Minneapolis Dissolves Office of Community Safety as Violence Prevention Groups Say Their Work Is Left Behind
On Oct. 29, the Minneapolis City Council voted 9-4 to dissolve the Office of Community Safety and eliminate the commissioner position, with police, fire, 911, emergency management and neighborhood safety reporting directly to the mayor. Council President Elliott Payne and Council Member Robin Wonsley said the office added bureaucracy and cost without results. City officials credit it with faster response times to urgent 911 calls and a coordinated response during Operation Metro Surge. Muhammad Abdul-Ahad of T.O.U.C.H. Outreach says violence interruption funding has been cut by more than 60% and community groups have been left to carry the work alone. Mayor Frey does not plan to veto.
The Minneapolis City Council has voted to dissolve the Office of Community Safety, the department created in 2022 to bring the city’s police, fire, 911, emergency management and neighborhood safety operations under one leader after the murder of George Floyd.
The council voted 9-4 on Oct. 29 to dissolve the office and move some of its responsibilities elsewhere. The ordinance also eliminates the community safety commissioner position as part of a broader restructuring of city government. The departments the office oversaw would remain and report directly to the mayor or a designee.
The vote pits council members who say the office added costly bureaucracy without results against a city administration that says it made Minneapolis safer. But some of the community groups doing violence prevention on the ground say neither side has given their work the support it needs.
“I don’t know if I can say anything of good that came from the department when it comes to partnering with neighborhood organizations,” said Muhammad Abdul-Ahad, executive director of T.O.U.C.H. Outreach, a violence interruption group that partners with the city.
Mayor Jacob Frey does not plan to veto the ordinance, according to city spokesperson Jess Olstad. She said Frey will talk with council members in the coming weeks and months about staffing the work so residents do not experience a gap in critical services.
In a joint written response to MSR before the vote, Council President Elliott Payne and Council Member Robin Wonsley said eliminating the office is not a retreat from the public safety commitments the city made after 2020. They said the office’s leadership had created “bureaucratic layers that slow progress, increase costs, and create confusion.”
They pointed to what they called the office’s failures, including weak oversight of contractors, its handling of the cases of Mariah Samuels, Allison Lussier and Davis Moturi, and Minneapolis Police Department overspending they said has exceeded $20 million in two years.
The office’s administration accounts for a proposed $2.04 million in the mayor’s recommended 2027 budget, according to Payne and Wonsley, while the five departments it oversees have a combined recommended budget of $388.7 million. The ordinance itself does not cut funding. The council will decide budget allocations during markup in December.
City officials argue the office delivered results. Rachel Sayre, the city’s Emergency Management director, said that before the office existed, Minneapolis had police responses and fire responses rather than a coordinated public safety system. She said a 2020 after-action report found department heads were not coordinating with one another, and that the city’s response to Operation Metro Surge this year showed “a night and day difference.”
She pointed to the September mass shooting on East Grant Street. Instead of a police-only response, she said, 911, police, fire, Neighborhood Safety mental health responders and Emergency Management, working with the Red Cross to set up a shelter, responded together.
In a fact sheet sent to MSR before the Oct. 27 hearing, city officials said average police response time to the most urgent 911 calls dropped from 9.4 minutes a year ago to 7.4 minutes. Joni Hodne, director of the Minneapolis Emergency Communications Center, said about half of the roughly 30,000 calls Behavioral Crisis Response has handled have come from BIPOC communities.
Olstad said some council members blamed the administration for poor outcomes while applauding themselves for successes. “Both of these things can be true, and we do not need to pit council against the administration,” she said.
Sayre said the office costs about $2.5 million to operate, more than the figure Payne and Wonsley cited. The staff who run the city’s Community Safety Centers and oversee reforms under the city’s human rights settlement agreement work in the office, she said, and moving them to other departments would not save money.
“You need dedicated public safety leadership at the highest level of a city government to do that work effectively,” she said.
Frey temporarily appointed Commissioner Toddrick Barnette after the council denied his nomination, Olstad said. That appointment ends at the end of the year.
Abdul-Ahad said violence prevention groups had more support when their work sat under the city’s Health Department. Once it moved under the Office of Community Safety, he said, the office never had the backing or the people who understood the work.
He said community groups, not the city, led the response during federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis and after Floyd’s murder, relying on their own training.
“We’re left alone to defend this body of work,” Abdul-Ahad said. “This work has been under attack for a long time, and this is the actual work that actually helps save lives.”
He said funding for violence interruption has been cut by more than 60%, and that some of that money is going to programs residents mistake for a replacement. He said Community Safety Ambassadors are not trained to step into conflicts and must call 911, while violence interrupters can mediate and de-escalate on the spot.
Olstad confirmed that Frey cut roughly $2.6 million in violence interrupter funding, and said the money was not shifted to other programs.
Abdul-Ahad said the office’s budget could be better spent on boots-on-the-ground work that serves Black and brown communities.
“Every time a shooting happened, that’s something that we know that could have been prevented if we had the right personnel or the right connections to mediate,” he said.
Six years after Floyd’s murder, he said, the work has never had a full cycle of investment long enough to show its impact.
“We should be talking about how can we invest in this more,” he said. “These are real people’s lives that we’re talking about.”
Residents can send comments on the mayor’s proposed 2027 budget to councilcomment@minneapolismn.gov.
Jasmine McBride welcomes reader responses at jmcbride@spokesman-recorder.com.