Minneapolis ‘beyond policing’ efforts are stuck while accusations of wrongdoing fly

Minneapolis’ plans to foster public safety “beyond policing” are a mess.

Just a few years ago, the effort to create a new model to deter violence seemed to unite elected officials, neighborhoods and civil rights activists. Today, the vision is mired in finger-pointing and accusations of failed oversight of taxpayer dollars.

City Council members say they’ve lost faith in Minneapolis’ Neighborhood Safety Department. Temperatures are running high at City Hall. A north Minneapolis pastor disrupted a public meeting last week, threatening council members and accusing them of betraying the cause. Several council members who had proposed offloading some programs to Hennepin County ultimately backed off Thursday.

Following a year of questions over the viability of the city’s unarmed public safety initiatives, Luana Nelson-Brown, the former director of Neighborhood Safety, resigned in January amid increasing City Council scrutiny over the department’s ability to coordinate services. Nelson-Brown also faced allegations that under her leadership, the Neighborhood Safety Department advocated contracts for those with personal connections to city staff.

Neighborhood Safety had a $23 million budget in 2024, with 85% spent on violence-prevention contractors.

In an interview following her resignation, Nelson-Brown denied financial wrongdoing, saying she was vilified and pushed out for demanding more financial oversight of Minneapolis' violence prevention groups. She said city leadership prevented her from speaking publicly about millions of dollars paid to contractors “without a shred of documentation,” and that when she tried to raise accountability to a higher standard than other departments were used to, she found herself with “no allies.”

“Acknowledging my concerns would mean admitting that this system had been allowed to operate unchecked for years. Instead of support, I faced stonewalling, gaslighting, and outright hostility,” Nelson-Brown said in a statement to the Minnesota Star Tribune, later self-published online, accusing past and present city employees of racism and shielding corruption.

Community Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette said litigation limited what his office could say, but that improvements to transparency were ongoing — and have remained a top priority since he took the helm in fall 2023.

“These are methodical changes,” he said in a two-page statement. “I am disappointed at how this has been mischaracterized, as all the improvements in place or underway in NSD occurred on my watch.”

Neighborhood Safety has undergone rapid change.

Equipped with millions of dollars after the murder of George Floyd to quickly build violence intervention strategies that went beyond policing, the department has sometimes struggled to demonstrate the effectiveness of its programs, especially those that work with gang members and youth out of public view. At other times, public-facing violence interrupters assigned to crime hot spots — such as downtown and Dinkytown — palpably tamped down problems, earning residents' gratitude.

Amid that growth, a lawsuit accused the city of failing to collect sufficient evidence of what violence interrupters were doing to get paid, creating conditions ripe for fraud. Under a settlement, the city agreed to collect receipts for expenses, conduct financial audits and educate contractors on accounting practices.

Facing this mandate to improve accountability, the department proposed new contracts for financial compliance, but those raised conflict-of-interest concerns. Meanwhile, gun violence continued to plague neighborhoods as homicides in Minneapolis ticked up from 2023 to 2024, and council members became frustrated by Neighborhood Safety’s inability to place violence interrupters in obvious hot spots.

For example, Council Member Jamal Osman said he asked the administration to help with a tinder box of problems at Franklin and Hiawatha avenues just weeks before six people were shot there over the summer.

“I don’t think there is any summer safety plan,” Osman said at the time. “No plan, no nothing. What do we need to do for your department to keep our residents safe?”

Minneapolis' unarmed mental health responders — the city’s newest 911 function — were removed from Neighborhood Safety and reassigned to the Fire Department after they reported Neighborhood Safety was unable to support their work with the necessary data analysis.

A recent assessment by the New York University School of Law validated fears: There was no data available showing what interventions were taking place and how they fit into a citywide plan for reducing crime. There was no policy for how city officials could activate their services, nor a clear process for how they could receive incident information from the city. Swaths of Minneapolis weren’t covered. None of the teams was scheduled to work during the most violent time of day, the early morning hours.

“Is this thing just totally on the ground dead?” Council Member Jeremiah Ellison asked of the Neighborhood Safety Department during a public meeting in the fall. “Is it functioning along fine? Because it certainly doesn’t feel that way.”

Council members issued information requests — officially known as legislative directives — to understand what was happening inside the department. Months would pass after answers were due. When Nelson-Brown made public presentations, council members criticized their lack of specificity.

Her lawyer, Dean Thomson, called the directives an “unfunded mandate” after his client said she couldn’t fulfill them while running the department.

“In a different functioning government, I wouldn’t have to do a formal legislative directive. I would be able to just have open and transparent conversations with leadership,” Council President Elliott Payne said in an interview. “City Council needs more rigor from the administration when it comes to oversight. ... It shows up really prominently when you get whistleblower letters for this one little department.”

Nelson-Brown blamed the City Council, and member Robin Wonsley in particular, for pressuring her from the dais. She said she focused on making sure city funds for violence prevention contracts were being spent legally, and hiring staff to manage those contracts.

At one point in early 2024, Nelson-Brown said she stopped paying certain violence interrupter groups who submitted improper documentation because they could not prove services rendered.

Along the way, Nelson-Brown said she was met with various threats for sticking to her principles, and had to a take a mental health leave. “My personal safety, and that of my child, was put at risk,” she said.

