Chad Davis (CC BY 2.0)
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey stands behind U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland as he presents the Justice Department's findings from its investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, June 2023.
In October 2023, the City of Minneapolis announced its intention to conduct an online survey of residents to gauge their perceptions of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and public safety throughout the city. The city’s goal was to raise public confidence in the MPD following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd and the subsequent wave of protests and unrest. To conduct the survey, however, the city entered into a three-year, $500,000 contract with an Israeli surveillance technology company Zencity.
Since early this year, a group of Minneapolis residents have organized a campaign called Cut the Contract, demanding Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey end the city’s contract with Zencity. In his bid for re-election, Frey is facing a number of challengers —including democratic socialist Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh, who has rallied progressive support and emerged as a strong challenger. Win or lose, he can still cancel the city’s remaining payments to Zencity by December 1.
I recently sat down with activist Bob Goonin, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and an organizer with the Minnesota Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, to learn more about the fight against the Zencity contract, and why Cut the Contract wants to see Zencity gone for good. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How was Zencity selected for this city contract?
Bob Goonin: There was a [request for proposal (RFP], and six vendors responded. I submitted a public data request for the RFPs for this contract. One of the other vendors that submitted an RFP is a national research and strategic consulting firm headquartered in St. Paul. Another research company framed the work in the context of the deep trauma of the community, as a result of MPD’s history, as a way to approach the task here. And another company had committed in their proposal to use local universities as resources.
Zencity is not a local company; it doesn’t employ local people. It’s a company that has been complicit in the surveillance of Palestinians; it’s been used nationally by police departments with violent, racist histories; and there’s no use of local resources. The range on the other bids was $148,000 to $176,000. That’s one-third of the cost of the Zencity contract, so that leads to the question of why Zencity was selected at all.
I found out through an open data request that the selection process was handled by MPD itself. They did not contract with an external resource to conduct this process. So, they picked the most expensive contract from an international company that doesn’t leverage local resources and won’t deal with MPD’s own history. The process used is questionable and the benefits are negligible.
Q: How does Zencity’s role in the survey work?
Goonin: Zencity uses algorithms to determine where to place [ads for the survey], so they are tracking your Internet activity and social media postings, and then they’re placing these ads based on whatever the algorithm tells them. So there’s a certain level of tracking of people’s online activity. I don’t especially like that myself when people are trying to sell me shoes this way, but it’s a little more problematic when the online tracking data is being given to MPD and not just to a commercial company.
Q: How so?
Goonin: Zencity’s technology has been used in other cities and municipalities in a way that is more in line with surveillance. After a police officer in Brooklyn Center [a suburb of Minneapolis] killed a Black man named Daunte Wright in 2021, the police department contracted with Zencity to basically find out what people were saying about the police on social media.
This happened in other places, too, like Kent County, Michigan. After police there killed a young Black person [a Congolese refugee named Payrick Lyoya, in 2022], it was the same thing. The police were concerned about protecting their buildings, so they responded to the killing by monitoring social media postings within the local Black community to see what threat there might be to their buildings from the racial justice protests that were taking place. In those examples, along with one in Grinnell, Iowa, where a Black person was killed—not by the police, but still—the police monitored what the community was saying online through Zencity.
Q: So, that’s the other function of Zencity’s work—more like spying or eavesdropping?
Goonin: Yes. A lot of police departments and municipalities use Zencity’s technology to monitor and track social media activity in their communities. What makes that a surveillance technology is that residents don’t know that their data is being gathered, or for what purpose. If you look at the product history of Zencity, they were formed in 2016 and acquired the digital survey technology in 2021. So from 2016 to 2021, they only had the surveillance technology, which they marketed as a way to collect millions of data points that they could then turn over to local municipalities and law enforcement. But they didn’t stop developing that surveillance technology: They have a product now that they call “Organic,” and one component of that is called “Listen.” It collects millions of data points from people, who have not been informed or given consent.
Q: Zencity’s argument is that local government budgets are limited, making this survey an easier and less expensive way to reach more people where they are, as opposed to only hearing from the same ten people that might show up to a city council meeting—correct?
