Minneapolis progressive council leaders advanced a plan to eliminate the city's post-George Floyd community safety office, citing waste and mismanagement even as Mayor Jacob Frey warns services could suffer.
City Council President Elliott Payne and Council Member Robin Wonsley are spearheading a proposal to wipe out Minneapolis's Office of Community Safety, a structure built in the aftermath of George Floyd's death and sold as the path to coordinated reform.
Fox News reported that council leaders advanced the measure Tuesday as part of a broader public safety restructuring, arguing the office has become costly bureaucracy that fails to deliver results.
Mayor Jacob Frey established the office in 2022 after calls for police reform. It was designed to oversee five departments, police, fire, 911, emergency management, and neighborhood safety, and to create a single chain of command. Now the same progressive wing that pressed for change is trying to tear the layer down.
Wonsley framed the move as basic fiscal discipline.
"It is good governance to stop investing in things that are not producing meaningful outcomes and are wasting taxpayer dollars,"
she said, adding that the office "has also contributed to increased audit costs due to poor management."
A recent Minneapolis audit identified serious deficiencies in the Neighborhood Safety Department's oversight of community-based violence prevention contracts. Auditors found inadequate documentation and weak financial controls that raised the risk of fraud and misuse of taxpayer money. The city failed to properly oversee millions of dollars awarded to those organizations.
The review examined a system that has directed more than $36 million to five major violence prevention programs since 2023. That record sits at the center of the council fight and matches patterns already covered in a Minneapolis audit on post-Floyd violence contracts.
Wonsley called the Office of Community Safety a $2 million shop that turned into "administrative bloat" and a "bureaucratic barrier" rather than a driver of alternative responses. She told Fox News Digital that residents should not expect harm because the office "was never able to effectively manage or oversee programs and services."
She went further:
"The proposal does not eliminate any violence prevention or public safety programs that produce results. It simply removes administrative bloat."
Payne defended the restructuring in similar terms, insisting the changes would protect progress on public safety and racial disparities by cutting "unnecessary costs and bureaucratic bottlenecks."
"Now more than ever, our city government must be responsive to the needs of residents, and its structure should reflect that."
Frey rejected the proposal as reckless. He reminded the council that members who once advocated for the office are now pushing to erase it without a replacement plan.
"This office, one that these council members advocated for, manages services like mental health response, violence prevention and police reform. If council members want these services in jeopardy, that’s on them. This wholesale elimination without a plan, combined with other proposed cuts to MPD, is not a serious proposal when it comes to public safety in our city."
The mayor's warning lands against a city budget that still pours heavy dollars into the system the progressives now call broken. Minneapolis's published 2026 public safety budget allocated more than $16 million to the Office of Community Safety, nearly $10 million to Neighborhood Safety, and more than $225 million to the Minneapolis Police Department. How much eliminating the office would actually save remains unclear.
Wonsley argued the Behavioral Crisis Response team, a key non-police program, predated the office, has shown success, and would continue without it. She said the city can advance a "comprehensive safety system and support police reform much more efficiently without unnecessary bureaucratic layers that have proven to be ineffective."
That claim tracks a larger national pattern in which politicians who once led the charge on defund-the-police reversals now distance themselves from the machinery they demanded.
The Office of Community Safety was built to coordinate services and impose accountability after 2020. Instead, council leaders now describe it as a barrier that inflated audit costs and failed to expand alternatives. The audit's findings on violence-prevention contracting give that critique hard numbers: weak controls, thin documentation, and tens of millions moving with elevated fraud risk.
Similar concerns have already surfaced in coverage of an audit flagging fraud risk on Minneapolis violence contracts in Minnesota. The local fight is not abstract. It is about whether a reform layer created in crisis delivered management or just another cost center.
Frey created the office. Progressive council members championed the direction. Years later, the same political camp is trying to dismantle the administrative shell while insisting the underlying programs can survive the cut. The mayor says that approach puts mental health response, violence prevention, and police reform work at risk and pairs it with other proposed cuts to the Minneapolis Police Department.
National debates over the same era still echo. Figures who once amplified defund-the-police rhetoric from the Floyd protest period have since walked back the hard line. Minneapolis is watching the municipal version of that retreat play out in real budget language.
Wonsley put the case in blunt terms: stop funding what does not produce outcomes. Payne said government structure must match resident needs. Frey answered that eliminating the office without a plan is not serious public safety policy. Those positions are now on the record as the proposal moves forward.
The open questions are practical. The absolute date of the Tuesday advancement is not fixed in public detail beyond the relative timing. The next procedural step for the proposal is not spelled out. Projected savings are still unknown. The audit's full formal title and report number are not laid out in the available account. Yet the core conflict is clear: a Floyd-era reform office is under attack from the left that demanded it, after auditors flagged weak oversight of the very contracts meant to prove the model worked.
Taxpayers funded the experiment. Auditors flagged the controls. Council progressives now want the bureaucracy gone. Mayors and councils who build sprawling "equity" layers rarely admit failure until the invoices and audit findings force the conversation, and Minneapolis residents are the ones left holding the bill.