Hennepin County detectives Jason Wong and Nick Peterson punched, tased and arrested Allanzo Johnson after stopping him for a broken taillight in north Minneapolis on March 27, 2025. Misdemeanor charges against Johnson were dismissed after prosecutors obtained the officers’ body camera footage. (Screenshot from bystander video)
MINNEAPOLIS (Minnesota Reformer) – Allanzo Johnson had just left a corner store in north Minneapolis when he noticed a black pickup truck pull out behind him. It trailed him for half a dozen blocks and then its police lights flicked on.
Johnson, 26, was confused. He was driving the speed limit. He was wearing his seatbelt. He wasn’t a criminal with outstanding warrants. He was a school bus driver on his way home after work.
He pulled over and two Hennepin County sheriff’s detectives wearing t-shirts, tactical vests and body cameras approached either side of his 2008 white Dodge Durango. Johnson remembers they had their hands on their guns and told him to put his hands in the air.
His brake light was broken, they told him.
Johnson pulled out his driver’s license to hand the officer, and in doing so revealed his permit to carry a gun. The officers asked if Johnson had a gun, and he said yes. The officers then asked Johnson to get out of his car.
“At that point, I knew it was gonna be something other than a regular traffic stop,” Johnson told the Reformer.
Johnson says each officer took him by an elbow and led him to the unmarked black pick-up.
He asked if he was under arrest and they told him no. Johnson pulled away and asked them not to touch him. Then one of the officers punched him in the face.
“Wound up and just clocked him right in the face,” said Henry Mulligan, a bystander, in an interview. “After that, they tackled him to the ground.”
Mulligan was so alarmed he took out his phone and recorded what happened next, which he shared with Johnson’s attorneys.
The video shows two officers in plain clothes and vests reading “sheriff” holding Johnson on the ground. Johnson shouts out, “Bro, what the f*** are you doing?… what are you doing? My hands in the air.”
One of the officers, who appears to have dropped his badge in the scuffle, picks up a Taser off the pavement and presses it into Johnson’s back. Johnson shrieks, and another bystander is heard yelling, “He’s not fighting.”
“You’re arrested,” one of the officers says.
“For what?” Johnson asks.
“I don’t know, for fighting with a cop.”
Undercover officers doing traffic stops
The identities of the cops who arrested Johnson, at least officially, are secret.
The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office has designated them as “undercover” in court proceedings, which allows the agency to conceal their names and body camera footage from the public under state law.
The sheriff’s office has been using state protections for undercover officers liberally to shield the identities of deputies who work on a special multi-jurisdictional team known as the Violent Offender Task Force, even when they’re doing regular police work, like the officers who arrested Johnson.
In fact, Shawn Gullickson, captain of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office Major Crimes Division, said in a May 2026 affidavit that all members of the Violent Offender Task Force and another group, the West Metro Drug Task Force, are undercover.
Hennepin County public defenders Amanda Brodhag and Raissa Carpenter, who represented Johnson after he was charged with misdemeanors, have tallied 66 cases since April 2025 — about one per week — in which the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office has used protections for undercover officers to restrict body camera footage from being shared with the public. There are likely even more cases that haven’t crossed their desks.
“I don’t buy that they’re undercover,” Brodhag said. “The majority of these cases involve people being pulled over for very minor traffic violations.”
The cases highlight a significant but easy to overlook facet of state law, which gives law enforcement agencies the power to determine which officers are undercover.
It doesn’t matter if the deputies don’t look the part of undercover agents — that they’re not pretending to be gang members as part of some covert operation, but rather conducting traffic stops in vests that say “sheriff” in big letters. If the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office says they’re undercover, judges have deferred to them.
The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office did not make anyone available for an interview but shared a statement saying the agency relies on undercover deputies to investigate serious crimes, and that anonymity is critical to their safety and the safety of their families.
“Sometimes, they must perform emergent law enforcement duties like traffic stops, crowd control, etc. but their undercover status does not change, as they still have ongoing undercover investigations that require their anonymity,” Rebecca Aurelious, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office, wrote in a statement.
