During the summer of 1968, Native American residents of Minneapolis organized to confront discrimination, police mistreatment, inadequate housing, and limited opportunities. Federal termination and relocation policies had encouraged many Indigenous people to move from reservations into cities during the preceding decades. Urban Native communities built new social networks, but they also faced racial profiling and hostile encounters with law enforcement. The American Indian Movement (AIM) emerged from this environment, linking local self-protection to broader demands for Indigenous rights and self-determination.

AIM began in Minneapolis in July 1968. Early leaders included Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, and George Mitchell, among other community activists. The organization initially used the name Concerned Indian American Coalition before adopting the American Indian Movement name. Its organizing focused on problems that community members identified directly, especially police behavior toward Native residents. Although the movement eventually became nationally known for treaty-rights campaigns and protests, neighborhood safety was one of its first priorities.

On August 19, 1968, approximately seventy people attended an AIM meeting at which about half voted to establish a citizens' patrol. They chose East Franklin Avenue in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis, an important center of urban Native life, as the patrol's operating area. The Minnesota Historical Society identifies this meeting as AIM Patrol's formation. A scholarly account dates the first patrol deployment to August 23, 1968; the decision to organize and the first street patrol should therefore be distinguished.

AIM Patrol volunteers aimed to monitor, document, and reduce potentially abusive police encounters without physically interfering in arrests. Participants wore conspicuous red jackets or shirts bearing AIM insignia and traveled in cars equipped with two-way radios, cameras, and tape recorders. They listened to dispatch traffic, observed officers' behavior, and recorded possible procedural irregularities. The patrol initially operated Friday and Saturday nights and later added weekday evenings. Members also offered assistance in neighborhood disputes and helped de-escalate situations before police intervention.

AIM leaders announced striking results. Five weeks after the patrol began, they claimed no Native residents had been arrested during the monitored period, compared with reports of five or six arrests a day before the patrol. A year later, leaders claimed twenty-two consecutive weeks without arrests. Those figures are important testimony about activists' perceived success, but the available historical account does not independently substantiate them as official police statistics. The patrol's methods nonetheless introduced organized civilian observation and public accountability into local policing disputes.

The program did more than watch police. Volunteers assisted at powwows, school dances, basketball games, and other community events. They supported neighborhood residents during crises and helped connect people facing criminal charges with legal aid. The Legal Rights Center, created in 1970 with AIM involvement, became a related institution offering legal assistance. These efforts treated community protection, access to courts, and cultural life as connected aspects of civil rights.

The original patrol ceased operating around 1975. After the murders of three Native women in Minneapolis in 1986 and 1987, AIM revived the program. In 1991, a later patrol office moved to the Elaine M. Stately Peacemakers Center at 2300 Cedar Avenue South, a location that must not be mistaken for its 1968 base. Later patrols and groups using the same name have had different leadership and organizational affiliations; the Minnesota Historical Society noted that a 2016 group using the name lacked official AIM sanction.

AIM Patrol's legacy lies in Indigenous-led efforts to document police conduct, protect neighbors, and assert the community's right to shape its own safety. Its historical landmark is best understood as the East Franklin Avenue patrol corridor rather than one surviving 1968 building. The Minneapolis American Indian Center at 1530 East Franklin Avenue, which opened in 1975, can serve as a present-day geographic reference, but it is not the patrol's founding site. This distinction preserves the accuracy of both the movement's history and its geography.