The head of a taxpayer-funded violence interrupter nonprofit in Minneapolis saw his pay nearly triple to $246,000 in a single year, even as a city audit warned that the program bankrolling his group lacked basic financial safeguards.
According to WND, an investigation by The Center Square found that Muhammad Abdul-Ahad, chief executive officer of T.O.U.C.H. Outreach, received $246,000 in compensation in 2024, the latest year for which the groups tax filings are publicly available. That spike in pay coincided with a sharp increase in city funding for his organization, which climbed to roughly $1.5 million that year under a Minneapolis initiative that outsources public-safety functions to private violence interrupter groups.
T.O.U.C.H. short for Teaching Our Urban Communities Hope is one of three such organizations contracted by the city to patrol high-crime corridors and defuse conflicts before they escalate. The model, embraced by progressive city leaders in the wake of the 2020 unrest and calls to reimagine policing, relies on unarmed civilians rather than sworn officers to maintain order in some of Minneapolis most troubled neighborhoods.
A recent audit of the citys Neighborhood Safety Department, which oversees these contracts, raised serious red flags about how public money is being managed. The review identified significant weaknesses in oversight, including poor invoice review practices and inadequate verification that contractors actually performed the work for which they were paid.
The city is at increased risk of fraud, waste and abuse within Neighborhood Safety contracts, the city auditors office concluded in June. That warning came after a Minneapolis resident sued the city in 2023, alleging that the department used arbitrary procedures to award contracts and failed to properly monitor payments, according to court records.
In a 2024 settlement, the city agreed to tighten its processes and require violence interrupter groups to provide more detailed reporting on how they spend taxpayer dollars. That agreement was reached late in the same year that Abdul-Ahads compensation from T.O.U.C.H. tripled, raising questions about whether the reforms came only after the money had already flowed.
Abdul-Ahad declined to disclose his 2025 pay but said it was likely lower than in 2024, as city funding to his nonprofit was cut by about half that year. The groups 2025 tax filings are not yet public, leaving residents in the dark about how much of their money is still going to executive compensation versus on-the-ground work.
Even at the 2024 level, his pay eclipsed that of many of Minneapolis top public officials, including the mayor, city attorney and chief financial officer. City data show the CFO earned about $234,000 last year, less than the head of this single nonprofit that operates under city contracts.
Abdul-Ahad, however, insists he is undercompensated given the nature of his work and the risks he and his staff face on the streets. He went so far as to argue that he deserves more than the citys highest-paid executive, interim Community Safety Commissioner Toddrick Barnette, who oversees the police and other public-safety departments and was paid about $365,000 last year.
Lets put him out on the streets to see what happens, Abdul-Ahad said of Barnette, who has announced he will leave the job at the end of the year. The remark underscored his view that front-line violence interrupter work is more dangerous and more valuable than traditional law-enforcement leadership, a claim that many law-and-order advocates would dispute.
The citys own numbers show that Abdul-Ahads 2024 compensation was nearly double that of the leader of another Minneapolis violence-intervention nonprofit, Metro Youth Diversion Center, which also receives city contracts for similar work. IRS filings indicate that Metro Youths top executive was paid about $134,000 in the same year, highlighting the outsized nature of T.O.U.C.H.s pay practices even within this niche sector.
City spokesperson Jess Olstad said Minneapolis imposes limits on how much it will reimburse contractors for work performed. At the same time, she emphasized that city contractors are independent entities that determine what they pay their own employees, effectively distancing City Hall from responsibility for how taxpayer dollars are ultimately allocated inside these organizations.
Olstad initially pressed The Center Square on how it obtained the salary figures, despite the information being contained in publicly available tax filings. She later declined to comment specifically on Abdul-Ahads pay or to say whether the city reviews those IRS documents to verify that public funds are being used appropriately.
