Minneapolis city leaders and local law enforcement have launched a new $2 million task force to investigate nonfatal shootings.
The goal is to treat all shootings with the same urgency as homicides, responding to historically low case clearance rates.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara says the new unit is backed, and will be staffed in part by multiple regional law enforcement partners, including the Minnesota BCA and the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office.
"This helps ensure the speed of information sharing, having officers from different counties and different agencies involved," says O'Hara. "All of that information sharing is very, very positive to help investigations not just in Minneapolis but around the metro."
City leaders also addressed their intentions to remove barriers within the current police contract to ensure Minneapolis can successfully hire the permanent investigative staff required to sustain these safety initiatives.
"So in Minneapolis, we're done treating nonfatal shootings as lesser crimes when somebody pulls the trigger," says Mayor Jacob Frey. "And whether it's by luck or an amazing action from our trauma response team, or it's the fact that police officers got there in time, the fact that somebody didn't die should not be the sense that this is a lesser crime in and of itself."
The new task unit in Minneapolis follows a model created in St. Paul, which Ramsey County Attorney John Choi says is responsible for an increase in the number of nonfatal shooting cases being solved.
"So, a much more intensive investigation and we're committed to solving the case without the victim's testimony," Choi explained to WCCO's Chad Hartman. "The board said we will give you some of our public safety money. The city council and the mayor said, I definitely want this money to be used for the nonfatal shooting unit. You would think that it's really easy to do, but it's not."
Before they started this process in St. Paul, they had a solve rate of about 37%. Now that solve rate is 70%.
"It should not mean that we shouldn't be holding perpetrators accountable, and it should not mean that we're devoting lesser resources to the incident in terms of investigation," adds Frey. "And so what we are doing in Minneapolis is we are treating nonfatal shootings the same way that we do shootings."
It's a very different number than across the river in Minneapolis. The nonfatal solve rate for shootings in 2024 was 23% but has been as low at 15% as recently as 2020.
"Last year in 2025, we were able to clear 80% of the homicide shootings," Frey said Monday. "Now compare that to 47% of the nonfatal shootings. Now those are records in the city of Minneapolis, but at the same time we have a lot more work to do."
The city's new FAST Task unit will include:
- Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA): Assigned 4 special agents to the team.
- Hennepin County Sheriff's Office: Providing dedicated intelligence analysts.
- Ramsey County Sheriff's Office: Dedicating law enforcement personnel to respond to shootings.
- Metro Transit Police Department: Assigning an officer to the task force.
- Bloomington Police Department: Joining the task force in June to assign detectives and investigators for the summer.
- Minnesota Department of Corrections: Set to provide upcoming assistance to the Violent Criminal Apprehension Team (VCAT)
