You can use these pages to learn about complaints against individual police officers. This information was obtained through Minnesota Data Practices Act requests.

There are two sources of complaints: the Civilian Review Authority (CRA) and the Internal Affairs Division (IAD) of the police department. Many of the complaints listed have a finding of "no probable cause," "dismissed," "exonerated," etc. You should be aware that these agencies have a high rate of not finding for the person making the complaint. For example, the annual report of the CRA for 2000 shows that of 1,373 complaints received in about 10 years, only 116 were found to have "probable cause" for investigation.  Of those, only 41 claims of police misconduct were sustained in 10 years.  In more recent years, the CRA has done a better job of sustaining complaints but the majority are still not sustained.  Moveover, Minneapolis Internal Affairs Division sustained only TWO complaints from community members in that same ten year period, despite receiving many hundreds of complaints.  Perhaps you should consider the number of complaints rather than just the outcome.

To review the complaint record of a police officer, click on his or her name on the list on the appropriate page.  If an allegation is sustained and the chief took disciplinary action, the nature of the allegation is included.  Under MN Data Practices Act guidelines, the agencies are not permitted to disclose the nature of allegations that are not sustained or not disciplined.  Consequently, complaints on this list are for a variety of allegations--everything from brutality and excessive force to ethics violations to showing up late for work.  Unless the complaint was sustained and disciplined, we are not able to learn the nature of the complaint.  However, for those complaints that are sustained and disciplined, we are in the process of adding PDF files of the complaint documents to this website.