Emilie Quast : It is July 13th at 6:36pm. Our guest tonight is Chief Jason Ohotto, who leads the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board Police.
I invited him because last year, 2025, we had a very disturbing late night July 4 gathering on Boom Island in the 2nd Precinct. This year, it was quiet. I want him to explain how the MPRB-PD got things so well contained this year. What did they do to make all the difference? I want him to take some credit for what he and his officers accomplished. Also, if there might be ongoing problems, what should 2nd Precinct residents be on the lookout for?
Chief Ohotto: I’m the Park Police Chief. I’ve been in this role for 13 years, and I’ve been with the Park Police for a little over 30 years. I’m proud to say that I also live on the East Side in the Waite Park neighborhood. I formerly lived in SE Como for several years.
I’ve presented to 2-PAC at least two or three other times before. I’m happy to be here. I’ve got mostly good news to share.
I’m going to go through just a very short slide deck; this will be about five or six slides. Then I’d like to spend the rest of my time just responding to questions you might have.
I always like to start with a little bit of an explanation of what the Park Police is and why we exist.
The story of the Park Police is really the story of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board.
The Park Board is a semi-autonomous and independently elected board. It’s responsible for acquiring, developing, operating parks across the city of Minneapolis.
The Park Board’s been in existence since 1883 and the Park Police Dept. came into being just a short time after that. We serve the Park Board’s mission, operating parks across the city of Minneapolis. If you’re interested, you can find the Charter authority in the Minneapolis City Charter, Chapter 6, Section 2E. It states that the mayor must appoint police officers to serve the Park Board at their request and that those officers will be paid out of the Park Board’s general fund.
Some ask why Park Police officers wear Minneapolis Police uniforms. Under the City Charter, we are Minneapolis Police Officers. We’re appointed by the Mayor, and then assigned to the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, who are our “bosses”. I don’t directly answer to the Minneapolis Police Chief or the Mayor or the City Council, although I work with all of those people very closely.
My boss is the Superintendent of Parks, Al Bangoura, who is the City Manager for the Park System. The Superintendent is appointed by the elected Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board.
Most of you who live in the Second Precinct are represented by Dan Englehart. Jason Garcia represents East Marcy Holmes, from 35W to 2nd Ave NE https://minneapolisparks.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=f6f46d2b57774f71b16c67faa3d31079 In addition to Commissioners Englehart and Garcia, there are three at-large commissioners: Meg Forney, Amber Frederick, and Tom Olson, who also represent the east side along with the rest of the city. That’s a total of nine Park Commissioners for the city of Minneapolis.
The Minneapolis park system today is comprised of 186 parks that span more than 7,000 acres.
There are more than 30 million visits to these parks every year. Two-thirds of those visits take place in our Regional Park system. Neighborhood parks are the smaller parks — typically, they’ve got an athletic field and a recreation center. Think of Northeast Park or Audubon Park versus the regional parks, which are the big, more natural resource-based expansive parks like Minnehaha Regional Park, the Mississippi River Bank.
Within the park system, we’re responsible for 55 miles of roadway and about 50 recreation centers.
Every year there are over 2,000 permitted special events in the park system. We police about 400 of those 2,000 permitted events, providing event security.
We just got through the 4th of July “Red, White, and Boom” events. The weekend before that was Twin Cities Pride, where Loring Park saw hundreds of thousands of people over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We are the police force that provides event security when those events take place in the park system.
The park board’s annual budget is about $160 million. $114 million of that is the General Operating Fund that’s mostly derived from property tax revenue, and then I broke down the rest of the remaining.SEE/GET CHART
And then if you look on the map (see, https://www.minneapolisparks.org/about-us/maps/) on the right side of your screen, everything that’s green is park property. The green adds up to about 17% of Minneapolis geography.
