Liberals Admit Defeat Amid Rampant Fraud Linked to “Defund the Police” Programs

In the summer of 2020, George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis sparked nationwide riots and the surge of the far-left “Defund the Police” movement. Six years later, not only has the liberal war on police led to needless suffering and death, it has paved the way for even more waste, fraud, and abuse of government programs.

According to a recent Minneapolis city audit, the city has spent more than $36 million on “alternatives” to traditional policing since 2023 – after Mayor Jacob Frey and the all-Democrat city council cut $8 million from the police department budget. But that funding has come with astonishingly little oversight, leaving taxpayers and government officials unable to verify whether contractors even delivered the “violence prevention” services they promised.

The audit examined how Minneapolis’s “Neighborhood Safety Department” managed more than 100 contracts from 2020 through 2025. The department oversees five main programs that hire community groups to “interrupt” street violence, work with shooting victims in hospitals, and respond after traumatic crimes.

Auditors found contractors submitting invoices with inadequate supporting documentation and city staff paying vendors despite missing or incomplete records. They found no standardized system for conducting or documenting site visits – the simplest way to determine whether contractors are actually doing the work that taxpayers financed. They also found inadequate safeguards against political pressure and conflicts of interest when contracts or payments were disputed.

The department has defended itself by claiming that it conducted about 140 site visits between spring 2025 and spring 2026. But Neighborhood Safety Director Amanda Harrington admitted that most of those visits were scheduled in advance, undermining their value as a check on whether contractors were performing the work.

This failure is especially glaring because the city had already promised to address these risks – the audit was required under a settlement reached after attorney Dean Thomson sued the city over weak oversight of violence-prevention spending. The city agreed to use a more uniform contractor-selection process, conduct regular audits, and require records to back up each invoice – none of which it appears to have done.

Perhaps the most visible of Minnesota’s post-2020 experiments is the “violence-interrupter” program, in which community groups hire people, often with past gang ties or criminal records of their own, to defuse conflicts before they turn violent.

But the “violence interrupters” have appeared to do little to stop violence despite continuing to accept checks from taxpayers – and in some cases have even engaged in violence themselves. Last year, two violence interrupters were charged in connection with a shootout in North Minneapolis.

The waste, fraud, and abuse have gotten so bad that even some elected Democrats have been forced to act. In May, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sued the group “We Push for Peace” over allegations that its leaders spent more than $6.5 million in taxpayer dollars on luxury cars, vacations, child support payments, and subsidizing personal businesses, including a liquor store and a used car dealership.

The city paid the nonprofit nearly $2 million from 2021 through March 2025 for violence interruption and outreach work.

Even Mayor Frey has admitted that the program isn’t working. His proposed 2027 budget includes a funding reduction for the violence interrupter program. Frey called it a “noble program filled with committed and talented community leaders,” but said that “clear tracking has not demonstrated the level of results taxpayers deserve.”

However, several city council members, including Jason Chavez and Jamal Osman, have promised to restore the funding, insisting that the program is essential to fighting crime in Minneapolis. They have provided no evidence to back up that claim.

In fact, the data shows that murders and other violent crimes in Minneapolis remained far above the national average following 2020, and have only started to come down this year amid the Trump administration’s national crackdown on crime.

Meanwhile, like other cities that embraced the “Defund the Police” movement, Minneapolis is now scrambling to hire more officers and increase the police department’s budget. Police leaders have asked for $20 million to end next year under budget.

Minneapolis has become a prime example of what happens when ideology takes precedence over law and order. In the name of “equity” and “reimagining” public safety, city leaders directed tens of millions of dollars toward alternatives to policing – then failed to check whether the money was used for its intended purpose, much less whether the programs even made communities safer.

This latest debacle has also become just one more chapter in the fraud saga that has gripped the state for more than a year. In addition to the “alternatives to policing” grift, Minneapolis was also the epicenter of a national welfare fraud scandal primarily implicating the city’s large Somali population.

New York Post

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The midterms should be a referendum on both of those failures – in Minnesota and elsewhere. Every Democrat in the state, including the current nominees for U.S. Senate and governor, cheered on the welfare programs and “Defund the Police” initiatives that funneled untold tens of millions of dollars into the pockets of scammers and fraudsters.

The taxpayers will never see a dime of their money back. But they still have a chance to punish the officials who let the theft happen at the ballot box.