure.

Alexander said he has been observing what has been happening to Barnette from his current position as interim managing director of public safety in South Fulton, Ga.

“I am not surprised,” Alexander said.

He said he believes some City Council members simply do not like Frey. Progressive leaders in Minneapolis, he said, had a “learned helplessness” that kept them from embracing successes in reducing crime or increasing public safety.

“It ain’t the conservatives,” Alexander said. “Hell, if it came to the right, I could have done my job because they were very clear about what law and order is. I’m very clear on what law and order is.”

Alexander referred to Minneapolis as a beautiful city. He spoke of the immense responsibility he felt in trying to improve community public safety after Floyd’s killing. He recalled the slogan he told police officers time and again during his brief tenure: “We are going to be constitutional. We are going to be legal. And we are going to be respectful.”

The problem, as Alexander said he sees it, is the city still isn’t certain what it wants out of its commissioner of community safety. He wondered if the city wanted a paper-pushing administrator or someone who could unify public safety departments so they were “making music together.”

“That was the success,” Alexander said. “They need to have some clarity to define exactly what it is you want this person to do.”

That question remains unanswered.

A legal opinion is being drafted by the City Attorney’s Office to determine what happens next. Opponents of Barnette’s reappointment would need to come up with two more votes to override a Frey veto.

Frey said it seems likely the process would simply start over with the mayor having to decide, again, if he wants to reappoint Barnette. Payne said the council is waiting for the legal opinion before determining next steps.

Payne said he hoped this process would bring the mayor to the table for a substantive discussion with the council about the future of public safety in Minneapolis. Frey said he was heartened by Barnette’s desire to stay on as commissioner while the process plays out.

And no matter what happens with Barnette, another battle in the council remains if Frey decides to reappoint O’Hara as police chief.

At the news conference following the vote against Barnette, O’Hara said the commissioner had “led in an incredibly admirable way.” He added that it was difficult to sit through the voting process.

Some council members have said they are unlikely to vote for O’Hara, who has been the subject of numerous misconduct complaints, though none has resulted in any official reprimand.

Although the mayor said he wasn’t ready to make the reappointment official, he said O’Hara has his “full support.”

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Louis Krauss and Deena Winter of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.

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