St. Louis Mayor Put Lives at Risk in Public Reveal of Demonstrators’ Personal Identifiers

Yeah, we have elected officials doxing their constituents as they call for defunding the police. That happened.

Amber Yates, Guest Writer

On June 26, St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson provided a live Facebook video update to her citizens, which included a briefing regarding COVID-19 and evidently, the doxxing of people who provided her with demands to defund the police.

Yes, you read that correctly. The Mayor of St. Louis, Missouri publicly doxxed nearly a dozen of her own citizens in a live video.

Approximately 30 minutes into the Mayor’s Friday presentation, spokesman Jacob Long relayed a question to the Mayor from a woman named Rachel:

“Rachel has a question, Mayor, about your meeting today with some demonstrators outside City Hall. She wants to know:

How was that meeting, and what did you talk about?”

The Mayor responded by saying, “The conversation wasn’t really a two-way conversation, I’ll be honest with you, because there was a very loud, um, very loud response from the demonstrators. And so they gave me some papers about how they thought, uh — in fact I’ll go pick it up off my desk, hang on.”

She walked across her office and came back to face the camera holding a stack of papers in her hand. She described these papers as a list of budget demands which included defunding the police department. What transpired next was a poorly-considered, irresponsible, and potentially dangerous situation.

Krewson began to read aloud the contents of these papers and as she did, she publicly shared with her live audience the names and addresses of each person who had listed demands within those pages. She continued to do so for nearly 10 minutes, doxxing at least 10 people in the process.

If you haven’t learned this already, doxxing is the purposeful revealing of hard-to-find public or private, personal information to a public forum, typically done with the intent to expose the person to harassment or abuse. It is most commonly resorted to as a protective response to already-initiated threats or abuse. Did the Mayor really intend to do this? Maybe not. But the consequences these individuals could face are very real, and she cannot take her words back.

She certainly tried, though.

The video was removed about 3 hours after it had aired, but hundreds of community members witnessed what had happened in real-time. Outcry began on social media and citizens began calling the Mayor’s office to express their concern and disgust at her carelessness. Hours went by without a statement from the Mayor offering explanation or apology. Clips of her deleted video began to circulate, with private identifiers hidden, showing how she provided sensitive information about constituents during this public briefing.

It was a bizarre move which served no purpose in answering the question which had been asked of her, and it begs us to ask further questions.

Why did the Mayor find it necessary to reveal the residences of these demonstrators? Did she lend any consideration to how she could be placing these people into harm’s way? Defunding the police is a hot-button political debate across the nation and in St. Louis, where protests and rallies are still occurring regularly. It’s no big hush that people are somewhat testy over the issue.

Was the Mayor aware that a “prayer rally” was scheduled in Forest Park on June 27, the following day, and that interested attendees had discussed appearing with firearms and other weaponry including “sticks, bows, nun chucks, bear spray, knives, spears, [and] Tasers” in the comments section of the article on the far right website Gateway Pundit which announced the rally? Dozens of comments were loaded with racism and hate speech, with direct references to hate groups such as the Proud Boys and open-ended threats like, “They have pallets of bricks. We have pallets of bullets.”

For the Mayor to publicly reveal the street addresses of residents in her city for any reason is not in the best interest of anyone. Given the current state of affairs in St. Louis and beyond, this oversight has literally placed lives in danger of harassment and direct threats to their personhood. This is a massive failure on her part to keep her citizens’ wellbeing a top priority. Krewson’s behavior is complicit at best, with the potential to enable further violence in the city of St. Louis. There is no excuse for the decision made today.

This is not the first time Mayor Krewson has been complicit with the doxxing of demonstrators in her city.

Back in September of 2017, St. Louis Metro Police (SLMPD) beat and arrested more than 100 protesters who were blamed for violence and vandalism including the beating of an undercover officer and broken windows.

SLMPD released a fabricated press notice after the arrests which read in part, “Many of the demonstrators were peaceful, however after dark, the agitators outnumbered the peaceful demonstrators and the unruly crowd became a mob. Multiple businesses also sustained property damage and one officer suffered a serious injury.” That press release also listed the names and addresses of everyone who was arrested.

Here’s the kicker.

It was later discovered that the undercover officer who sustained injury was beaten by several SLMPD officers, not by demonstrators. They were all indicted.

Mayor Lyda Krewson tried to claim she knew nothing about the beating of the undercover officer prior to the press release. However, she was included in a civil lawsuit by the beaten officer, stating that she knew he had been undercover and that in an elevator with him she made the comment, “Oh, they messed up your pretty face.”

The suit stated that many people named within it had “engaged in a course of conduct that was designed to cover up the misconduct of the officers at the scene to protect the City and its officers from liability and embarrassment.”

This certainly does not help her defend a constructed image of blissful unawareness.

Video is here. Watch from the 4 min mark. https://t.co/78Kn2IG9T2

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— Javad Khazaeli (@javadesq) June 27, 2020

A little before 10 PM, Mayor Lyda Krewson issued an apology on social media. For some, a weak, late apology, loaded with defensive justification, is not enough to repair the damage done.

Many are now demanding that she resign.