Committee considers using metal detector for council meetings

Friday, April 29, 2011

There may soon be a new fixture at Jefferson City Council meetings — a metal detector.

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At the public safety committee meeting Thursday morning, members considered the proposal to use a metal detector that has been made available to the Jefferson City Municipal Court.

City attorney Nathan Nickolaus said the detector is something the court has been pushing for a while, in response to a rising concern.

“The court, for a while, was doing metal detection with a hand-held metal detector and they found a tremendous number of knives and other weapons that people would have otherwise brought into the courtroom,” Nickolaus said. “In fact, after they’d used that for a while, people kind of learned and they started dumping their weapons outside. We would find them hidden behind trash cans and things outside.”