YouTuber and “activist” Regan Benson sat outside the Englewood City Council chambers Monday night, watching the meeting on Englewood City Council meeting on Englewood’s YouTube channel.
Benson had encountered Deputy Police Chief Vance Fender before the meeting as Fender was leaving the building. Fender said he was not on duty and was simply walking to his car. When Benson began to scream at him, calling him a “pussy,” Fender said that Benson couldn’t talk to him like that and got into his vehicle and left.
That claim stuck with Benson after the Deputy Police Chief left and she brought it up with the police officer working security at the event as she went through security. She asked if harassment laws applied to police and received a non-committal answer from the officer before moving over to the windows outside the city council meeting.
Benson has been banned from the city council chambers for 45 days after multiple outbursts during city council meetings. She appealed and lost, blaming “corrupt” city attorney Tamara “Twat” Niles for choosing an independent mediator who would side with Englewood unfairly.
As she watched the meeting through the windows, she noticed a man was scrolling on his phone while watching the meeting. Benson alerted the police officer at the security desk of her accusations against the man and wanted the security guard to go in and remove the man from the meeting for “obviously” recording.
Recording of the city council meetings is not allowed within the chamber unless the person doing the recording is sitting in the designated “press area.” Benson has been upset that a man sitting outside of the press area received a man from the Civic Center for recording last month.
After the officer observed the man scrolling on his phone, he said that it appeared that the man was simply scrolling on his phone. Benson was not satisfied with this answer and briefly confronted the man when the city council took a break later in the night, with the man assuring her that he was not recording.
Increasingly bored and with no real purpose to be “at” the meeting, Benson brought up random topics during her three-hour livestream. At one point, Benson brought up a recent incident that she described as “road rage” that happened between an Englewood police officer and her husband.
Benson said that her husband had just driven through a road in Englewood that contained the Flock Safety automated license plate recognition system when an Englewood police vehicle “paced” his car for a few seconds.
According to Benson, the police vehicle then cut her husband’s car off aggressively and “weaved between lanes” for a few blocks before making a left-hand turn and disappearing from his view. Benson said that this was targeted harassment and that her husband would be filing a complaint with the Englewood police.
Turning her attention to newly appointed police chief David Jackson, Benson warned that the Englewood police chief was “on his third strike” with her as he would not acknowledge her at his swearing in ceremony, which was closed to the public.
She said she would think of “removing strikes” if Jackson started firing some of the police officers she felt were “corrupt” on the Englewood police force. She then said that the firings would never happen as unions and other protections were in place to keep even the most corrupt cops on the job.
Benson later brought up city council member Joe Anderson, again calling him a “cult leader” as he leads a Church in the area. She said that she had learned that he has six children and asked her followers to imagine what he was “doing to six children as a cult leader.”
She later confronted Anderson after the meeting ended, as Anderson was in the process of retrieving his bicycle. She said that Anderson was a cult leader, would never be mayor and that she would have a “better day” if Anderson quit the city council when he asked her how she was doing.
Benson moved to her car taking on random subjects for the next hour. Of them, her stance on Denver’s homeless micro community stood out. Last year she was given the ability to choose two slots at the new facility for two people that she worked with as an advocate for the homeless.
Recently, she learned that one of the two people she had decided to house at the facility had moved into permanent housing. When she inquired about the open slot, she was told by the Denver Mayor’s office that she no longer had any influence over the slot as it was a one-time deal.
This may be a continuing issue with Benson and the Mayor’s office, as she stated that she had two possible candidates living on the streets in the area of the micro community.
We will continue to monitor Benson’s on-going outrage.
