>The cop said, “You’re under arrest,” grabbed her arms, and pulled her out of the room. “I can do this all night. I get paid by the hour,” the cop added.
Two sentences showing precisely why no one can trust the police. Not only are they completely unaccountable, but they will trample your first amendment rights and do so with smug amusement in full public view. These are the kinds of people we're supposed to be happy to give massive surveillance power to?
I don't even get what the comment has to do with anything. Is it supposed to be some kind of zinger? It's a great idea. Make him spend all night arresting people.
If the attendee's description is true and the video is not missing context, then that doesn't appear to be what happened. Interpreting her description and the video, during the public comment period for an unrelated topic, she went through the usual process for giving a public comment, started her completely off-topic written statement, then was arrested during it a few seconds after two attempts by the council to interrupt her, during which she was flipping off the council.
If she was within her allotted time for a comment that was completely off-topic but otherwise complied with the public comment process, and her flipping off the council was, as she claims, only after it was clear that she was going to be interrupted by the police, then that does seem different than actually interrupting the discussion or refusing to leave.
> Yeah because addressing the city council with your middle fingers extended is totally mature and appropriate of adults.
I think by reaching adulthood, let alone public office, most people have seen middle fingers before. Moreover there is no statute against being in public bare-handed.
As an european guy. Interesting to see things happen from far away. Knowing that crazy country has so much power, makes the near future of the whole world even more scary.
Thankfully we have no voting power in the said country so they don't care what we think as long as we consume and overall behave. Let's see how long this lasts though. It seems as though EU is approaching the finding out stage.
It's not that much different in the most powerful parts of Europe. For instance Germany does this to people who talk about Palestine. So does the UK. Poland does it to people who talk about gay rights. I'm not sure what they're doing in France.
Maybe. Off-year municipal elections tend to low turnouts, and those who do vote - especially in smaller municipalities - are not stereotypical disengaged Americans.
But more interesting:
- Is there a recall process for mayor?
- Wikipedia calls the current mayor a businessman. Is that a local business, which people can vote their pocketbooks against?
At this point I no longer think the US can say anything about the Chinese. Yes they have a surveillance dystopia and highly entrenched state crony capitalism, but we now have exactly the same thing.
> “Well, I said: ‘Jeff Schrag is a cuck.’ I said: ‘Fuck you Jeff.’ I said: ‘Worthless’ and then, also, the final thing I said was: ‘Jeff Schrag has a tiny, stinky, cock,’” Powell explained.
I agree with the point she was trying to make. As a member of the public she should not have been arrested for being verbally abusive. But I'm OK with her being removed for subjecting the people who work there to that abuse. If she had made the same points with something approaching civility I'd be in her corner, as I still am with respect to surveillance.
If she were a coworker directing that to me, one of us would be an ex employee by the end of the day.
A reasonable take. It’s a hot button issue, and arrest is absurd, but these people are embarrassing and actually the most counterproductive way to approach this.
You want to know how to turn the masses of normies that could otherwise be persuaded to join you? Send in people like this to behave like this.
1. That wasn't her, it was someone else who was arrested
2. These are the "normies":
> Mia Heider had never attended a public meeting before when she showed up to the city council meeting in Springfield, Missouri.
> Dozens of people showed up to the Springfield City Council Meeting on September 22 with plans to let city leaders know how they felt about the city’s use of automated license plate readers. There was a resolution before the council that would trigger a review of the controversial camera systems, but Schrag moved to send the resolution to committee and prevent public comment on the issue.
> Later in the evening Mia Heider tried to speak out about Flock during public comments about a housing issue. Police arrested her while Schrag looked on. “Sorry ma’m,” the mayor said as police led Heider away in handcuffs.
I mean, what is the appropriate response to someone refusing follow protocol after giving guidance that there's a different topic at hand now? There was a comment session on Flock cameras, people talked about it, then they moved onto housing. You can't run a public meeting where people get to drag every issue back to their favorite issue uninhibited, it just literally doesn't work. The meeting would run 24/7/365 and still nothing would get done.
Sure makes it awfully convenient to end a comment session when you don't want to hear what's being said. We are approving the budget for the death ray, do we have any objections? You have five hundred microseconds to object. Let the record show there were no objections. Guards, arrest that man for speaking after the time for objections has ended.
