The man charged with resurrecting a police department infamous for the murder of George Floyd and preventing a situation that opens a door for President Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act did not emerge from the Midwest’s rolling plains.
He was forged in the dense, uncompromising brick and asphalt of northern New Jersey.
Brian O’Hara, the 54th chief of the Minneapolis Police Department, carries with him the particular imprint of that place: the post-industrial resilience of Kearny, where he was raised; the academic corridors of Rutgers University-Newark, where he topped his class; and the relentless, often grim, real-world laboratories of the Newark Police Division, where he spent over two decades.
Today, O’Hara leads the reform of a police force whose members murdered a man in broad daylight, and parries with a president who wants unlimited power to suppress protest and patriotism, while the White House occupant flagrantly breaks the law, defies the Constitution, and instigates death and destruction.
O’Hara’s journey began in Belleville and unfolded in the shadow of New York City, a region known for its blunt truths and complex loyalties. He joined the Newark police in 2001, a force then better known for its troubles than its reforms.
His rise was not marked by flashy arrests, but by a grinding, bureaucratic ascent through the ranks into the unglamorous engine room of police reform.
The defining chapter of his New Jersey career was his appointment in 2017 to captain overseeing the implementation of a federal consent decree.
This was a direct order from the U.S. Department of Justice to dismantle and rebuild systems rife with excessive force and unconstitutional practices that occurred while Cory Booker was mayor and in years before that.
Here, in New Jersey, O’Hara became less a traditional cop and more an institutional mechanic, tasked with retooling a broken machine.
He led town halls, faced skeptical residents, and drafted new policies from scratch.
Peter Harvey, the former New Jersey Attorney General who served as the federal monitor, credited O’Hara directly for “unprecedented progress,” noting the captain pushed changes that even exceeded the decree’s mandates.
The result was a measurable, if fragile, peace: Newark once went an entire calendar year without a police-involved shooting under this regime.
By the time Mayor Ras Baraka named him Newark’s Public Safety Director in 2021, O’Hara had become the embodiment of a specific 21st-century archetype: the reformer from within.
He managed a quarter-billion-dollar budget and thousands of employees, his reputation hitched to data, compliance, and a hard-won drop in gun violence.
And then Minneapolis called. Or, more accurately, pleaded.
Mayor Jacob Frey looked east last fall, past a field of candidates, and selected O’Hara as the first outsider in 16 years to lead a department still reeling from a global scandal of its own making.
The appointment was unanimous, a desperate embrace of a man whose resume reads as an antidote to Minneapolis’s failures.
But the question hangs in the air like factory smoke over the Jersey Turnpike: Can the lessons of Newark’s negotiated reform survive transplanting to the more fractured, traumatized soil of Minneapolis?
Newark’s consent decree was a prescription; Minneapolis operates under a different, perhaps deeper, crisis of legitimacy.
Chief O’Hara now walks the same streets where the world watched a man die under a knee, where a president is seeking pretense for putting the nation under foot.
O’Hara brings a New Jersey pedigree—a certified public manager, an FBI National Academy graduate, a holder of advanced degrees from the very streets he policed. It is a profile of meticulous competence.
The people of Minneapolis demanded a transformation. Whether the disciplined, decree-tested methods of Newark can meet that demand is the experiment now underway.
O’Hara is married to Wafiyyah (Wafia) O’Hara, who is a lieutenant in the Newark Police Department, and the couple has two sons, Brendan and James.
The O’Hara family remains in Mountainside, New Jersey, while he works in Minneapolis, communicating often via FaceTime.
The nation watches, waiting to see if a chief molded in one city’s struggle can finally guide another toward its redemption without justifying tyranny to crash down on America.