Today’s Park Police is budgeted for 35 police officers, including the Park Police Chief, two lieutenants who are work-group managers, six patrol sergeants who are first line supervisors, two detectives, and 24 officers. In addition, we also have Park Patrol Agents whose work is similar to MPD Community Service Officer. Many of them are aspiring to become police officers or are in college or recently graduated from college. They provide a lot of support work within the police department and low level enforcement like animal control and parking issues.
DEMOGRAPHICS BY the numbers: At the end of 2025, we had 50 employees, 32% were employees of color. The Park Police Department’s annual budget is $8.5 million, or 7.4% of the park board’s general fund. Contrast with MPD’s $230 million, today.
The Park Police only covers two shifts a day, starting at 7 AM. We’re supposed to end at 1 a.m. So from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m., if there’s an emergency within the park system, the MPD would respond to that. In addition, we share nearly all support services including 911 communications, property and evidence, records management system, crime lab, all of the behind the scenes services needed to make a police department run. There is no duplication of service. Our officers attend much of the same training as the MPD, including the police academy, the range, and in-service and pre-service training. We do that because we want to make sure that when we’re delivering service out on the street, next to our MPD colleagues, those services are delivered seamlessly. The MPD will investigate a homicide if it occurs in the park system. Thankfully, so far this year, we have not had a homicide in the park system, although last year we had four.
The Park Police does investigate most other crimes that occur in the park system. That has changed a little bit since 2020. Before 2020, MPD took a greater role in investigating major complex cases. With the contraction of officers since 2020, we’ve taken back some of the cases that historically were investigated by MPD, but the nature of the relationship and the reality of policing in Minneapolis is that MPD frequently will arrive on a park police emergency, and park police officers will frequently arrive on an emergency outside of the parks. That service needs to be consistent, professional and seamless, no matter who shows up.
Headline events in the Second Precinct Parks
One of our most challenging locations over the last18 months or so, has been late night activity, along Main Street SE and on to the Stone Arch Bridge. We’ve had large groups of young people showing up very late at night, involved in disruptive behavior, fights, fireworks, sometimes firearms.
We did have a couple of shootings on the Stone Arch Bridge in 2025. That Bridge is probably the most traveled stretch of trail in the state of Minnesota. This late night activity has been very concerning and disruptive to residents on both sides of the river. I’m not going to take much of the credit for what has changed there this year, and frankly, we’re still dealing with challenges in this area. This isn’t over, but there has been significantly less crime and violence on the Bridge compared with what we saw last year after the bridge reopened.
I’ve worked very closely with the MPRB Community Connections and Violence Prevention Dept., to get violence interrupter presence into that space, particularly on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. We’ve got Park Board staff working from late evening to the wee hours, doing proactive engagement with the young people that are showing up there, and enforcing standards of conduct in a way that the police typically would not be successful at. I think that that has dissuaded a lot of activity.
In addition, the MPD, Inspector Fisher, Lieutenant Hudok, all of our partners at the 2nd Precinct are very aware of what’s going on there and have been great partners. Councilmember Rainville’s office has been extremely involved in the work that’s going on there. If Councilmember Rainville is in the room he can speak later in the Q&A about the violence interrupters that are under contract to do work there. In addition, folks in other parts of the city enterprise are helping out, too. We get a lot of support from the traffic control agents who do parking enforcement in this area. All of these strategies have helped tamp down the disruptive activity that’s been taking place. As I said, we’re not all the way through it. We’re still dealing with challenges down there. I’m just pleased to report, though, that the levels of violence this year versus the second half of last year are lower.
BOOM ISLAND
In June, 2025, we had a mass shooting at Boom Island. One person was murdered and five other people sustained gunshot wounds. This was a large birthday party that had gotten kicked out of French Regional Park in Plymouth around nine o’clock at night, and showed up at Boom Island, unpermitted and off of our radar. There was some posting about this birthday party on social media that drew rivals to the area. A gunfight erupted. MPRB officers responded with the 2nd Pct.
Officers acted heroically. We had officers both from the Park Police and MPD who received lifesaving awards for the emergency care they rendered during that mass shooting. MPD Homicide investigators did remarkable work. Three people were charged in this case. The person who caused the death of the young lady was brought to justice and pleaded guilty.