How it works in Seattle is that people are supposed to sign up and talk about things on the agenda for that council meeting but they are not stopped from talking about anything. This is why you'll see people like Alex Tsimerman (look him up) speak nonsense at nearly every council meeting. The councilpeople just ignore those comments and I believe they aren't included in the meeting record since they're off topic.
There's other ways to also try and limit the length of public comment, if there's more than say 30 people signed up, reduce public comment from 2 minutes per person to 1 minute. Be aggressive about cutting mics rather than giving everyone 10 extra seconds. For topics that council knows will be contentious and attract a lot of public comment they'll either hold multiple public comment blocks that day or literally just do a marathon session, 4-5 hours of just public comment.
Finally, if enough people are frustrated enough about an issue to constantly show up to public comment to talk about it, councilmembers should try meeting with those people at a different forum to at least hear them out to try and diffuse their anger. Council meetings should not be the only other place where residents can talk to their councilmembers.
Thank you for mentioning this. I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand city council meetings and just how many disruptive people who want to play out the clock talking.
> I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand city council meetings and just how many disruptive people who want to play out the clock talking
That may be the case but here it would seem a discussion about Flock was skipped on purpose so that people who want to bring it up would have no choice but to do so during an 'unrelated' discussion.
As a community leader, it would be to publicly acknowledge that there are concerns, then schedule a town hall meeting for their constituents to discuss those concerns with subject matter experts at a more appropriate time.
Based on reading between the lines and watching the video, here's my sense of what happened:
1. Some protestors showed up at a council meeting to complain about flock
2. The council moved to disallow discussion of flock cameras
3. The protestors started disrupting the meeting, chanting, etc, and were forced to leave/were arrested
4. One protestor went to the podium and started talking about flock cameras, was politely interrupted, then had her mic cut. She flipped off the council and was arrested
If you oppose flock/this kind of surveillance, fine. But this kind of behavior is not tolerated at council meetings, and it's not a surprise that some of the protestors were arrested.
> “Well, I said: ‘Jeff Schrag is a cuck.’ I said: ‘Fuck you Jeff.’ I said: ‘Worthless’ and then, also, the final thing I said was: ‘Jeff Schrag has a tiny, stinky, cock,’” Powell explained. “I just let myself get handcuffed and let them do whatever power trip they wanted to do. Got my ticket and left.”
I'm sure people like you making fun of "pearl clutching" would defend other cranks at public meetings, right? Or is it a matter of "I only invoke 'pearl clutching' if I agree with your cause, otherwise they're being uncivil and deserve to be arrested"?
> 2. The council moved to disallow discussion of flock cameras
Not sure why they would do that. Our city council gives people three minutes to talk about what they want. Not sure why this city council wouldn't do that.
> The council moved to disallow discussion of flock cameras
> (…)
> this kind of behavior is not tolerated at council meetings
Right. We shouldn’t tolerate a council which is stopping the people from talking about the issues that are important to them. After all, the council is meant to represent the people; if they show up in large numbers to discuss a topic, it should be discussed.
Oh, wait, you meant the people should have just bent over and allowed the council to do as they pleased to silence the legitimate concerns of the populace. In that case, you’re wrong.
All I mean is that you shouldn't swear, call people "cucks," flip people off, etc. It's not an effective means of communication, and will get you removed from whatever room you're in.
They really buried the details in this article. The opener leads you to believe she did nothing wrong because she briefly spoke during a public comment period
> Mia Heider had never attended a public meeting before when she showed up to the city council meeting in Springfield, Missouri. After briefly speaking at a podium during a public comment period, she was arrested and dragged away in handcuffs.
The details are toward the end. The council was trying to discuss a public housing issue and she was trying to use that time slot to bring up Flock.
> Later in the evening Mia Heider tried to speak out about Flock during public comments about a housing issue.
They cut off the mic and told her it was the wrong topic, she wouldn’t leave the podium, flipped off the council (it’s the photo in the article) and the police hauled her off the podium.
There’s a real valid story in here about the city council sending the Flock thing to committee, but the article has been through the clickbait ringer so many times that they’re trying to make it sound like someone got arrested for saying “Flock cameras” during an open comments section, which isn’t true.
Given the topic I’m probably going to get downvoted for bringing up facts from the article itself, but I’m really tired of this type of journalism where you can tell they workshopped this and carefully chose which important details to bury at the bottom of the story so it gives a different impression if you only read the headline or skim the first couple paragraphs.
