Police investigating after Newark council meeting is disrupted by racial slurs

Police are investigating after a Newark City Council meeting was disrupted by online provocateurs yelling racial slurs.

The incident happened Monday night, shortly after the meeting began.

Newark allows members of the public to participate virtually through the Microsoft Teams online teleconferencing platform.

Two of the virtual participants — it appeared to be a female voice, followed by a male voice — unmuted their microphones during a presentation by a University of Delaware representative and suddenly began yelling racist remarks. The comments, which included the n-word, were audible to everyone attending the meeting in person as well as online.

Shocked council members quickly condemned the comments.

“I can tell you that this government and this public body absolutely finds comments like that to be absolutely abhorrent,” Mayor Jerry Clifton said. “No one in this government endorses or agrees with that kind of comment and language. I want to tell the people online and the people here, on behalf of the seven of us on city council and our staff, that we’re sorry that happened. We’re sorry you had to hear that.”

Councilwoman Dwendolyn Creecy, the first and only Black woman to serve on Newark City Council, called the incident offensive and horrendous.

“It’s quite funny that you have to do it on a phone line and not here in my face,” Creecy said.

She said that, unfortunately, she’s no stranger to being targeted by racist remarks.

“But I’m here to take it,” she added. “So the next time you want to make a comment about anything that has to do with the African American or minority race and you want to say something so derogatory, I dare you to come say it to me. And let’s see how you feel after that.”

During the meeting, Clifton briefly stepped down from the dais and conferred with a police officer providing security at the meeting. Police and technology staff will try to use IP addresses to identify and track down the people who disrupted the meeting.

Newark officials will also look at ways to prevent a similar incident. Participants’ microphones are muted by default, but they are able to unmute themselves in order to speak during allotted public comment periods. That had not caused issues previously, but tighter restrictions are likely to be implemented for future meetings.

Disruptions to online meetings, sometimes referred to as Zoombombing, became common early on in the pandemic when many meetings switched to Zoom and other similar platforms. Provocateurs would find public Zoom links and then crash government meetings, college lectures and even elementary school classes to disrupt them with offensive comments and explicit images. Incidents were often coordinated through online forums and message boards.

In April 2020, the FBI warned that Zoombombing is far from a harmless prank and could lead to criminal charges, including disrupting a public meeting, computer intrusion, using a computer to commit a crime, hate crimes, fraud or transmitting threatening communications.