Nicholas Torborg is the new 2nd Precinct Inspector (Provided)
The 2nd Police Precinct has a new head cop, a 30-year veteran of the force and a Northeast native.
On Aug. 6, Nicholas Torborg was named inspector for the second largest of the city’s five police precincts, succeeding Inspector Sean McGinty, who served in the post since March 2022. Torborg oversees patrol and investigations in the area bounded by the Mississippi River on the west and south, 37th Avenue NE on the north, and the cities of St. Anthony and St. Paul on the east.
In a Nov. 14 interview, Torborg talked about his life before becoming a cop and since.
Torborg attended Holy Cross grade school, DeLaSalle High School and the College of St. Thomas, where he received a degree in biology. During his last year of college he got a part-time job as a security guard, which he said was “getting paid to study.” After graduation he took a job as an engineer with Hines, a large real estate management company with several buildings in downtown Minneapolis. “I didn’t have an engineering degree but my boss at the time said, ‘It’s a science degree, we can get you all the classes you need.’ It was a good opportunity, and I worked for them for about seven years. But they were based in Houston, and to move up in the company you had to be willing to travel and relocate.”
Torborg had some interest in being a conservation officer with the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), but back then there were few positions available for many applicants, and one of the requirements was that an applicant had to be a licensed police officer, requiring an additional two years of school.
While he was pondering his options, an upstairs neighbor in his Northeast duplex who was a Minneapolis cop took him on a ride-along. Torborg called it “an eye-opening experience,” adding, “An hour into it, I’m thinking this the best-kept secret in the world, because we were just rolling around, and we happened to get into a car chase, we went on some medical calls, and I realized that you were just getting paid to drive around helping people.” His neighbor suggested joining the police cadet program, and in nine months he’d be a Minneapolis police officer, and eligible for DNR positions. He was accepted as a cadet and joined MPD in 1994, just as a big spike in city crime began. “After a year, I literally had arrested people for everything from spitting on the sidewalk to murder. And I never did pursue that DNR thing.”
He said his family wasn’t that pleased with his new career choice. “They didn’t have a problem with police officers, but they worried about the danger; they also felt that their sacrifices to send me to Catholic and private schools, and money spent for college … what was the point? But it was mainly the danger.” Torborg said that was a legitimate concern, but noted, “It is a dangerous job, but the trick is to do the work safely and maintain your professionalism.”
After being promoted to sergeant, he worked in the Special Operations/SWAT Unit, Robbery Unit, and the Fourth Precinct as a shift sergeant. After eight years he was promoted to lieutenant and assigned to the Sex Crimes Unit. Two years later he was transferred to the First Precinct, where he worked the middle watch (3:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.) and dog watch (7:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m.) shift lieutenant for seven years until his recent appointment.
Torborg worked in North Minneapolis with various partners for 13 years. Asked what he liked most about police work, Torborg said, “I loved being a patrolman, answering calls, and I was lucky. I had good field training officers and good partners, for the whole time I was a patrol officer. One of the great things for patrol officers and patrol sergeants is we have 10-hour shifts and a flexible schedule; you typically take 12 days a month off, but you’re only working about four days a week. Working nights, you get the day to run errands and get personal stuff done. The dog watch is tough, but the mid watch, from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., is the busy period for police calls, and the time would go by fast.”
Unlike in the business world where there is pressure to complete projects or meet sales goals, after finishing the end-of-shift paperwork, a cop can leave the job at the office. Torborg noted that the job can produce its own kind of stress. “I’ve had to deal with my share of horrible things in my career. But I didn’t know about them ahead of time, so I wasn’t stressing out about them.”
Torborg talked about the ongoing consent decree between the police department and the Minnesota Department of Civil Rights, a court-enforceable contract calling for a number of changes in police procedures, including de-escalation, limits on the use of force and “pretext stops.” He expressed disappointment in the report the decree was based on, saying it relied to an extent on “anecdotal stories and hearsay … and was fraught with errors and false conclusions. That being said, our city leaders signed off on it and we have to abide by it. And so far, there hasn’t been anything imposed that’s been crippling to the department; we’re still able to do our job in a reasonable manner.”
Asked why he stayed on the job following the death of George Floyd, Torborg responded, “To be honest, I’m not sure why I stayed. … I stayed out of a sense of duty — I didn’t want to abandon my fellow officers at such a time of crisis, and I grew up in Minneapolis and have many friends and family members that live in the city, so I couldn’t just watch my city devolve into chaos without at least going down fighting.”
Torborg noted that while homicides in the 2nd Precinct are rare, car thefts are still a big problem. Some weeks, three or four thefts occur each day (though there was a recent drop-off in cases around Thanksgiving). The precinct has deployed cops in areas with a lot of auto thefts, placing bait vehicles, “and using other tactics.” He mentioned a recent program from Hyundai and Kia, the car makes most frequently stolen, that upgraded the software in owners’ cars to eliminate their vulnerability to theft. He said, “I wish we could give everybody a steering wheel club, just to be on the safe side.”
Another issue Torborg cited was body camera use: “These days, we can’t get along without them, but they take a huge amount of our time managing them. We have to activate them on every call, sync the camera to our phones, add the case number, add comments and save it all. Our investigators have to watch every minute of body camera video if a case goes to trial, so the prosecuting attorneys can make sure that there wasn’t something the officers missed. There are also corrections to be made and quarterly audits to file. It’s probably made us 30% less efficient, across the department.” He added that the consent decree also calls for reports whenever a firearm is drawn or someone is handcuffed. “When I worked on the North Side, there was so much gunfire and people with guns you’d have your service firearm out constantly.”
Torborg cited the low staffing numbers of police officers as “my overarching concern; we have a pretty big geographic area between Northeast and Southeast, and we’re spread very, very thin.” Minneapolis’ city charter requires 1.7 officers per thousand residents, meaning the city should have at least 730 officers. There were around 900 cops on the force at the time of George Floyd’s murder three years ago; there are around 530 now. Torborg noted that even this year there are nearly twice as many resignations as hires. The staff at the 2nd Precinct currently includes 50 patrol officers, eight sergeants and four lieutenants.
Asked if recruitment was part of his job description, Torborg said, “You know, it’s everybody’s job. Trust me, I’m constantly looking for people who I think might be good cops. At almost every community meeting, I try to spread the word that we’re hiring. And that despite all the negatives, if you’re in it for the right reasons, there’s still good reasons to become a Minneapolis police officer.”
A typical day for Torborg at his new post is a morning of meetings and “the problem or the crisis of the day; it never fails, which is why I still have ten unpacked boxes in my office. There’s always something that comes up.”
With 30 years of police service under his belt, Torborg feels he’s at his last posting (“I serve at the behest of the chief.”) But he said, “I did have a dream of like, someday, like the last couple of years in my career, just going back to a picture of being a patrol officer just answering calls. I’m not a spring chicken anymore. And this is a young man’s game. So I don’t think that that’ll happen.”