After a week of violent threats, Minneapolis City Council postpones violence prevention proposal
After a contentious, days-long debate over the future of violence intervention services, Minneapolis City Council on Thursday voted to delay any decision on shifting group violence intervention programs to Hennepin County.
The council has been considering temporarily moving some of its policing alternatives to the county, alleging concerns over fraud, wasteful spending, and lack of oversight of the city's Neighborhood Safety Department (NSD), which is led by Minneapolis Public Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette.
Tensions have been high dating back to Monday, when Rev. Jerry McAfee, a pastor at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, made threats of violence as he interjected during a budget committee meeting.
McAfee is the founder nonprofit violence prevention group 21 Days of Peace, which the Star Tribune reports has received $3 million in Legislature-directed funding in recent years, while his church won a $300,000 contract from the city to carry out a de-escalation initiative.
During Monday's meeting, McAfee angrily addressed the council and criticized them for not taking his phone calls, before saying: "Maybe you all have not tasted the blood. I need you to get your fire back for why you ran in the first place and take care of our people ... I'm out there doing funerals. I'm out there on the block.'
After the live feed was cut to the chamber, McAfee accused council member Jason Chavez, who is gay, of acting like a girl, and accused council member Robin Wonsley of corruption.
He then proceeded to say "The way you lookin' at me, if you wanna come behind that podium, you do it. I guarantee, I guarantee you will regret it ... I got 40 years of shit in me from seeing my people die."
When asked if that was a threat, McAfee said: "I don't make threats, I make promises," and said if he was to be removed from the chamber, his "people" would come.
On a Facebook Live stream on Tuesday, McAfee said that he would keep things peaceful at Thursday's meeting, but he also suggested violence to some with the following statement:
"Rev. McAfee ain't hit nobody, I ain't shot nobody. However, I will if I have to. I don't want to. I'm not going to bother anybody, but I'm going to fight for my people."
The "corruption" of which McAfee was accusing Wonsley referred to the proposal to move some of the city's group violence intervention (GVI) programs – which target known, high-risk individuals – to the county.
Wonsley said this proposal followed several complaints received by the council regarding the NSD, citing understaffing that followed "mass resignations," delays in payments on contracts, and a whistleblower alleging fraud and waste within the department.
"Despite the Frey administration being aware of council members' concerns, NSD continued to operate in ways that raised significant concerns," Wonsley alleged in a letter Wednesday. "This concerning pattern of mismanagement, accompanied with lack of data on outcomes for almost two years, demonstrated that the department was currently unfit to properly administer public safety services."
If the proposal put before the council had been passed, it would have sent $1.13 million to Hennepin County, and task the county with administering the city's Group Violence Intervention and Youth Group Violence Intervention Programs.
The Ward 2 councilor also accused McAfee of making threats towards the council, both at the meeting held on Monday and later publicly via social media, which prompted heightened security at Thursday's meeting.
On Thursday, McAfee was in attendance with members of the 21 Days of Peace organization. After the council ultimately decided to postpone the vote, he thanked the council on his Facebook account.
"I want to thank the city council for tabling and postponing the transfer of those funds to the county. And thank you to the community for your support," he said.
The proposal has been opposed by several council members, as well as Public Safety Commissioner Barnette.
During the meeting on Thursday, some council members — including Ward 12's Aurin Chowdhury — accused Barnette of providing misinformation to media outlets that led to the corruption accusations.
"I do think misinformation is going on, and that's what we're trying to get to the bottom of, because it has inflamed this community, and it has led to threats," Chowdhury said. "This has just gotten way out of hand."
Council President Elliott Payne echoed this, saying the Frey Administration should work with the council rather than endangering members "by making false accusations."
"This conversation has gotten completely out of control and 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," Wonsley said, adding while she was willing to postpone a resolution to the issue, she will continue to use her authority in maintain criticism of the department.
Council member LaTrisha Vetaw, one of Mayor Jacob Frey's allies on the council, defended McAfee's comments, and said she herself had felt threatened in the past only for no action to be taken by the council. She also said that no data exists to support moving the funding to the county and that the council needs to do the work in identifying that.
The withdrawal of the motion to GVI funding to the county indefinitely was unanimously approved in a vote.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
21 hours ago
- New York Times
What Is the Future of George Floyd Square?