On the ground, T.O.U.C.H. Outreach operates by hiring people as independent contractors to patrol streets, alleys and parking lots south of downtown Minneapolis five days a week. Workers wear bright yellow shirts emblazoned with the groups name in black capital letters and typically move in teams for seven or eight hours at a time.
Their strategy, as described by Abdul-Ahad, is to make drug dealers, users and other troublemakers feel unwelcome simply by occupying the same spaces. In the roughest zones, a dozen T.O.U.C.H. workers may fan out and stand in visible positions, a show-of-presence tactic that he says has pushed the drug trade away from certain entrenched locations.
The effect, he concedes, is often temporary. Once dealers and other offenders feel enough pressure, they simply relocate to another area, raising doubts about whether this approach delivers lasting public-safety gains or merely displaces crime from one block to the next.
Beyond confronting street-level disorder, T.O.U.C.H. staffers talk with local businesses to identify emerging problems and maintain logs on individuals they encounter, many of whom are homeless. The group then attempts to connect those individuals with public services, blending social-work functions with its quasi-security role.
Direct interventions in violent situations occur sporadically, according to the account provided to The Center Square. On one recent patrol that the outlet observed, three T.O.U.C.H. workers stepped in to break up a dispute between coworkers at the Midtown Global Market that had escalated to shoving, escorting one man outside and talking him down until tempers cooled.
The work is not without danger, as the group sometimes encounters individuals armed with knives, guns and, increasingly, bear spray, which Abdul-Ahad said has become popular among youth. He noted that none of his workers has been seriously injured, in part because they do not patrol during the more-dangerous overnight hours when much of the citys worst violence occurs.
Shortly after The Center Square left the group on a recent evening, gunshots were reported across the street from T.O.U.C.H.s office, according to the Minneapolis Police Department. Inside the office, a whiteboard used for planning still bears bullet holes, Abdul-Ahad said, from a period in recent years when shootings were more frequent.
Police data show that reports of shots fired citywide have fallen by more than 50% since a 2021 peak, along with a decline in the number of gunshot victims. Abdul-Ahad credits much of that improvement to his nonprofit and similar groups, though that claim is difficult to verify and comes as city leaders are reassessing the value of these programs.
Mayor Jacob Frey has proposed slashing funding for the citys street-level violence interrupter program by more than 70% in next years budget. He wants to shift resources to a new Community Safety Ambassador program, under which the ambassadors are city employees trained to disengage from unsafe situations and call police rather than confront them directly.
The ambassadors duties overlap with those of the violence interrupters, but the key difference is that they remain under direct municipal control and operate within clearer chains of command and liability. For critics of the defund-the-police era, the move represents a partial return to accountable, government-run public safety instead of opaque, third-party contractors.
Abdul-Ahad warned that Freys plan would have dire consequences for crime trends. Crime is going to go up, he predicted if the mayors proposal is approved, arguing that fewer violence interrupters on the streets will leave a vacuum that criminals will quickly exploit.
Even as the city rethinks its reliance on outside groups, it has already imposed new restrictions on the violence interrupter contracts that directly affect T.O.U.C.H.s workforce. Those changes effectively capped pay for front-line workers at about $20 per hour, down from more than $30 per hour, a shift that Abdul-Ahad said caused him to lose many staff members.
Those who remain, he said, tend to be deeply familiar with the patrol areas and the people who inhabit them, often because they have lived similar lives. Several have served long prison sentences, a background that Abdul-Ahad argues gives them credibility on the streets but that also raises questions about vetting and oversight in a taxpayer-funded program.
Abdul-Ahad himself has a serious criminal history. Federal court records show he was sentenced in 2009 to up to 10 years in prison for his role in a violent drug ring that operated out of his familys home, a case investigated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives using cellphone wiretaps.
In one instance, ATF agents intervened to stop a planned armed robbery of another drug dealer, according to court filings. A co-defendant who cooperated with prosecutors told investigators he once saw Abdul-Ahad with 3 kilograms of cocaine and that Abdul-Ahad and his brother Akbar had so damn many guns, the records state.