Aurelious noted state law prohibits the sheriff’s office from releasing video or other records that would reveal the identity of an undercover deputy.
“This is a requirement of state law, not a policy created by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office,” she wrote.
Who is undercover, however, is up to the sheriff.
Undercover officers signing criminal complaints
After Johnson was arrested, on March 27, 2025, he was taken to jail and held in custody overnight while awaiting charges. He had never been in jail before.
He was charged with a gross misdemeanor for “obstructing the legal process” and a misdemeanor for having an open alcoholic container, a bottle of Rémy Martin cognac found on the driver’s seat.
The charges were eventually dropped after prosecutors obtained the detectives’ body camera footage.
That came weeks after legal wrangling between the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and Johnson’s attorneys. The sheriff’s office would only agree to release the footage to the defense — and even prosecutors — on the condition it wouldn’t be copied or shared with the public.
The sheriff’s office argued having their identities of these undercover officers made public would compromise their safety and criminal investigations.
Johnson never got the officers’ names. He only remembers the one who punched him looked like Louis CK and the other was a white “average Joe.”
Both officers’ names are concealed on the police report, but one of the detectives, Jason Wong, signed the statement of probable cause with his badge number on the charging documents. If he were undercover, why would he put his name in a public court filing?
Johnson’s attorneys identified the other officer, the redheaded Louis CK-type who punched Johnson, as Nick Peterson in a court filing after recognizing him in the bystander video.
The Reformer was able to confirm Peterson’s identity through a public records request for his badge number, which matches the incident reports. The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office did not fulfill public records requests regarding Wong, including his badge number and disciplinary record. The sheriff’s office cited the Minnesota Data Practices Act’s section governing personnel data but did not provide a more specific explanation.
Brodhag said she and her colleagues noticed around 2022 that the sheriff’s office started classifying agents with the Violent Offender Task Force as undercover for the purposes of body camera footage. Wong and Peterson are part of the task force and listed in the sheriff’s 2022 annual report for being promoted to detectives.
Not much is publicly available about the group beyond that it’s a multi-jurisdictional task force that goes after the most dangerous criminals, targeting drug dealers and “trouble spots.” In its latest annual report, the task force reports that in 2025 it made 505 arrests, confiscated 391 illegal firearms and dozens of kilos of illegal drugs.
Conflicting accounts
Public defenders have become familiar with Wong and Peterson.
A few weeks after Johnson’s arrest, the same detectives in a black pickup truck arrested Demario Reid in north Minneapolis.
Reid, 37, was a backseat passenger in a vehicle that Minneapolis police suspected of dealing drugs. After stopping the vehicle, the detectives asked Reid for his ID because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. When Reid declined, they made him get out of the car.
“Right after I get out the car, I just felt hands … a lot of hands,” Reid said in an interview. “They’re trying to twist and bend my hands up.”
Reid says he told them he had just broken both his shoulders, but they threw him against the truck. Bystander video shows Wong kneeing him repeatedly in the side while yelling at him to get in the back of the pickup.
Reid, too, was charged with “obstructing legal process,” which was later dropped after prosecutors obtained the body camera footage.
In both cases, there were key discrepancies between the officers’ accounts and that of Reid and Johnson.
Wong, in his statement of probable cause, justified asking Johnson to exit his vehicle because he smelled marijuana, while his partner wrote Johnson was making “furtive movements as if trying to hide something.” The officers used the same justification of smelling marijuana and “furtive movements” in arresting Reid.
In Peterson’s telling, after Johnson pulled away from them, he “took a fighting stance” so Peterson “struck (Johnson) in the face to separate myself from him so he could not assault me.”
Johnson disputes the officers’ accounts: “I didn’t obstruct anything.”
The Johnson case also raise questions about the use of so-called pretextual stops, which is the term for when officers use a minor equipment violation such as a broken taillight as a rationale for stopping and searching a car, in hopes of finding drugs or guns.
Minneapolis police have been barred from conducting such pretextual stops since 2023 under a consent decree with the state Department of Human Rights and later the U.S. Department of Justice, which both found the department had a pattern of targeting Black men such as Johnson.