Note: This newsletter was sent to readers on May 23, 2025. Dear Headway reader, A version of this letter was originally published in Race/Related, a weekly newsletter focused on race, identity and culture. There's no place in America quite like George Floyd Square. More than 300 responses to our story about the site have reinforced this sentiment. Even if you landed in this place without any context, you would know something significant happened at the intersection of 38th Avenue East and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis. From the sculptures of raised fists marking the intersections that border the street to the closed gas station bearing the hand-painted title 'The People's Way,' the corner where a police officer killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck on May 25, 2020 now feels like the physical outpouring of a community's grief, anger and hope. It is currently a place suspended in time. Since its days as a barricaded protest zone filled with residents and activists, members of this community remain divided over what to do with the impromptu memorial that was created here. If there's consensus on any point, it's that change is both inevitable and necessary. But there are conflicting visions over what the city should do with the site, which has been the object of a still-unresolved struggle between Mayor Jacob Frey and the Minneapolis City Council. The Headway team asked Ernesto Londoño, The Times's Minneapolis bureau chief, and Joshua Rashaad McFadden, who photographed the George Floyd protests for The Times in 2020, to show us the square as it currently stands, alongside the perspectives of some of the people with a say in what it becomes. We wanted to document the site as it exists today, knowing that it will eventually change. You can see our story here. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Forbes
a day ago
- Forbes
This Dangerous Email Tricks You Into Hacking Your Own PC
Do not be tricked into hacking your own PC. getty Take a walk through any major tourist city in the world, and eventually you will see them. On a bridge or promenade or in a park. Someone sitting with three plastic cups and a bunch of onlookers, watching as someone is scammed. Everyone knows it's a scam. It doesn't matter that you've watched as the marble is placed under a cup, keeping an eagle eye on it as the three cups are swapped around. The marble has moved and you cannot win. You know you should know better. So it is with the so-called ClickFix lures currently hacking PCs around the world. The leading example of the new wave of 'scam yourself' attacks, you know you should know better. But the cleverness of the hook, the trickery of the scammer still works. As McAfee explains, ClickFix attacks 'begin with users being lured to visit seemingly legitimate but compromised websites. Upon visiting, victims are redirected to domains hosting fake popup windows that instruct them to paste a script into a PowerShell terminal.' In reality, this 'sophisticated form of social engineering, leveraging the appearance of authenticity' just 'manipulates users into executing malicious scripts.' The email lure. Cofense A new warning from Cofense has just outed one of the most devious lures I've seen recently. It's a nasty attack that plays on the human emotions and fears of the victim being scammed, so much so that they don't see the attack coming. But they should. The dangerous email lure is sent to businesses in the travel industry, purporting to be from market giant warning that a customer has made a serious complaint and giving the recipient a time-boxed opportunity to respond using the link provided. This click launches ClickFix Cofense 'While the exact email structure varies from sample to sample,' Cofense says, 'these campaigns generally provide emails with embedded links to a ClickFix fake CAPTCHA site which is used to deliver a malicious script that runs RATs and/or information stealers.' The campaign 'preys on the recipient's fear of leaving a guest dissatisfied' and might 'claim that a guest was trying to contact the hotel but was unable to get a response.' Cofense provides one such example, which is 'particularly notable for mentioning potential reputational damage and giving a strict 24-hour deadline for compliance.' ClickFix attack. Cofense Not all these attacks are negative, some suggest requests or questions from future (imaginary) guests, while also providing a link for the hotel operator to respond. 'The emails used in these campaigns will sometimes state that the embedded link only works on Windows computers,' simply because this malware only infects Windows PCs. But despite the lure, the attack is the same as all the others. In this case it's a CAPTCHA 'Robot or Human?" challenge, which instructs the user to open a Windows prompt and paste in the text on the PC's clipboard, and then press Enter. Absent a few wording changes, there is no variation in this part of the attack. It's the most blatant tell. Cofense says some of the latest attacks used Cloudflare CAPTCHAs while others used brand instead. The instructions, though, are all the same. Once you know about ClickFix, in theory at least you can't be fooled. But the cybercriminals will try nonetheless, and the attacks are flying, so it's working. Don't be fooled. Never paste in copied text and hit Enter in this way. Whether it's a CAPTCHA, a secure website or document restriction, or a technical fault, it's always an attack. And the hacker is always you.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
1 dead, several wounded in Minnesota's Boom Island Park ‘war zone'
A woman was killed and five men wounded late Sunday when a mass shooting turned Minneapolis's Boom Island Park into a 'war zone,' officials said. Another woman was hospitalized after being knocked unconscious in the chaotic aftermath, Minnesota Police Chief Brian O'Hara told reporters at a Monday-morning press conference at the park. Investigators said there was likely more than one shooter, given the number of shell casings, and that no arrests had been made. The Hennepin County Medical examiner identified the woman killed as 23-year-old Stageina Katraya Shapryia Whiting from Brooklyn Center on Monday. She suffered a gunshot wound to the torso. The gunfire broke out during a dispute at a large gathering in the Mississippi River-adjacent park, O'Hara said, and calls began coming in around 9:30 p.m. Police arrived to find about 100 people in the park. Chief O'Hara said a large crowd had gathered at the park Sunday evening, perhaps for a BBQ, when an argument escalated into gunfire. His investigators believe multiple shooters were involved in the incident, as hundreds of pieces of evidence were strewn around the park, many of them empty shell casings. 'It's more akin to a war zone, the amount of casings found in the park. It's sickening and we need people to come forward,' O'Hara said. 'The level of violence displayed in this shooting is absolutely sickening, and our investigators will work diligently to bring whoever is responsible to justice.' Mayor Jacob Frey called the violence 'completely unacceptable' in a social media post stating that just this week, the city launched 'Operation Safe Summer' to curb violence. City statistics showed more than three dozen law enforcement units responded to the gunfire. CBS News reports that at least one Minneapolis City Council member wants to see Boom Island close its gates by 8 p.m.