So, you know, that certainly was a concerning incident, but it was not the norm for Boom Island. If you look at the history of crime for Boom Island, it’s not a place that has high levels of trending crime. BUT, it’s an easy to access, very large space with a large parking lot. The possibility for more of these gatherings, these unexpected, illicit late night gatherings became really concerning to me.
I worked with CM Rainville on it. We decided to modify the parking limitations at Boom Island. So it used to be that you could park at Boom Island until 10:30 at night. Very often, picnics were permitted until 10 or 10:30 at night, which meant people weren’t actually leaving until after 11. We modified the times and made the entire parking lot No Parking after 9PM. Then we enforced that by closing a gate. So the park is open. People can use the park until midnight by ordinance Developed parks are open from 6am until midnight. But we are limiting the parking in a way that hadn’t been done prior to last year at Boom Island.And that has brought considerable peace to that neighborhood. And I wish we didn’t have to take things away in order to make them safe, but in this case, limiting parking has been a significant game changer in what’s going on at Boom Island Park.
I’m also happy to report there’s no single Second Precinct park that has experienced a crime surge or trend so far this year. Our calls for service in the second precinct are slightly higher than the last couple of years. We’re at 666 so far this year. At the same point last year. We were at 624. The year before we were at 610.And serious violent crime, which for me means rape, robbery, homicide, and aggravated assault are also about the same. We’ve had five reported crimes so far on the east side this year. And we had four last year and four the year before.
QUESTIONS Questions? Karl Smith has raised his hand.
Smith: Two questions for you. As a southeast, long-time southeast resident and long-time bicyclist, I really appreciate the parkways. I bike them regularly. One question is about the posted speed limit is 25. On West River Parkway, commuters are traveling 35 to 40 miles an hour. That makes it dangerous for us crossing the Parkway.
Second Question: There’s been an increase in the number of non-compliant e-bikes. They’re really not e-bikes, they’re motorcycles on the parkways, and those things are scary. They come whipping by. Is there any chance chance there’s going to be some enforcement of these non-compliant nominal e-bikes, which are actually motorcycles?
Ohotto: First of all, the Park Board did change the speed limits on the parkway from 25 to 20 a few years ago now. So historically, they had been 25, now they’re all 20. The reality is that nobody is driving 20 miles an hour.
We field a lot of complaints around aggressive driving across the park system. In response to those complaints last summer, we finally hit a staffing level where I was comfortable assigning an officer to do traffic enforcement over the summer months. We expanded that pilot from last summer, when it was only over the summer months, to it’s been full-time since April, and it’ll be a six-month assignment over the course of the summer.
The officer who’s doing that traffic enforcement is doing an outstanding job. There are frequently days when he comes in with around 15 citations for speeding, which is a significant number in the park system.
Then he’s going to wherever we’re receiving complaints. So his assignment is pretty much complaint-driven. He’ll go there. He’ll do traffic enforcement until folks figure it out. Then he’ll go to the next focus.
So we are doing more traffic enforcement to get the speeds down.
We’re up against a challenge in that the parkway system, the 55 miles of roadway that constitutes the parkways, was designed and constructed close to 80 years ago now. Today, we would never design and construct the parkway system in the linear way that it’s built, because it just lends itself to speed. You can drive down West River Parkway from Minnehaha Falls to Broadway Avenue North, and I think you only hit one traffic light at Plymouth. We’re also trying to work with our city partners in figuring out ways to do some traffic calming, and maybe, when appropriate, redesign the roadbed of the parkways.
That’s tremendously expensive, so it’s not going to happen quickly, but we’ll put some natural bends and curves in these roadways to slow folks down. In the meantime, we are doing some speed enforcement.
The city is also expanding their enforcement, their camera enforcement pilot. They got authorization from the state legislature, I think it was two years ago, to install these traffic enforcement cameras. There’s a handful of them across the city, and that is also being expanded. We’re hopeful to get some of those on the parkway as well.