I dunno, Council announces that they are going to be talking about Flock (YC 17), that there will be public comment about Flock (YC 17), sees that a whole lot of people are very angry about Flock (YC 17) and have come to the meeting, and immediately shift the discussion to a committee so they don't have to hear those people angry about Flock (YC 17), I can see why she did what she did. That sure seems like the Council is trying to avoid all of the community anger over Flock (YC 17).
If you are going to do something that makes so many people so angry that they are willing to come to a local government meeting, you kinda have to let them talk about it, you know? Otherwise it feels like you're trying to run out the clock on the,.
Can you explain the need to be annoying about the YC 17 thing? What's the objective here? Is it supposed to convince potential founders to decide against taking YC's money as a way of putting financial pressure on YC not to fund projects that people don't like? Or is the intention that YC people are reading your comment directly and it's changing their minds?
I can't imagine either of these being impactful, and the effect seems to just be to distract from people's concerns about Flock (YC 17). Eg, my eyes are bouncing off of the presumably anti-Flock statement you're making here because you've coated it in repeated parentheticals and tortured the writing so you can say "Flock" as often as possible.
I am amused that much of the HN community goes out of its way to highlight YC connections for companies- I've even seen it for Stripe (YC 09) and Dropbox (YC07) within the past year or so- but has completely dropped that for Flock.
It's objectively hilarious that the useful idiots so virulently angry about Flock look like the type of people that don't drive a car, so it makes you wonder what the fuss about ALPRs is and how it affects them.
If Flock was used to enforce congestion pricing in the cities they ride bikes in, they would all be for it.
Don't act like flock is incapable of tracking bicycles and individual humans. The product may have been sold as ALPR but scope is creeping to total persistent surveillance.
> so it makes you wonder what the fuss about ALPRs is and how it affects them.
Wow. Poe's Law in full effect here. I'm not sure if you're just oblivious or trolling. If you're oblivious do yourself a huge fucking favor and read up on what Flock is doing in addition to ALPR and how even that is abused by law enforcement.
This article is terrible. The story is already pretty good (for the anti-flock side), with the the mayor/council was for shutting down debate on flock. The author didn't need to devolve into ragebait territory, obfuscating what happened by jumping forwards and backwards in time between paragraphs.
Here's a concise, non-ragebait, chronological version:
>Dozens of people showed up to the Springfield City Council Meeting on September 22 with plans to let city leaders know how they felt about the city’s use of automated license plate readers. There was a resolution before the council that would trigger a review of the controversial camera systems, but Schrag moved to send the resolution to committee and prevent public comment on the issue.
>Heider explained that she waited until the public comment period for a different issue, filled out a form to talk, and then got up to deliver a written statement about Flock cameras.
>she was arrested and dragged away in handcuffs.
>The cop said, “You’re under arrest,” grabbed her arms, and pulled her out of the room. “I can do this all night. I get paid by the hour,” the cop added.
>The police officer who arrested her said Heider was being charged with disrupting the peace. He took her into the hallway outside of the meeting and held her in handcuffs for around five minutes before issuing her a ticket and letting her go.
Back in the 90s, when I wore a younger man's clothes, I got a 'disturbing the peace' citation from the Modesto Police Department, the world's finest law enforcement agency (major sarcasm; they're horrible). Two cop cars were parked side-by-side, drivers chatting, blocking the only exit from a parking lot. I gave a little toot of the horn in my '87 Honda Prelude (I loved that car!). The cops didn't move. I gave another little toot. No movement, but they both turned their heads and looked right at me, irritated. I was in a hurry to get home and watch the VHS I had just rented, so I laid on the horn, really loud, just held it down. One cop got out, walked over to my car, told me he could arrest me and hold me in jail all night, just if he felt like it. Then he gave me the 'disturbing the peace' ticket.
I actually went to court to fight it, but the cop didn't show up. Case dismissed.
Article: city council purposefully cancels the public comment segment of an extremely divisive issue that people came to protest, arrests two people, cop makes clearly sadistic comment, the direct will of the people is beaten into submission by using the powers of the council to derail any possible opposing words or actions
Comment thread: but what about her decorum? Did you see the middle fingers she was putting up? Why didn't she comply with the procedure and sinned by commenting on an unrelated topic after they canceled the appropriate one? Are we sure she didn't break any other laws here? What if she looked at someone the wrong way? Are we sure we want to permit this behavior in our society? And why is the article quoting the cop? Isn't it a bit divisive to just use the officer's own words to make him look like a monster? Why aren't we talking about the real issue?
