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Community speakers urge city to cut ZenCity contract, cite surveillance concerns
Summary
Several public commenters at the March 3 CCPO meeting criticized the city's $500,000 contract with ZenCity, an analytics firm, raising privacy, provenance of data, vendor ties to Israeli intelligence services, and MPD control of data as central concerns.
During the public-comment portion of the March 3 Community Commission on Police Oversight meeting, multiple speakers urged the city to end a $500,000 contract with ZenCity, an analytics and digital-engagement firm.
Speakers said ZenCity’s founder and some staff have ties to Israeli military intelligence and argued that the company’s tools have been used to monitor racial-justice protesters and community critics of police. Bob Gonin (phonetic) told the commission the firm has been used nationally to monitor protests and criticized the company’s role in polling and sentiment analysis around police use-of-force incidents. Joe Manu said he attended a ZenCity presentation to the Administration & Enterprise Oversight committee and that nothing in the presentation eased his concern about a foreign company with those connections handling Minneapolis community data.
Commenters also raised data-governance questions: who controls the data, what retention and sharing policies apply, and whether contract terms allow MPD exclusive access to the backend. One speaker said ZenCity indicated data “goes to MPD” and “goes to Alifa,” and asked what safeguards protect Minnesotans’ personal information. Several speakers linked the ZenCity contract to broader concerns about MPD surveillance and the department’s compliance with human-rights settlement obligations.
City staff present at other meetings were asked to clarify whether the ZenCity contract fulfills any settlement-agreement requirement for an independent community survey; the city attorney’s office and implementation staff responded in subsequent committee discussions that the settlement agreement specifically tasks the independent evaluator (Alifa) with an annual community survey, while the city’s separate contract with ZenCity remains a city/MPD contract.
Why it matters: Community members framed the ZenCity contract as both a privacy and civil-rights risk. They asked the CCPO and City Council to require transparency about contract scope and data protections and to consider whether a local vendor or a publicly overseen process would better meet community needs.
No formal action to change the contract was taken by the CCPO at the March 3 meeting; speakers asked staff and council members for follow-up information on data governance and whether MPD or Alifa would use ZenCity outputs for required community surveys.