The e-bike stuff is a can of worms. I have to say, frankly, I don’t have staff to do any focused or targeted enforcement on the e-bikes that aren’t really e-bikes.
Yet I know that they are causing a lot of trail conflicts, especially in the park system. I do think that there’s work being done at the legislature to provide some better guidance and classifications around the buckets that these different machines fall into.
If you’re driving an electric motorcycle that can go 50 miles an hour, even if it has pedals on it, that should probably require some sort of a license, and both a license for the driver and then a license for the vehicle.
I think we’re getting there, and I think it’s happening at a quicker pace now that we are seeing more trail conflicts, but we’re not in position yet to be able to do much enforcement.
Another question from Dan Miller:
Miller: Chief Ohotto, Thank you so much for the work you and your officers do. It’s deeply appreciated.
I live at 22nd and McKinley, and it’s about a block off of Stinson Parkway. I have a perfect view and over the past 10 years have been able to really basically eyeball the speeds that people are moving on Stinson Parkway.
You do the 3-1-1 calls and you get the speed wagon out or an officer out. I know that you’re shorthanded, but we could really use some help this year.
I’d just like to say that some people do drive 20 miles an hour, myself included. By personal example, I think we teach people to do that.
I’m very excited that 2028 we are planning a street repaving for Stinson Parkway. Hopefully we could do a little bit more than just repaving and ADA enhancements to try to get the speeds down on there. I would appreciate more attention on the parkways per se.
I just sent a fairly lengthy letter to Dan Englehart, my commissioner, and maybe you’ll be hearing a little bit about that. It’s not so much in your domain, but it’s in really the design and what we can do in the next couple of years to see some improvements.
Ohotto: Thank you. Like I said, we’re trying to do more traffic enforcement. We’ve got this assignment that’s spread throughout the entire city. 35 officers divided across two shifts means I typically have one supervisor and three squads on during the daytime and five squads and one (28:41) supervisor on during the evening. In summer, those officers are running call to call to call. It’s not that we’re ignoring your complaints. It’s that we have a staffing situation that requires us to prioritize life-safety stuff first.
Typically, we can do more in the fall and winter seasons, but spring and summer are really tough around here. Our workload increases by 300 percent in July versus what it is in the off-season, and we don’t get to flex the number of people that we have working here. We’ve got what we’ve got.
I do think, though, if people are really serious about changing the driving behavior on the parkways, it requires a change in road design. If you go to any of these parkways you’ll see they are built for speed, they are straight, they are long, they are linear, there’s no traffic control devices. I think rather than throwing human resources at this problem, we need to throw some design resources and reconstruct some of these parkways in a way that slows people down naturally so you don’t have to have a cop sitting out there with a radar gun.
I’m hoping we can get something accomplished by 2028 when this is planned to have a resurfacing. We’ve got a few years here that hopefully we can get some ears on it. I just wanted to alert you that people are trying.Thank you.
Quast: Gail has a question at Monroe Village.
Gail here, a question about Park Police policy making compared to Minneapolis police policy making. Something that’s been in the news quite a bit in the last week or two brings this to mind. Drones have come up as a big controversy for Minneapolis police. Are Park Police policies joined with Minneapolis Police policies, or do you do your own policy making?
Ohotto: We do our own policy making. We’re a separate police agency.
There’s a lot of mandated policies by the Minnesota Post Board where we have to mirror model policy language, but that being said, because we train so closely with Minneapolis, we very often, to the extent possible, try to mirror operational policies of the MPD.
Bonniville: Has the topic of drones come up for park police?
Ohotto: No. We don’t have anybody to fly a drone. We barely have enough people to drive the squad cars, so we don’t have any drones. We’re not getting any drones.
In certain circumstances, when we’ve needed support for a missing child or something like that, we have asked for assistance from the Minneapolis Police Dept. and they have provided that support.
2nd Precinct Advisory Council 