When you wonder how average people let dictatorial power grow unchecked in their societies, refer to the above.
78 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 50.6 ms ] threadTwo sentences showing precisely why no one can trust the police. Not only are they completely unaccountable, but they will trample your first amendment rights and do so with smug amusement in full public view. These are the kinds of people we're supposed to be happy to give massive surveillance power to?
(I suppose I have a little more respect for her, though. We certainly need more citizens like her.)
How is that First Amendment rights?
If she was within her allotted time for a comment that was completely off-topic but otherwise complied with the public comment process, and her flipping off the council was, as she claims, only after it was clear that she was going to be interrupted by the police, then that does seem different than actually interrupting the discussion or refusing to leave.
I think by reaching adulthood, let alone public office, most people have seen middle fingers before. Moreover there is no statute against being in public bare-handed.
In the Flock camera case, there's no out-group: the speech being suppressed is supporting the rights of US citizens.
On a scale of zero to Mussolini, the US is much closer to the right of that scale at this point.
But more interesting:
- Is there a recall process for mayor?
- Wikipedia calls the current mayor a businessman. Is that a local business, which people can vote their pocketbooks against?
If your goal is to rescue the reputation of capitalism, people have found more success just calling Donald Trump a communist.
I agree with the point she was trying to make. As a member of the public she should not have been arrested for being verbally abusive. But I'm OK with her being removed for subjecting the people who work there to that abuse. If she had made the same points with something approaching civility I'd be in her corner, as I still am with respect to surveillance.
If she were a coworker directing that to me, one of us would be an ex employee by the end of the day.
You want to know how to turn the masses of normies that could otherwise be persuaded to join you? Send in people like this to behave like this.
2. These are the "normies":
> Mia Heider had never attended a public meeting before when she showed up to the city council meeting in Springfield, Missouri.
> Dozens of people showed up to the Springfield City Council Meeting on September 22 with plans to let city leaders know how they felt about the city’s use of automated license plate readers. There was a resolution before the council that would trigger a review of the controversial camera systems, but Schrag moved to send the resolution to committee and prevent public comment on the issue.
Do you believe avoiding embarrassment is more important than any moral position?
I mean, what is the appropriate response to someone refusing follow protocol after giving guidance that there's a different topic at hand now? There was a comment session on Flock cameras, people talked about it, then they moved onto housing. You can't run a public meeting where people get to drag every issue back to their favorite issue uninhibited, it just literally doesn't work. The meeting would run 24/7/365 and still nothing would get done.
There's other ways to also try and limit the length of public comment, if there's more than say 30 people signed up, reduce public comment from 2 minutes per person to 1 minute. Be aggressive about cutting mics rather than giving everyone 10 extra seconds. For topics that council knows will be contentious and attract a lot of public comment they'll either hold multiple public comment blocks that day or literally just do a marathon session, 4-5 hours of just public comment.
Finally, if enough people are frustrated enough about an issue to constantly show up to public comment to talk about it, councilmembers should try meeting with those people at a different forum to at least hear them out to try and diffuse their anger. Council meetings should not be the only other place where residents can talk to their councilmembers.
That may be the case but here it would seem a discussion about Flock was skipped on purpose so that people who want to bring it up would have no choice but to do so during an 'unrelated' discussion.
I Googled that name and found a bunch of stories about him being excluded/banned from council meetings, because he was consistently disruptive.
That's apparently asking too much.
Maybe: 24/7/52
Or: 24/365.25
(Always bothers pedantic me.)
Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Speaking About Flock (YC 17) at City Council Meeting
1. Some protestors showed up at a council meeting to complain about flock
2. The council moved to disallow discussion of flock cameras
3. The protestors started disrupting the meeting, chanting, etc, and were forced to leave/were arrested
4. One protestor went to the podium and started talking about flock cameras, was politely interrupted, then had her mic cut. She flipped off the council and was arrested
If you oppose flock/this kind of surveillance, fine. But this kind of behavior is not tolerated at council meetings, and it's not a surprise that some of the protestors were arrested.
> “Well, I said: ‘Jeff Schrag is a cuck.’ I said: ‘Fuck you Jeff.’ I said: ‘Worthless’ and then, also, the final thing I said was: ‘Jeff Schrag has a tiny, stinky, cock,’” Powell explained. “I just let myself get handcuffed and let them do whatever power trip they wanted to do. Got my ticket and left.”
