Urbana, Illinois Alderperson Shirese Hursey showed what can only be described as extreme hypocrisy this past Tuesday when she refused to allow a City Council meeting to be heard and recorded. Hursey, apparently upset that the press was attempting to record portions of the meeting which she preferred to keep secret, reached out and physically disabled our audio equipment multiple times.
Though some portions of the meeting were held using a microphone, about 45 minutes of the meeting were not at all audible to the public. The Council and City Officials spoke amongst themselves at tables out of earshot from the public seating area. Check CU placed audio receivers on the tables to supplement the audio reception of our recording equipment. Hursey asked that the audio equipment be turned off, and when it was not, she turned it off herself.
Notwithstanding her actions being criminal, as defined by the Illinois Open Meetings Act (OMA), Ms. Hursey’s depraved guard of her own privacy as an elected official at a public meeting is nothing short of bizarre, especially given her history of contempt for the personal privacy concerns of Urbana residents.
Over the past year, Hursey has become a champion of City-wide surveillance systems. Last summer, she proposed that the City install security cameras throughout neighborhoods in her ward to address crime.
Hursey at the November 15th, 2021 City Council meeting: “We actually wanted CCTV cameras. So we wanted to catch people in the act of doing whatever they could do.”
Over the past six months, Hursey has campaigned vigorously for the installation of automatic license place readers (ALPRs) throughout the City.
The proposed ALPR system, sold by Flock Safety, would photograph and log locations of vehicles 24/7, allowing the City to track any person’s past driving habits as well as real-time movements. By linking their system with other Flock systems, Urbana would be able to track vehicles all over the county, state, or even the entire country, and other agencies would also have access to Urbana’s vehicle tracking data.
Due to concerns about privacy and possible abuse, in October of 2021 the Urbana City Council declined to approve the installation of ALPRs. ALPRs were discussed at several additional meetings, but those discussions were put to rest in mid November.
However, the ALPR issue already appears to be resurfacing, and Hursey has not ceased displaying resentment toward Urbana residents who expressed concern for the inherent privacy invasion of tracking all vehicles that drive within or through the City.
Hursey is not shy about resorting to demagoguery and shaming. In her view, residents who are concerned about ALPRs are uncaring, must not have ever been affected by crime, and are “arguing in favor of a normalization of [gun] violence” in certain neighborhoods.
At the very same meeting where Hursey violated the Open Meetings Act by refusing to allow much of the meeting to be heard or recorded, she once again derided members of the public for expressing privacy and abuse concerns over her plans for City-wide surveillance and tracking. Check CU was able to capture that statement.
“There have been several people that don’t seem to have a problem martyring young men and women to die so that they can keep their privacy.” – Urbana Ward 3 Alderperson Shirese Hursey
Hursey, along with the other Council members and City Officials, have been recorded at their meetings for years. For the vast majority of their recent public meetings, the same officials sit directly in front of a camera and microphone for the duration of the meeting. State law requires the City to record their Zoom meetings, and requires them to “allow any interested member of the public access to contemporaneously hear all discussion, testimony, and roll call votes”. It is nothing short of bizarre that dozens of City officials suddenly felt that a City Council meeting should not be recorded.
Tuesday’s meeting would not be the first time that Hursey has engaged in OMA violations. Hursey supported content-based speech restrictions in 2020 which resulted in numerous residents being muted for speaking ideas which the Council found disagreeable. The Attorney General said those speech restrictions were illegal, and the City paid to settle a civil rights lawsuit.
Every member of a public body in Illinois is required to complete OMA training within 30 days of taking office. Violations of the OMA are crimes, but State’s Attorneys almost never prosecute them.
Another Check CU article, which describes the recording prohibition at Tuesday’s meeting in greater detail, can be viewed here: