A crowd of anxious community members in Springfield, Missouri turned downright hostile on Monday, leaping to their feet after city council members rubber-stamped a resolution around Flock surveillance cameras.
Footage published by local channel KY3 captured the moment counselors voted 5-3 to send the resolution on Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) to the city’s planning committee, functionally bypassing any chance at a public hearing.
The audience immediately turned hostile following the vote, with throngs of attendees screaming out at the top of their lungs as they filed out of the meeting hall in protest.
“Worthless!” one unidentified community member bellowed before storming off.
“What I’m trying to do is get people answers to some real question that they’ve brought to us for months,” said councilman Brandon Jenson, one of the councilmembers who tried to open the floor for public comment. “It’s a shame that it comes down to this sort of, I guess, theater… to try and help get those answers — this isn’t how government is supposed to run.”
“It’s just disappointing,” Jenson continued. “And we’re not even allowing the folks to speak who clearly came out to share their voices tonight.”
The ultimate fate of the resolution is still up in the air. If passed, it would mandate a review of the city police department’s use of ALPRs, which have become rife with abuse by other law enforcement agencies throughout the United States.
“It just makes me wonder where we’re trying to go if something as straightforward as this gets referred to a policy committee to be shelved until who knows when,” Isaac Protiva, an organizer with the anti-ALPR group Flock Out SGF told KY3 after the hearing.
“It just makes me question where this city goes and honestly makes me question how much I want to invest in this city as a young person that moved here from deeper in the Ozarks,” Protiva continued.
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