Minneapolis poured more than $36 million into post-George Floyd violence-prevention contracts with so little oversight that auditors warn of heightened fraud risk, a pattern critics link to Minnesota’s larger nonprofit scams.
A city audit of Neighborhood Safety contracts found Minneapolis is “not providing sufficient contract oversight or managing contracts effectively” on programs launched as alternatives to policing. The review covered spending from 2020 through 2025 and zeroed in on more than $36 million spent since 2023 on five major violence-prevention efforts.
Auditors warned that weak controls created a heightened risk of fraud and improper payments. Contractors often submitted invoices with limited supporting documentation. The city sometimes kept paying anyway even when records were missing or concerns went unresolved. The audit did not identify a specific instance of fraud, yet the gaps were plain.
More than 100 contracts went out to community groups in 2020 after George Floyd’s death. Officials framed the spending as neighborhood safety and violence interruption instead of traditional policing. Years later, basic checks still lagged.
Reporting on the findings shows the Neighborhood Safety Department lacked a standardized process for conducting and documenting site visits to confirm contracted services were actually performed. Invoice reviews, record preservation, contractor communications, and escalation procedures all needed work.
The same city that rushed money out the door after 2020 still struggled to verify what taxpayers received. That is the core failure the audit put on paper.
The Washington Examiner detailed a 60-page City Auditor’s Office report that reached the same conclusion: the department fails to properly oversee contractors. A site-visit policy remained in draft form. Payments frequently went out without full supporting documentation.
“There are currently no safeguards in place to ensure the contracting process is not influenced, directly or indirectly, by those who have direct channels with elected officials,” the audit report stated. Political access and weak controls sat side by side.
One contractor, We Push for Peace, received roughly $2 million. Its executive director later faced charity-fraud charges for diverting assets to luxury cars, Las Vegas trips, and child support. Earlier reporting had already flagged staffers involved in violent incidents outside St. Paul grocery stores in 2021, including a violence interrupter captured on video beating a homeless man.
Mayor Jacob Frey has proposed cutting the program’s budget. He called the Floyd-era initiative “noble” yet said it has “not demonstrated the level of results taxpayers deserve.” Results mattered less than the moral framing when the contracts first flowed.
Readers tracking Twin Cities public-safety fights will recognize the pattern in other local flashpoints, including when the Ramsey County sheriff sounded alarms on gang violence while area Democrats pushed back.
Bill Glahn, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, told reporters the audit matched what he had already seen. In 2023 he examined the violence-interrupter push: the city committed up to $7.5 million for 2022, 23 and budgeted another $13 million for 2024, 28. Several participating groups showed annual revenues or staffing far below the size of the grants they received.
Fox News carried his assessment of the latest findings.
Glahn said:
"Based on my past reporting on this and other city grant programs, any diligent audit of any city-administered grant programs would produce similar results."
He added:
"The city seems primarily interested in shoveling money out the door to ‘address’ urgent problems. Little if any care is given to ensuring that the grant recipients are capable of or have a track record of doing the work, are actually doing the work contracted for, or whether that work is resulting in net benefit for city residents and taxpayers."
Site visits are “generally helpful,” he noted, but even a cursory front-end review of tax records and financial statements would have disqualified many vendors from the start. Last month he told the same outlet that fraud has not been stopped in Minnesota: “We have not slowed down, there is no sense in which the fraud has been stopped in Minnesota.”
That critique lands harder against the backdrop of repeated Minnesota scandals. State Sen. Mark Koran, a Republican, pointed to the Feeding Our Future case and the simple failure to show up.
Koran said in December:
"If they would have just gone to the facilities, you know, you hear of the thousands of people being served out of an apartment twice a day, all they would have to do is show up and look at it."
He cited a legislative auditor report in which 30 property owners contacted the Department of Education. They said the businesses did not exist at the claimed locations; one was thought to be a city park.
Minneapolis governance disputes keep surfacing in federal-local clashes too, as when Ilhan Omar was removed from a Minneapolis ICE facility after advance-notice rules were enforced.
Retired Navy intelligence officer Phillip C. Parrish put the Minneapolis findings in blunt terms on X. He rejected any soft description of paperwork problems.
Parrish wrote:
"Call it what it is. This isn’t a tracking glitch. It’s the same business model that looted child-nutrition money, Medicaid housing, autism therapy, and daycare: stand up a moral emergency, pour cash through politically connected nonprofits, skip site visits and receipts, then scream ‘livelihoods’ when anyone asks where the money went."
The Breitbart account tied the audit directly to that broader Minnesota record under Gov. Tim Walz, including the $250 million Feeding Our Future COVID scheme. Fox News Digital reached out to Walz’s office for comment on the neighborhood-safety findings; no response appears in the available reporting.
City officials offered a different tone. An unnamed Minneapolis spokesperson said the department appreciates the auditor’s recommendations and noted the auditor expanded the report’s scope. The spokesperson added that the Neighborhood Safety Department has “a lot to be proud of,” works on violence prevention and human trafficking prevention, and has “taken several steps since the audit report to improve our processes and contract oversight.”
“We are in the business of helping people and improving lives, and that means improving how we do it. It’s that simple,” the statement read. Process fixes after the fact do not erase years of payments made without basic verification.
Law-and-order questions keep returning in other races as well; a Michigan Democrat’s 2013 arrest for resisting police recently resurfaced in a House contest, reminding voters how past encounters with policing still shape today’s debates.
The audit’s own language stays measured: heightened risk, insufficient oversight, missing documentation, no standardized site visits, incomplete safeguards against political influence. It does not claim every dollar vanished. It does show a system built to move cash fast after a national crisis and slow to install the ordinary controls any private firm would demand.
More than $36 million since 2023. Over 100 contracts dating to 2020. Invoices short on proof. Payments that continued anyway. A draft site-visit policy. A contractor later charged with charity fraud after taking roughly $2 million. Prior staff violence tied to one of the same groups. Parallel state scandals where property owners said the claimed operations did not exist.
Those are the verified facts, not slogans. Progressive leaders sold the programs as innovative safety. The paperwork and the site visits never caught up. When auditors finally looked, the risk was obvious and the excuses familiar.
Police-related institutional fallout remains a live concern for readers, whether the focus is Twin Cities contracts or cases such as an NYPD officer’s death overseas that triggered family demands for accountability.
Minneapolis created the vulnerability when it treated post-Floyd urgency as a reason to skip ordinary diligence. The audit simply confirmed what thin documentation and absent site checks already invited.
Taxpayers deserve contracts that prove the work happened before the next check clears. Anything less is an open invitation to the next scandal.