The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson · www.mollymcpherson.com

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara: The Interview You Likely Missed

January 27, 2026·23 min·1 clip

O'Hara says the ICE killing of Rene Good was predictable and preventable—he had said so at a press conference the day before—then admits 'I just thought, fuck, this is it.'

1. The PR Breakdown Podcast analyzes Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara's interview on The Daily with Michael Barbaro as a crisis leadership case study. 2. Host Molly McPherson is a PR strategist who specializes in crisis response; she presents the episode as an annotated walkthrough of an interview she found exceptional. 3. The episode's core argument is that O'Hara's refusal to hide behind legal cover, surprise, or political framing is what separates good crisis leadership from performative crisis communication. 4. The episode was recorded two weeks after the ICE killing of Rene Good but McPherson added a preamble noting that by recording time, federal agents had also shot VA nurse Alex Preddy, a legally armed man whom the White House called an assassin. 5. O'Hara's interview was on The Daily's January 13, 2025 episode; McPherson says she found it while searching for something to listen to during what she describes as a period of avoiding news. 6. McPherson notes that O'Hara, originally from Newark, came to Minneapolis after the George Floyd killing and oversaw policing through the Annunciation Catholic School shooting the prior year. 7. The first thing McPherson highlights is O'Hara's admission that the shooting was 'predictable and entirely preventable'—he had said so at a press conference the day before—which she says removes what she calls the 'escape hatch of nobody knew.' 8. O'Hara's unscripted reaction when the call came in—'I just thought, fuck, this is it, the potential for 2020 all over again'—is described by McPherson as what makes him credible to people on the ground who are also scared. 9. O'Hara describes his department as one-third below typical staffing while dealing with a higher level of serious street crime than pre-Floyd, stating plainly 'this is unsustainable' rather than framing it as grit or resilience. 10. When Barbaro asks whether the Rene Good shooting would have ended differently if Minneapolis police had handled it, O'Hara answers 'no question' and details specific traffic stop protocols: identify yourself by rank, name, and agency; explain why the stop is happening; do not place yourself in the path of the vehicle. 11. O'Hara draws a line not around the legality of ICE enforcement but around its methods, saying 'it's not necessarily about which laws are being enforced, it's about how that enforcement is happening.' 12. He notes that ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot Rene Good, was previously seriously injured in a traffic stop, and raises questions about what the agency did to protect its own officer and whether it prepared him adequately for the situations it was placing him in. 13. McPherson adds context that a New York Times article on Jonathan Ross described him as having a military background from the National Guard including a deployment to Iraq, and that a leaked video showed Ross saying 'F-ing bitch' after shooting Good. 14. O'Hara defends protesters and community observers by quoting the First Amendment directly, calling their presence a challenge but not an injustice, which McPherson describes as unusually courageous because it refuses to use protesters as a deflection. 15. Near the end of the interview, O'Hara admits his deepest fear: 'I'm just afraid that if we have another large-scale unrest, we are going to have a dramatic increase in crime yet again, and another mass exodus of the department, and we cannot sustain that.' 16. His closing statement—'I think everybody needs to turn the heat down'—is described by McPherson not as neutrality but as the perspective of someone who cannot log off from the consequences of escalation. 17. McPherson frames the episode as a template applicable to any leader managing compounding crises: the correct move is naming what is true, admitting fragility, and holding both individual accountability and systemic failure simultaneously. 18. The episode uses audio clips from The Daily throughout rather than paraphrasing, with McPherson providing analysis between each clip in a commentary format. 19. This episode is for people who lead teams through institutional crises, work in communications or public affairs, or want a specific example of what credible crisis leadership sounds like. 20. Listeners expecting straight news coverage of the Minneapolis situation or the ICE killing of Rene Good will find this episode is a media analysis and leadership commentary, not a reporting piece.

As heard by us

A blunt lesson in crisis leadership: standards matter more than slogans.

This episode takes a hard look at police leadership under federal pressure, centering Minneapolis Chief Brian O'Hara's warnings after the killing of Rene Good and the later death of Alex Preddy.

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Why you'd press play

You want a crisis chief who says the quiet part out loud.

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