Former Minneapolis police officer Justin Stetson stands guard over the Third Police Precinct on May 27, 2020, during protests of George Floyd's killing. Photo by Chad Davis.
Minneapolis Police Department officers reported using physical force against suspects more than 1,000 times in 2022, one of the highest per-capita rates of police force in the nation, according to data released this week .
MPD officers reported using force at the same rate in 2022 as they did in 2020, the year George Floyd was murdered by MPD officers, led by Derek Chauvin.
Over the same time period, police use of force rose precipitously in neighboring St. Paul, roughly doubling from 2018 to 2022, according to the data. On a per-capita basis, St. Paul police are now more likely to use force against suspects than MPD officers.
St. Paul and Minneapolis are now ranked third and fourth in the nation, respectively, for the frequency of police use of force among cities with more than 100,000 residents.
The Minneapolis Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokesman for the St. Paul Police Department noted the department publishes its use of force data annually , and said they are “committed to de-escalation whenever possible.”
The data were obtained via public record requests and analyzed by the nonprofit group Mapping Police Violence , which tracks police shootings. Uses of force include weaponless physical techniques like restraints, punches and takedowns, as well as the use of weapons including pistols, Tasers, batons, chemical spray, and K-9 units.
Because there is considerable variation between police departments in how they track and report officer uses of force, the study adjusted the raw data to enable, as much as possible, apples-to-apples comparisons between departments. But accurate use of force numbers rely, in large part, on the ability and willingness of individual police departments to collect that data.
Nationwide, police use force against people about 300,000 times each year, according to the report. That number is similar to an annual estimate released by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2015 .
About one-third of those incidents result in injuries to the suspects, 80% of whom are unarmed. “The vast majority of people who police use force against were not alleged to be involved in any violent crime,” the report found.
A 2023 Justice Department report found that the Minneapolis Police Department violated residents’ civil rights by using “excessive force, including unjustified deadly force and unreasonable use of Tasers.”
The department used force against people suspected of petty crimes, or who committed no crime at all. Officers used force to punish people who made them angry or criticized them, the report found , and frequently fired their guns in situations where there was no immediate threat.
The report found that officers used force to make people do things they had the legal right to refuse, and also “gratuitously” became physical with suspects who were already restrained.
The Mapping Police Violence data shows that MPD’s use of batons and other impact weapons increased dramatically from 10 incidents in 2019 to 78 in 2021. The department’s use of Tasers is also up, from 78 incidents in 2020 to 108 in 2022.
The Mapping Police Violence data on Minneapolis covers the period prior to the Department of Justice report and subsequent consent decree.
The data also shows that police in St. Cloud use force at even higher rates than those in Minneapolis and St. Paul. In 2022 officers in the city of 70,000 reported using force more than 450 times. In per-capita terms, St. Cloud officers use force more than twice as often as those in the Twin Cities. But the city was not included in the report’s overall rankings because of its relatively small population.
In addition, the report found significant racial disparities, with MPD officers using force against Black people more than eight times as frequently as against white people.
This story has been updated with comment from the St. Paul Police Department.
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