A liberal Minneapolis police officer has quit and left the country after she says she was relentlessly harassed by fellow officers for not supporting former president Donald Trump.
Colleen Ryan was the only Minneapolis police officer disciplined in connection with the department’s response to George Floyd protests last year — for “speaking without permission to a magazine columnist about what she called a toxic, para-militant police culture that breeds dangerous officers like Derek Chauvin,” the Minneapolis Star-Tribunereports.
Ryan has filed a complaint with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights alleging she was discriminated against because she’s a lesbian who advocated for “women and queer officers” in the workplace.
In her complaint, Ryan alleges she was denied a promotion to become a field training officer earlier this year. Meanwhile, two straight men from her shift were promoted – one who violated the department’s search and seizure policy, and another who faces drunken-driving charges.
“Ryan, who agreed to speak with the Star Tribune/Frontline last week, a day before she left the country, said she endured years of harassment in what she described as a misogynistic and homophobic culture running deep within the department,” the newspaper reports. “She described a cultlike adherence to former President Donald Trump’s ‘Back the Blue’ politics, which she said has given rise to an ‘us vs. them’ complex among officers toward the communities they serve.”
The article notes that Lt. Bob Kroll, who then led the Minneapolis police union, appeared onstage with Trump during a rally in downtown Minneapolis in 2019.
“Once (Ryan’s) fellow officers learned she supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 and marched against Trump, they refused to partner with her and purposely stalled in backing her up during dangerous calls,” the newspaper reports. “The day after the election, a fellow officer texted her a picture of a message written on the roll-call white board of her precinct: ‘4th Precinct Mids … Making America Great Again.'”
After learning that Ryan attended a Women’s March in 2017, all 25 of the officers on her shift refused to ride with her while her partner was on leave.
On one occasion, when she called for backup after responding to a car accident where a fight had broken out, “I could see on the GPS on our squad computers, those squads that were assigned to back me didn’t move for a couple minutes,” Ryan said.
Fellow officers also began posting memes in the women’s bathroom.
“One showed a photo of three women in police uniforms over a message boasting the empowerment of learning to shoot and wearing a bullet-resistant vest — ‘not wearing a [expletive] ridiculous pink hat and ‘protest,'” the Star-Tribune reports. “Another featured Trump and the quote: ‘We will be one people under one God, saluting the American Flag.'”