You're right, but the parts you've picked are misleading. Minimums are normal for a lot of gig work.

Those officers are paid $107 an hour, but payroll is handled by the city.

This is in reference to the "buyback" program, where neighborhoods or organizations can pay for extra on-duty patrols. The off-duty private security payroll isn't handled by the city.

The bigger issues that stood out to me:

MPD officers would usually sit in their squad cars, fully uniformed

Gordon said running a business using city resources — uniforms, guns, squad cars — without city management, should be considered a violation of the city ethics code, even though the city explicitly allows it, even paying insurance for off-duty work.

I don't have a problem with any public official doing any kind of side work, as long as it doesn't affect their job, and they aren't using government resources to do it. Every job I've had has said you can moonlight, but you can't use company resources or use the company name to imply any kind of endorsement. But clearly that's not what's happening here. This is absolutely a protection racket.

The joys of defunding the police coupled with requiring minimum amounts of security for highly vulnerable businesses. This 'Small business owner' nightclub with over $1,000,000 in startup the article is in reference to lol. The writer is very measured and chooses their words carefully for a reason though. It's a decent writeup regarding the issue.

Here’s how the off-duty work program works: Some businesses — like large nightclubs — are required by the city to have security, which until 2020, sometimes had to be off-duty Minneapolis police officers.

In 2020, the Minneapolis City Council stopped requiring off-duty officers at licensed events, and let them hire private security instead. In August 2020, Velazquez told the City Council only four businesses were being required to hire off-duty MPD officers. But some businesses were voluntarily hiring them because they were under the impression they had no choice, he said. Others thought if they hired police officers they would get “some level of preferential treatment,” he said.