Many Minneapolis residents near Derek Chauvin‘s old precinct don't trust police. Cops say they are working on it
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A couple dozen blue-uniformed officers gathered at Phelps Park near George Floyd Square in the spring warmth, flipping burgers and mingling with community members as children played.
It was a sight that would have been impossible five years earlier, when witness video of police killing George Floyd ignited global protests.
At first glance, there’s no indication of that past. But on the edge of the park, an indignant voice sounded, breaking the image of a new day.
“Say his name!”
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The voice belonged to Marcia Howard, a Minneapolis school teacher who has been tending to the protest space at George Floyd Square since 2020.
She has continued to open meetings at the memorial each morning at 8 a.m., discussing neighborhood mutual aid plans with other volunteers and advocating for the remaining demands that community members drafted after Floyd’s murder, including ending qualified immunity for police officers.
She yells again: “Say his name!”
It’s not long before two officers — Drea Mays and Xander Krohnfeldt — peel off from the crowd to greet her. They say hello. It seems they’ve met before.
“I am doing excellent,” Howard sarcastically said in response to an officer’s greeting. “Because this is cute. It’s been five years …. I think about all the little children who were not alive when George Floyd was murdered.”
As they speak, eventually launching into a debate over police reforms, a mural of George Floyd on the side of a church seems to watch over them.
“The fact that y’all gotta do what you gotta do in order to make this innocuous in their minds, right?” Howard continued. “Oh, we’re just friendly neighborhood police.”
While the police department works to make court-mandated changes and replenish its ranks with new hires, neighbors await transformation of the police while others continue to demand a transformation of systems writ large. Once at the epicenter of calls to defund the police, the police budget in Minneapolis has only grown, though the sworn force shrunk after officers left the department.
Those officers are working to build trust and faith in their profession. That task is a steeper climb in the 3rd Precinct, where George Floyd was murdered, turning the neighborhood into an epicenter of unrest. The fabric of the community remains visibly changed — from the signs at George Floyd Square to the shell of the 3rd Precinct police station and the still-empty lots.
An empty, battered precinct station
A 10-minute drive away from where Floyd was killed, the scorched 3rd Precinct police station stands empty. Exterior cleanup has picked up in recent weeks, but for several years it was surrounded by razor wire.
Enduring images of the station being set ablaze during the unrest and the hulk that’s left turned it into a symbol — one that carries vastly different meanings depending on who you ask.
The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, the union that represents MPD cops, sells a challenge coin on their website with an image of officers in riot gear lined up in front of that building. It reads “Never Forget 2020.”
But for many neighbors in the area, the structure represented something else. Mabel Houle, 70, said she remembers the police standing on top of the 3rd Precinct, aiming less-lethal weapons loaded with rubber bullets at protestors “who were just wanting our voices heard.”
“After George Floyd, we just had a bad feeling about that,” Houle said. “That place, that experience, that building, the response that we felt even in the neighborhood after the protests,” she said. “It just wasn’t a healing experience. It was more brutality.”
For years, even before tensions boiled over there, 3rd Precinct officers didn’t have a clean reputation around the neighborhood.
While the Department of Justice probe found discriminatory policing across the department, investigators learned that the 3rd Precinct was where the “cowboys” wanted to work. Derek Chauvin was one of the top cops there, tasked with training others. For years, he used excessive force on residents without consequence, prosecutors said.
Barbara Scotford lives a few minutes walk from the old police station and said she long had a sense that it was a “troubled” precinct.
“The building itself was such a citadel,” she said. “It was really hard to go in. I remember going in once to invite anybody in a uniform to come to my garage sale and they would get 50 percent off. Well, you'd think I was some sort of terrorist or something trying to entrap them into something. That was a very strange us against them feel to it."
Scotford said five years later, the inner workings of the 3rd Precinct remain a mystery to her. Without having much personal interaction with officers, she can’t say what her sense of change is, except that she says she no longer sees officers speeding through intersections as often.
For some, the sense that police have abandoned the area, persists. Kara Carrier also lives in the blocks near the 3rd Precinct. She moved back to Minneapolis with her family in 2023, after more than a decade in Los Angeles. She said she has two dogs “ready to launch if necessary.”
“If I see police cars around here, it's very rare, and it makes me wonder, is this ever going to come back?”
Data from the city indicated that officers were responding. In the 3rd Precinct, 911 response times for the most urgent calls are on average seeing a quicker response time than in 2019. However, police take about 14 minutes longer to respond in situations where there’s no immediate threat.
A fraction of the officers from 2020 remain
Five years later, the makeup of that precinct has changed, too. Seventy-three 3rd Precinct officers are no longer with the department, among the hundreds who left the MPD after June 2020. Many filed worker’s compensation claims for post-traumatic stress disorder before leaving.
About 1 in 5 assigned to the 3rd Precinct patrol unit is an officer who served there in 2020, according to an April 2025 MPD roster.
There are currently 86 officers assigned to that unit, down from the 120 five years ago.
The officer leading that cohort is 3rd Precinct Inspector Jose Gomez. He’s been with MPD since 1994. In 2020, he was assigned to special crimes investigations, working in a unit focused on juvenile outreach and diversion. Now, he’s been the face of rebuilding trust in the city’s largest police precinct, which covers much of south Minneapolis east of Interstate 35W.
He’s developed a reputation for being the kind of cop people want to see on the streets. Since President Donald Trump came into office, Gomez has been on Latino radio shows and at local businesses, pushing to get the word out that Minneapolis police aren’t allowed to ask residents about their legal status.
