Anonymous releases alleged leaked St. Louis County Police dispatch audio
LatestUPDATE: “We have released these tapes to the public so they are able to get a sense of the atmosphere [in] the moments before and the hours after Mike Brown was shot, and to expose potential misconduct by authorities,” a member of Anonymous that’s associated with @TheAnonMessage told Fusion via email.
UPDATE: At approximately the 44-minute mark, the dispatcher advises all vehicles that they are switching over to the riot channel
UPDATE: At a 24-minute mark, the dispatcher mentions that they were requesting “TAC” cars. TAC is an acronym for “tactical anti-crime” unit.
Moments later, there’s a request for K-9 units.
UPDATE: At approximately the 9:40 mark, the dispatcher mentions that Ferguson PD is requesting assistance with crowd control. At the 11:15-mark, the dispatcher notes that there has been “an officer-involved shooting.”
A person or persons claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous, the loosely organized hacker collective, has released what they say is audio of the dispatch for the St. Louis County Police Department that was taken from the day Ferguson, Mo., teenager Mike Brown was fatally shot by a police officer.
The group announced the existence of the audio on Wednesday morning via the Twitter account @TheAnonMessage and it was eventually posted as a YouTube video. The post contains close to two hours of raw audio pieced together. The post’s description said that it had been edited to shorten “long quiet moments”.
The authenticity of the audio has not yet been confirmed. In an email to Fusion, one of the members behind @TheAnonMessage said that they would not “expose the source that led [them] to the tapes” or how they were obtained in the first place. Officer Brian Schellman, a public information officer for the St. Louis County Police Department, told Fusion that the department was aware of the video and that their investigators were looking into it, but would not comment beyond that.
Anonymous takes a “shoot first, ask questions later” approach to information leaks. In 2012, Anonymous incorrectly doxed—released someone’s personal information—an individual who they thought had bullied Canadian teenager Amanda Todd into committing suicide.
Anonymous says leaking the tapes is the latest effort in #OpFerguson, an online campaign by the group to compel police to release more information about Brown’s death, including the name of the officer who shot Brown.
Fidel Martinez is an editor at Fusion.net. He’s also a Texas native and a lifelong El Tri fan.