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Minneapolis News
Cari Spencer
Updated:

Minneapolis City Council postpones proposal to move violence prevention funds to county

A woman speaks
Ward 2 council member Robin Wonsley says she will vote against the police federation contract during a meeting in Minneapolis on July 18, 2024.
Ben Hovland | MPR News

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The Minneapolis City Council voted Thursday to indefinitely postpone a proposal to have Hennepin County temporarily oversee two of the city’s violence intervention programs, amid concerns of prolonged problems in the Neighborhood Safety Department.

The author of the proposal — council member Robin Wonsley — said even though she took the proposal off the table, she will continue to hold the Neighborhood Safety Department accountable for how it administers the group violence and youth group violence intervention programs.

Supporters of the proposal had pointed to a lack of outcome data from the past two years, unsatisfying answers about whether or not the department followed best practices around intervention, and other issues including reports of vendors not being paid.

Council member Aurin Chowdhury said the stakes for ensuring the nationally recognized GVI and YGVI model — which aims to get ahead of gunfire by identifying, helping and deterring groups that drive the most violence — are high. The model has been credited with bringing down homicide rates in other cities.

“That’s what this item is about,” Chowdhury said. “It’s a fear that in our current system, as a city, we will not be able to execute it well on the behalf of our community.”

The vote to withdraw the proposal followed more than an hour and a half of heated discussion. That followed an even more charged week of resistance — including threats aimed at council members from a prominent pastor involved in violence prevention work and public accusations from the city’s head of community safety that council members were pushing the proposal forward amid contract negotiations because they “don’t like who was selected.”

At one point in the meeting, council vice president Aisha Chughtai pushed Barnette to name which council members he believed had ulterior motives or to provide more evidence for his claims. Barnette dodged those questions.

“I have yet to see any evidence being provided to corroborate that this action before the body is somehow motivated by council members having an issue with specific vendors that were chosen or not chosen,” she said. “But if that were true there needs to be evidence provided to us so that we can take the appropriate action here.”

Wonsley and other council members accused Barnette of spreading misinformation, which they said inflamed the community and led to threats. The heated debate that emerged from that, Wonsley said, has not focused on the problem.

“It is simply distracting from the current issue at hand, which is a continued failure of the Neighborhood Safety Department to correctly administer programs that keep our residents safe,” she said.

Barnette and some council members who opposed the proposal said the plan to move the city’s violence intervention programs would be too disruptive. He said the department has also been working to implement accountability measures and has a new contract process in place — a change that was required after a 2023 lawsuit alleged the department arbitrarily awarded millions of dollars in contracts without oversight.

The department is currently going through a leadership change, after the director resigned last month, and is in the process of staffing up. Though the department’s struggle to stabilize goes back to 2022, when it was moved out of the health department, losing staff and infrastructure in the process.

Council member Jeremiah Ellison had supported the move, as a way to give the department time to straighten out. He pointed to questions he and other council members had previously raised — which he said they never received sufficient clarity on — like whether or not the current programs were operating with “fidelity to a model, any model, when it comes to delivering these services.”

He said though it was off the table for now, the proposal was the right course of action.

“Council member Wonsley rightfully recognized problems in this department and utilized her leadership to seek a resolution to that problem,” Ellison said. “I think that that should be commended. It shouldn't be disparaged. If it’s not the fix — fair enough. But the answer cannot be the status quo either.”