A 2023 investigation by the Department of Justice, which dropped the federal consent decree under President Trump, found the Minneapolis Police Department stopped but did not cite or arrest Black people at 5.7 times the rate of white people.
The top prosecutors in Hennepin and Ramsey counties have largely stopped prosecuting cases that arise from traffic stops for low-level infractions in order to discourage law enforcement from doing them over concerns of racial profiling.
When Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced last fall that her office would default to not prosecuting crimes stemming from “non-public safety” traffic stops — barring a “compelling public safety interest” — she said they came at a significant cost to Black residents with little payoff.
She was joined at the news conference by Valerie Castile, the mother of Philando Castile, who was shot and killed by a St. Anthony police officer after being pulled over for a broken taillight and telling the officer he had a permitted gun.
The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office is not bound by the ban on pretextual stops for Minneapolis police, however. Sheriff Dawanna Witt criticized Moriarty’s decision to not prosecute crimes arising from them, calling it “reckless overreach.”
And Johnson’s charges were filed by the Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office, which handles misdemeanors, and is not bound by Moriarty’s policy of generally not prosecuting crimes from pretextual stops.
That’s how Johnson found himself in the position of being pulled over for a pretextual stop in a city where the police are barred from doing them and then charged by that city’s prosecutors.
Public defenders confront ‘absurd’ restrictions
The public defenders’ office has fought the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office in court over the body camera footage in these undercover cases, arguing that restricting its release undermines transparency and a defendant’s right to a public trial.
Body camera footage is already broadly private under Minnesota law but can become public if it’s used as evidence in court, there’s a public interest in it or if the subject of the footage requests its release. The orders sought by Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office would ensure the public may never see video of conduct by officers it calls undercover but for there being bystander video.
At a court hearing in May 2025, Minneapolis assistant city attorney Michelle Johnson — no relation to Allanzo — emphasized prosecutors weren’t looking to withhold the body camera footage from the defense.
They weren’t even trying to hide it from a jury. Under the city’s proposed order, the body camera would be shared with the defense and could be played in a courtroom. The undercover officers’ faces would be blurred in the video but the officers would testify in person, so the jury and anyone else in the courtroom would see their faces, hear their voices and know their names.
“We are not requesting to shield the identities of any of the officers,” Michelle Johnson said.
The point of the request was to stop the body camera footage from being accessed and distributed by the press or other members of the public because it could endanger the officers, she said.
At the time of this hearing, Michelle Johnson didn’t know what the body camera footage showed. She told the judge she didn’t have the footage because the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office would not give her the video until she obtained the court order barring its distribution.
The Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office declined to comment on specific cases in response to a Reformer request.
In a declaration to the court, Gullickson, the county sheriff major crimes captain, explained that Wong and Peterson didn’t appear to be undercover when they arrested Johnson because undercover officers don’t always carry out their duties “exclusively in traditional (undercover) roles” but require the undercover moniker for their safety and ability to carry out investigations.
Carpenter said the logic just doesn’t make sense.
“How is it that the officers can come …. sit in a public courtroom where anyone from the public can come and view them, and that’s not a threat to their safety, but their video of their face being played is a threat to their safety?” Carpenter said in court.
The judge granted the order to restrict a wide release of the body camera footage without ruling on if the officers were undercover.
In case after case, Brodhag and Carpenter have been unsuccessful in convincing judges to reject the stipulations demanded by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office. Judges have ordered that the unredacted video must be turned over to defendants and their attorneys but that it cannot be shared with the public.
None of the 66 cases tracked by Brodhag and Carpenter, however, have proceeded far enough in court for a judge to determine if the officers are indeed undercover and whether the video must be redacted for a jury. The cases have either settled or been dismissed.
Without a definitive ruling from a Minnesota court, the sheriff can continue to claim the officers are undercover and conceal body-cam footage from the public, no matter what type of work the officers are actually doing.
Johnson, while no longer facing charges, said he’s more paranoid about the police since the incident.
“I followed every rule, every protocol you’re supposed to be when you’re talking to and dealing with the police,” Johnson said. “That’s the scary part … I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
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