Goonin: Yes, that’s their exact marketing line. They claim a broader input than just relying on people that come to meetings. What is new is that Minneapolis uses artificial intelligence (AI) to categorize responses to the survey. And now they use AI to interpret and summarize the responses for their clients. We do characterize the company as a surveillance company because that’s how their bread has been buttered. However, we do not call the current contract with Minneapolis a surveillance contract, because it is a survey that people can choose to complete. We try to be conservative in the way we use this terminology.
Q: Tell me more about your involvement with the organizers who are trying to cut the current contract with Minneapolis.
Goonin: When I heard about the contract, it really surprised me. It’s worth mentioning that I’m Jewish, and I had already been involved in Palestinian solidarity work, and so the fact that Zencity is an Israeli company. . . .
Q: The Israeli connection raised a red flag right away?
Goonin: It did. I think it is a problem. Zencity’s founder, Eyal Feder-Levy, served in Unit 8200, which is the elite surveillance and cybersecurity wing of the Israeli military. Out of this unit come products that are used for phone hacking and surveillance globally. Microsoft recently had to cancel their contract for the Azure cloud platform because Israel was using it to record millions of Palestinian phone calls—that technology came out of Unit 8200. And then there are other [spyware products], like Pegasus, which is used internationally, and is linked to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Unit 8200 is part of Israeli military intelligence, and for Zencity to have their technology coming out of that, where the founder honed his craft, means it is directly complicit. It makes the city of Minneapolis indirectly complicit as well, to be doing business with Zencity as a partner.
Q: What objections to Zencity has the Cut the Contract campaign raised?
Goonin: The Minnesota Department of Human Rights found in 2022 that MPD has used racial profiling and excessive force. That’s MPD’s history with Black and Indigenous communities. And now they’ve partnered with a company that has sold surveillance technology and framed it as a better way to engage the community. But we think the right way to engage the community is to at least be accountable, especially to the people that have experienced the most harm by MPD. Doing a digital survey is the opposite of being accountable. It’s a public relations thing. It’s a way of reframing MPD’s history and sugarcoating it.
Q: The Zencity contract was proposed in June, 2023. In January, 2024, the Minneapolis City Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, despite Frey’s opposition to the measure. How does that jibe with the council’s authorization of this contract with Zencity?
Goonin: The Cut the Contract campaign started in the late winter of 2025. A lot of our early work was raising awareness of the contract and pointing out the problematic aspects of it. We’ve done community webinars. We have contacted all of the city council members. Several of them responded, and we met with them. Those that strongly opposed the ceasefire resolution supported the Zencity contract, while those who supported the resolution have generally shown opposition to the contract.
We’ve also collaborated with the Twin Cities chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, because we heard from several council members that they had gotten blowback for their vote on the ceasefire resolution [from critics who] alleged that the resolution was antisemitic. One of the things we did was hold a private session for the city council about the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, to help people understand and articulate the difference between the two, so that if they are challenged about [their vote on] this contract, they will be able to explain it.
Q: Cut the Contract delivered a petition to City Hall recently. Have you received any response?
Goonin: We had a petition for people to sign, expressing their opposition to the contract, and we collected more than 2,000 signatures. We held a rally at the City Hall rotunda. We had speakers from many different perspectives, including the Black community, immigrants, and members of the Jewish community who oppose Israel’s state conduct. And then we delivered the petition to Frey’s office. He wasn’t there, but staff members said they would deliver it to him. We haven’t had any direct response from Frey.
One important piece there to understand is that it is only Frey who can cut the contract, because the city’s procurement department reports to him. The contract says that it can be cancelled with thirty days notice for any reason. The next quarterly payment is due on January 1, 2026, so we’ve been calling on Mayor Frey to give notice to Zencity by December 1. At that point, the city could still save approximately $150,000 total by cutting the contract short. That’s our demand for the mayor.
Editor's note: This interview was updated on November 1 to correct the styling of Zencity's name and the location of Daunte Wright's murder, and to clarify Bob Goonin's roles within Jewish Voice for Peace and Minnesota BDS.