“I understand the fear, I mean it’s real,” he said at a recent community meeting in the Seward neighborhood. “I was born here, lived in Mexico for a while, came back with my parents, and we would always hide. I didn't get it at the time, but we would just hide when the mailman came, because he had a uniform, and they didn't know any better.”
Gomez has been developing a relationship with a mosque near the new station for 3rd Precinct officers, set to open in 2026. He has an office in the American Indian Center in a part of the city with a large Native American population where trust in police runs low for many.
Jolene Jones is a leader of the Indigenous Protector Movement in Little Earth — an unarmed neighborhood patrol that formed during the unrest and has continued since then. Gomez has gone “above and beyond” making inroads with the community there, she said.
But she also says it’s going to take more than one supervisor to change the reputation of a department that has a history of police brutality and racism toward the Native community, according to an investigation by the Department of Justice released in 2023.
“Just because I feel I have a good relationship with Gomez does not mean I trust the MPD. Does not mean I trust the officers under him. Does not mean when I get pulled over, that I don’t get nervous,” she said.
For one thing, she said, she wants to see officers respond to calls for help by treating victims like victims, not perpetrators. She said many people are still resistant to call the police — which protector Jordin Perez, 31, agreed with. “If you try to go call them, it wouldn't be a help, because they'd be trying to find problems within the problem,” he said.
MPR News requested to interview Gomez, but was directed to Chief Brian O’Hara instead, who attended the cookout at Phelps Park.
It was kicked off by an event hosted by the Unity Community Mediation Team, a group consisting of Black pastors and community leaders who have been working to mend relations with police for more than two decades. They said change has happened and will continue to happen.
“I thank God for today as a starting point where we're actually here and we can be here together, because there's no way forward through this unless we're going forward together," O’Hara said.
Emmett Dysart stood nearby. The 57-year-old grew up in the neighborhood and said he’s been racially profiled too many times to trust the police. If he gets burglarized, Dysart — who is Black — said he’s not calling the police. He’s just getting a bigger dog.
Dysart said he’s “cool” with the cops. He doesn’t see them as “the boogeyman,” but he’s doubtful they’ll have the same friendly faces at 11 p.m. on Lake Street and Chicago Avenue.
He added that he doesn’t get the sense enough officers take the time to get to know the people they serve.
“We used to have beat cops that walked up and down,” he said. “They would know the community.”
Walking the beat in the 3rd precinct
In the entire city of Minneapolis, there are just two officers who walk a daytime foot patrol and they’re in the 3rd Precinct. Together, Drea Mays and Xander Krohnfeldt cover the beat that includes 38th and Chicago, also known as George Floyd Square.
They also walk parts of Franklin Avenue and Lake Street, engaging with businesses and residents, in addition to making arrests. The duo can respond to 911 calls, though they are usually not the first pulled in.
Mays said there used to be beat cops in every precinct and priority spots — like downtown — where she used to walk the beat. But that's no longer the case. The department says with a smaller force than five years ago, MPD prioritizes sworn personnel responding to 911 calls or on investigations.
While they are the only officers assigned to walk the beat, all other officers on patrol have to log at least 15 minutes a day of “high visibility” work, which includes getting out of their squads and walking the streets.
“Building relationship means being a part of the community, right? And so if something happens and they know who I am and I know who they are, it just makes that relationship or interaction that much easier,” Mays said. “And that's how you build trust, because without relationship there is no trust.”
Mutual aid’s deeper roots
Where that trust has been broken, other models of community safety long present in Minneapolis found new life.
On Minnehaha Avenue, just three buildings down from the old police station, a group of business owners and a local pastor gather at a table inside Arbeiter Brewing, in the hour before opening. They’re part of Longfellow Rising, a group formed to push for racial equity and vitality in the community.
“What happened five years ago was a very important movement, and I think for us to continue the work of what happened is part of our DNA now as organizations on this block,” said Kate Winkel, one of the co-owners of Arbeiter.
Winkel said she tries not to engage with the police. If a problem arises, she’ll work with other business owners to find a solution that doesn’t involve dialing 911.
“And that’s what you want out of communities at the end of the day,” added Ingrid Rasmussen, a pastor at nearby Holy Trinity Lutheran Church. “People who care enough about one another to not simply pick up the phone and report some sort of unwanted behavior prematurely.”
Many at the table were heavily involved with mutual aid during the unrest. That includes Rasmussen, who said the church became a site for medical care and food and plywood distribution at the time.
She said that care has continued in the corridor, whether through free meals or helping uplift Native people and people of color who want to start businesses as the area continues to stabilize.
Policing alternatives and a new police station
For neighbors in the 3rd Precinct, as in all parts of the city, more alternatives to calling police exist in 2025 than in 2020.
The Behavioral Crisis Response team — a group of unarmed mental health responders trained in de-escalation — has taken on a greater number of calls that had previously gone to police. Calls diverted to BCR have nearly doubled since 2022, the first full year the option was available to residents in Minneapolis.
For the past year, a couple social workers with Hennepin County have been walking along Lake Street five days a week, working to get people connected to housing and treatment. Each police precinct also has an embedded social worker from Hennepin County. In 2024, MPD referred 455 people across the city to social workers, according to a Hennepin County spokesperson.
As for the old 3rd Precinct station, it’s less blighted than it had been for the past five years. In late April, crews began taking down barricades around part of the 3rd Precinct. After more than a year of messages promising cleanup underway, a sign reads: “future home of the Minneapolis Democracy Center.” The plan is to eventually turn the rehabbed building into a Voter Services Center, with room to host community space.
Officers with the 3rd Precinct are temporarily working out of a space in downtown Minneapolis. Their new HQ will be known as the South Minneapolis Community Safety Center. It’s a symbol in its own right, a representation of where city leaders say they want the new direction to be — only part police station.
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