After his release from prison, Abdul-Ahad said he worked construction jobs and delivered auto parts before launching T.O.U.C.H. Outreach. For years, the nonprofit operated on a shoestring, reporting less than $50,000 in annual revenue in both 2021 and 2022, small enough that it was not required to itemize how the money was spent.
The financial picture changed dramatically once city money began flowing. In 2023, after Minneapolis started funding the group, T.O.U.C.H. reported about $881,000 in revenue, nearly all of it from government sources, and Abdul-Ahads compensation jumped to $88,400.
The nonprofits IRS filings do not specify which government entities provided the funds. However, Abdul-Ahad told The Center Square that the organization is almost entirely funded by the city of Minneapolis, underscoring how dependent the group has become on local taxpayers.
By 2024, T.O.U.C.H.s revenue had climbed to about $1.4 million, and Abdul-Ahads compensation nearly tripled again to $246,000. In the same period, Metro Youth Diversion Center, another city-funded violence-intervention nonprofit, paid its leader roughly $134,000, according to its IRS filings, a stark contrast that highlights how aggressively T.O.U.C.H. has rewarded its chief executive.
Abdul-Ahad told The Center Square that an unspecified portion of his 2024 compensation came from consulting work he performs for other cities around the country. That claim is not evident in T.O.U.C.H.s tax filings, which do not break out consulting revenue or clearly distinguish between his nonprofit role and any private contracts.
In a follow-up interview, he said he is personally contracted by those cities and that some of the money flows to his nonprofit. When pressed for details on how much he kept versus how much went to T.O.U.C.H., and how that arrangement was structured, Abdul-Ahad abruptly ended the interview.
He said he was in Tennessee for consulting work on a weekday, even though IRS filings list his job at the nonprofit as full-time. T.O.U.C.H.s returns also show nearly $40,000 in unspecified travel expenses in 2023 and 2024, despite the groups day-to-day work being concentrated near its Minneapolis office.
By comparison, Metro Youth Diversion Center reported about $2,500 in travel expenses over the same period. The disparity adds to concerns that T.O.U.C.H. may be using public funds for activities that are only loosely connected to its local mission, if at all.
CharityWatch executive director Laurie Styron, whose organization monitors nonprofit accountability, said the overlap between consulting and charity work raises potential ethical and legal issues. If a charity employee is performing consulting work while on the clock using charity time, the revenue such consulting generates should go to the charity, not the employee, she said.
Styron also flagged another problem: for the first two years that Abdul-Ahad drew a significant salary from T.O.U.C.H., he was treated as an independent contractor even while being listed as its chief executive. Misclassifying executives as independent contractors can allow a charity to avoid payroll tax obligations and obscure the true nature of its executive compensation arrangements, Styron said.
Chloe Jackson, an unpaid member of T.O.U.C.H.s five-person board of directors, defended the boards handling of Abdul-Ahads pay. She told The Center Square that his salary was established within the parameters and the requirements of the contracts, considering all the applicable provisions.
Jackson declined to provide specifics on how the board arrived at the $246,000 figure or what benchmarks it used to judge reasonableness. Instead, she argued that critics underestimate the difficulty and danger of the work, saying, I dont think folks realize the type of work that T.O.U.C.H. Outreach does and how hard it is to be in the community and what folks deal with on a day-to-day basis.
For taxpayers and advocates of limited government, the case of T.O.U.C.H. Outreach encapsulates the risks of outsourcing core public-safety functions to lightly regulated nonprofits with opaque finances and politically favored leadership. As Minneapolis moves to rein in funding for violence interrupters and shift toward city-run ambassador programs, the unanswered questions about executive pay, travel spending, consulting side deals and weak oversight will likely fuel broader skepticism about the progressive experiment in replacing traditional policing with social-service-style interventions.
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