In April, she reported concerns to police about a suspicious vehicle driving by her Eden Prairie home five times. When she tried to speak with the driver, the vehicle sped away. No threats were made, and Nelson-Brown was told to call back if it happened again, according to a police report obtained by the Star Tribune.

Asked to respond to Nelson-Brown’s criticism, Wonsley said she wished Nelson-Brown “all the best in her next endeavors.”

“These issues stretch beyond just one director, one commissioner, and actually focus in on what is happening under this current administration,” said Wonsley. “It’s just been my effort to try to do everything possible to mitigate and correct that in collaboration with my colleagues.”

Behind the scenes, city employees had expressed serious concerns about management of the department. Some penned a whistleblower letter to council members in late 2023.

One complaint in the letter referenced a contract with a business called LaNoTa Group LLC, for “process analysis” utilizing the “Human Dignity model of violence prevention.” LaNoTa had been incorporated less than a month before Nelson-Brown issued the call for applications, and its CEO, Leon Dixon, had been listed on Nelson-Brown’s Facebook page as being in a relationship with her in 2021.

During the procurement process, there was no competitive bidding due to “specific expertise required in Human Dignity model of services,” according to city documents. LaNoTa was the only applicant, and it was awarded the contract.

It’s unclear what the “human dignity model” is. The whistleblowers hadn’t heard of it, and national providers of evidence-based violence intervention contacted by the Star Tribune hadn’t either.

Reached by phone, Dixon said his model had not been studied because it was “new,” and he did not know who else was practicing it because, “I’m not concerned with anybody else.”

“The human model focuses on the dignity of every human being that that organization serves, so putting the human dignity, the human person first,” said Dixon, whose consulting rate was $830 an hour. “It goes beyond just doing one-off on diversity, equity and inclusion.”

He emphatically denied ever being romantically involved with Nelson-Brown, and said he helped the department with financial compliance.

In an interview, Nelson-Brown acknowledged that she and Dixon did in fact date several years ago, but were long broken up when he consulted for her department last year. She said she recused herself from evaluating his proposal and disclosed the prior relationship to her boss. She also said she did not sign LaNoTa’s contract.

When the Star Tribune informed her it had a copy with her signature on it, she noted that Community Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette agreed to take over the administration of that contract. He did so in an amendment two months later, approving additional funds for Dixon. Ultimately, the city authorized up to $175,000 for LaNoTa —the maximum for a contract without a City Council vote.

She vehemently denied having any financial interest in the LaNoTa Group.

Nelson-Brown acknowledged she intended to hire a consultant who valued the “principles” of human dignity and “maybe I should have used that terminology.” But she denied tailoring the opportunity for Dixon.

The whistleblower letter also flagged a $5,000 noncompetitive agreement for an organization, the Black Business Enterprises Fund, to provide fiscal responsibility training. Neighborhood Safety staffer Georgia Korsah was BBEF’s former chief operating officer and sister to its CEO, Nancy Korsah, according to an archived version of the company’s website at the time.

In October, when Nelson-Brown recommended awarding BBEF nearly $1 million to help violence prevention nonprofits with financial compliance, council members questioned what experience BBEF had working with such groups.

Nelson-Brown could not specifically answer. She also denied council members access to BBEF’s proposal. A city attorney later said the council members had a right to see it before voting on it. The council ultimately declined to approve the contract.

The city said Georgia Korsah recused herself and had no part in the review or selection process for her sister’s proposal.

Thomson, the lawyer representing Nelson-Brown and Nancy Korsah, acknowledged that council members should be allowed to see proposals they’re being asked to vote on. However, he argued it was the council’s responsibility to keep asking Nelson-Brown for the proposal after the City Attorney’s Office informed her of the law.

Both Nelson-Brown and Nancy Korsah only wanted to bolster the city’s accounting practices, Thomson said.

Barnette did not respond to Nelson-Brown’s public allegations that when she came to the city, not a single violence prevention group provided a “shred” of documentation before being paid, and that she was alienated in City Hall for having higher accountability standards than other department heads. Nor did his office address questions from the Star Tribune about whether the whistleblower letter was ever formally investigated, citing private data. “We take all personnel concerns seriously,” he wrote.

Nelson-Brown, who is Black, called the employee who signed the whistleblower letter a white woman who “weaponized her complaint not to expose wrongdoing, but to shield it.”

She also criticized her predecessor leading Minneapolis' violence prevention work, Sasha Cotton.

Cotton, who now runs a research center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, used to give regular presentations to the City Council in the early days of the violence interrupters. But her office couldn’t provide the level of detailed data that some members of the public wanted because the work had just launched, she said.

“The implication that we were somehow just paying people money without meeting the minimum standards of the city is just crazy,” responded Cotton.

This month, following Nelson-Brown’s resignation, Neighborhood Safety appeared before the City Council to respond to questions about internal operations posed in October.

Department representatives said they aimed to improve the way they allocate violence prevention services to the parts of the city most in need, apply more rigor to verifying receipts and would offer contractors more accounting support.

Barnette noted the unit got together to “level set where we are and to really get back into a good place of where we were years and years ago ... of being a model for the nation.”