I mean, really?
Not sure why they would do that. Our city council gives people three minutes to talk about what they want. Not sure why this city council wouldn't do that.
> (…)
> this kind of behavior is not tolerated at council meetings
Right. We shouldn’t tolerate a council which is stopping the people from talking about the issues that are important to them. After all, the council is meant to represent the people; if they show up in large numbers to discuss a topic, it should be discussed.
Oh, wait, you meant the people should have just bent over and allowed the council to do as they pleased to silence the legitimate concerns of the populace. In that case, you’re wrong.
> Mia Heider had never attended a public meeting before when she showed up to the city council meeting in Springfield, Missouri. After briefly speaking at a podium during a public comment period, she was arrested and dragged away in handcuffs.
The details are toward the end. The council was trying to discuss a public housing issue and she was trying to use that time slot to bring up Flock.
> Later in the evening Mia Heider tried to speak out about Flock during public comments about a housing issue.
They cut off the mic and told her it was the wrong topic, she wouldn’t leave the podium, flipped off the council (it’s the photo in the article) and the police hauled her off the podium.
There’s a real valid story in here about the city council sending the Flock thing to committee, but the article has been through the clickbait ringer so many times that they’re trying to make it sound like someone got arrested for saying “Flock cameras” during an open comments section, which isn’t true.
Given the topic I’m probably going to get downvoted for bringing up facts from the article itself, but I’m really tired of this type of journalism where you can tell they workshopped this and carefully chose which important details to bury at the bottom of the story so it gives a different impression if you only read the headline or skim the first couple paragraphs.
If you are going to do something that makes so many people so angry that they are willing to come to a local government meeting, you kinda have to let them talk about it, you know? Otherwise it feels like you're trying to run out the clock on the,.
I can't imagine either of these being impactful, and the effect seems to just be to distract from people's concerns about Flock (YC 17). Eg, my eyes are bouncing off of the presumably anti-Flock statement you're making here because you've coated it in repeated parentheticals and tortured the writing so you can say "Flock" as often as possible.
Stripe: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Dropbox: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Flock: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Unless it was in a very specific investment/exit/valuation related sense.
YC is an investor that turns money into more money, and claims to be good at that. It doesn't claim to be good at anything else.
If Flock was used to enforce congestion pricing in the cities they ride bikes in, they would all be for it.
Wow. Poe's Law in full effect here. I'm not sure if you're just oblivious or trolling. If you're oblivious do yourself a huge fucking favor and read up on what Flock is doing in addition to ALPR and how even that is abused by law enforcement.
> they would all be for it.
Would they? "They" being people you imagine don't drive (with whatever that implies to you personally, it isn't made clear) based on their appearance.
Maybe take a step back and focus on what can actually be confirmed instead of leading with multiple layers of conjecture.
Here's a concise, non-ragebait, chronological version:
>Dozens of people showed up to the Springfield City Council Meeting on September 22 with plans to let city leaders know how they felt about the city’s use of automated license plate readers. There was a resolution before the council that would trigger a review of the controversial camera systems, but Schrag moved to send the resolution to committee and prevent public comment on the issue.
>Heider explained that she waited until the public comment period for a different issue, filled out a form to talk, and then got up to deliver a written statement about Flock cameras.
>she was arrested and dragged away in handcuffs.
>The cop said, “You’re under arrest,” grabbed her arms, and pulled her out of the room. “I can do this all night. I get paid by the hour,” the cop added.
>The police officer who arrested her said Heider was being charged with disrupting the peace. He took her into the hallway outside of the meeting and held her in handcuffs for around five minutes before issuing her a ticket and letting her go.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/21/darth-vader-...
https://www.404media.co/doctor-doom-thanked-seattle-for-all-...
I actually went to court to fight it, but the cop didn't show up. Case dismissed.
If you're currently living in Modesto, here's a song for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spsiGPa4aaY
Comment thread: but what about her decorum? Did you see the middle fingers she was putting up? Why didn't she comply with the procedure and sinned by commenting on an unrelated topic after they canceled the appropriate one? Are we sure she didn't break any other laws here? What if she looked at someone the wrong way? Are we sure we want to permit this behavior in our society? And why is the article quoting the cop? Isn't it a bit divisive to just use the officer's own words to make him look like a monster? Why aren't we talking about the real issue?
When you wonder how average people let dictatorial power grow unchecked in their societies, refer to the above.