A Democratic candidate for governor in Missouri placed surveillance caps on women, disabled citizens and minorities — and suppressed the results from administering the caps.
Lynne Blankenbeker, a former state representative and current communications director for the campaign of rival Lt. Gov. Mike Parson, said the Department of Public Safety provided her with a missing file on the different types of facial contortions that would test the caps.
Ms. Blankenbeker, who is a registered nurse, said that on paper, the caps were written in such a way that the exercise was useless for her. Ms. Blankenbeker said she was looking into the issue and shared the discussion of it with a few people, including Bobby Schindler, executive director of the Missouri Council on Developmental Disabilities.
The department offered Ms. Blankenbeker the “temperature” data she would need. But, she said, in “mind-blowing” coincidence, just days before her campaign gathered the results for the photo study, a homicide had been committed in Scott City. She said the department told her the victim was transgender. She said she knew it wasn’t true. She sent a memo to the public safety director saying her campaign had “completed an ethnographic survey of discrimination against the Scott City community,” she said.
The department told her the information would not be used.