A Columbia Tattoo Artist Got Arrested Protesting License-Plate Cameras. He Says It Was Worth It.

If you’ve driven through the intersection of Broadway and Providence Road in Columbia recently, you may have passed a man in a Guy Fawkes mask holding a sign in front of one of the city’s automated license-plate readers. That’s Dominic O’Connor, a tattoo artist at Electric Peacock Tattoos who commutes in from Mexico, Missouri — and as of last month, he’s been arrested for it.

O’Connor first showed up at the Broadway/Providence intersection after seeing a post from DeFlock America, a group that opposes the spread of automated license-plate reader cameras like the ones Columbia Police use, branded Flock, according to ABC 17 News. He stood there for about three hours holding signs — one an upside-down American flag, others with pointed language about the cameras — angled to block the camera’s line of sight. Nobody stopped him that first time.

He went back the following Monday and did it again, this time for about two hours before police arrived. O’Connor was arrested and, per ABC 17’s reporting, faces charges that include jaywalking, standing on a median, resisting arrest, and possibly obstructing government operations.

His objection is about privacy, not whether the cameras work. “It gets worse every year, but that doesn’t mean that we need to have our privacy invaded and have law enforcement thinking they can just step on our toes,” he told ABC 17. Asked whether the arrest changed his mind, he said no: “I feel like I need to take it upon myself to do it, just spread awareness and get people to follow in the footsteps.”

Columbia police, for their part, have defended the Flock program’s usefulness, pointing to at least one homicide case the cameras helped crack, per ABC 17’s reporting.

Rocheport doesn’t run Flock cameras of its own, but this is a local story in the way that matters most: it’s playing out on a Boone County street plenty of us drive through on the way into Columbia, and it’s one piece of a wider fight over automated surveillance that cities across mid-Missouri are having right now, one camera contract at a time. Whatever you think of the cameras, O’Connor’s arrest turns an abstract privacy debate into an actual court date, over an actual protest, at an intersection a lot of us know by sight.

No hearing date has been reported, and it isn’t clear yet whether prosecutors will pursue every charge on the list. Whether O’Connor goes back out to that corner likely depends on how his case shakes out.