The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office has stopped classifying deputies as “undercover” to shield their body camera footage from the public, following a campaign by public defenders for more than a year and rebukes from at least three judges.

As the Reformer first reported earlier this year, the Sheriff’s Office has since around 2022 restricted the release of body camera footage of members of its Violent Offender Task Force by calling them undercover, even when the deputies were carrying out regular policing duties like traffic stops for broken taillights.

Public defenders argued the practice robbed their clients of public trials and was a blatant attempt to circumvent public transparency, one of the main reasons law enforcement agencies around the country invested millions of dollars equipping officers with body cameras.

Hennepin County public defender Amanda Brodhag said the policy change is a “win” — but one tempered by the Sheriff’s Office increasingly using the classification for deputies in a different task force, the West Metro Drug Task Force.

“Same game plan. Different team,” Brodhag said.

Hennepin County sheriff conceals bodycam footage by calling officers ‘undercover’

Public defenders learned about the policy change in an email from a prosecutor in the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office on Sept. 4, stating they would no longer be seeking protective orders for body camera footage of Violent Offender Task Force members.

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office confirmed the policy change and said it was made by Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt.

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.

Brodhag and her colleagues tallied 78 cases from April 2025 until the policy change last month — about one per week — in which the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office used protections for undercover officers to restrict body camera footage from being shared with the public.

They’ve counted five requests to restrict body camera footage for deputies with the West Metro Drug Task Force since then.

Body camera footage is already broadly private under Minnesota law but can become public if it’s used as evidence in court, if there’s a public interest in it or if the subject of the footage requests its release.

The Reformer reported on the cases of two men who were stopped by deputies with the Violent Offender Task Force, violently arrested and charged with misdemeanor, “obstructing legal process,” for allegedly not following orders.

In both cases the deputies were wearing vests that said “sheriff” and large body cameras on their chests — hardly an image that the word “undercover” conjures of an officer disguised as a drug dealer or gang member to infiltrate criminal networks.

But the Sheriff’s Office would not turn over the footage until prosecutors secured a judge’s order that it not be shared with the public.

Prosecutors for the city of Minneapolis promptly dropped the two cases after receiving the footage, which highlighted the fact that they had brought criminal charges without reviewing what is often the most important evidence in cases involving abuses against or by law enforcement officers.

The Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office declined to comment on those cases as well as the sheriff’s policy change.

Shawn Gullickson, captain of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office Major Crimes Division, said in affidavits to the court that allowing the footage to be public would blow the deputies’ cover and put them in danger.

He also said deputies may “transition between traditional (undercover roles) and other more standard roles such as proactive policing in the community.”

Gullickson has said in court affidavits that all deputies on the Violent Offender Task Force and West Metro Drug Task Force are undercover, but it’s unclear how many deputies serve on them.

For the most part, judges sided with prosecutors and issued protective orders. That’s because under state law, law enforcement agencies have the power to determine which officers are undercover.

At least three judges pushed back in recent months, Brodhag said.

In July, Hennepin County District Judge Andrew Tweeden sided with public defenders in a case brought against a man who was found to have a firearm without a permit after being pulled over for not wearing a seat belt.

Prosecutors sought to redact the videos by blurring the deputies’ faces before showing them in court even though the officers themselves would appear in person in the courtroom.

The officers were all clearly identifiable as law enforcement and wearing body cameras. Tweeden said the fact that they may sometimes engage in undercover work does not justify restricting a defendant’s rights to mount a complete defense and have a public trial.

“This was not a covert operation,” Tweeden said. “It was a public act.”

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