An internal investigation into Burlington Police Deputy Chief Jan Wright’s social media use did not disclose dozens of comments she’d made anonymously, prompting some city officials to question the thoroughness of the probe.
Among those calling for a fuller accounting are several Progressive city councilors, members of the Burlington Police Commission and a state representative from the Queen City who wants to know, “What more is out there?”
“There’s not a lot of belief or confidence that this was just some isolated incident,” said Rep. Selene Colburn (P-Burlington), a former city councilor.
Indeed, Wright has used aliases on the internet since at least 2015, when she created the Twitter handle @honeybadger159. The city did not include that account in its probe because, officials said, she didn’t use it to bash others.
Yet Wright did use at least two other pseudonyms, according to the city, which documented 19 instances in which the deputy chief acted inappropriately online. Alternately portraying herself as “Abby Sykes” and “Lori Spicer” — sometimes on the same comment thread — Wright would pick fights with others, defend police tactics and savage the news media.
Some 40 additional posts, first uncovered by VTDigger.org last week, show that Wright expressed herself without inhibition under the cloak of anonymity.
In one instance last year, Wright derided University of Vermont economics professor Stephanie Seguino, who studies racial disparities in police traffic stops. In another, the deputy chief anonymously complained about the racial makeup of the civilian board that oversees the city police department.
“The commission is now 6/7th black. Is this representative of the Burlington community?” Wright wrote last June using the Sykes account, commenting on a Seven Days story posted to Facebook.
Burlington Human Resources director Deanna Paluba, who conducted the internal investigation with the City Attorney’s Office, defended the limited scope of the probe. The city stopped searching for Wright’s anonymous posts once officials determined that the deputy chief had violated city policy.
“We needed to move forward,” Paluba said. The HR director was reluctant to commit to further investigation “without new or different information.”
“We do all have other jobs to do,” she said.
That’s not good enough for Jabulani Gamache, a member of the city police commission. While he believes Wright is remorseful, the city’s failure to hire an outside investigator has created “an optics problem,” he said.
“I think the public does have a right to know: How much deeper does this go?” asked Gamache.
Complicating matters is the fact that Wright wasn’t the sole Burlington police official misusing social media. Last July, then-chief Brandon del Pozo created an anonymous Twitter account, @WinkleWatchers, and sent several tweets to troll police department critic Charles Winkleman before deleting the account. When Seven Days asked del Pozo about the handle, he lied and said it wasn’t his. But in December, the chief admitted what he had done and resigned days later.
At that time, Mayor Miro Weinberger vowed to implement policies to govern employees’ online behavior, which the city has never had. To that end, Weinberger retained “workplace expert” Anita Tinney, a $200-an-hour consultant from the Philadelphia-area Employee and Labor Relations Academy. Wanting an “outside set of eyes,” Paluba asked Tinney to review the Wright report before it was made public. The consultant has no written contract, but her scope of work includes a promise to perform social media training.
Tinney has already weighed in on the city’s draft social media policy and has been paid $1,900 for her efforts to date.
City Councilor Jack Hanson (P-East District) worries the city won’t be able to move on from the controversy without a full accounting of what happened. Two top police officials anonymously used social media to harass members of the public, and yet the city’s internal investigation was “the bare minimum,” he said.
Wright had sent him and Councilor Perri Freeman (P-Central District) “friend” requests from her Spicer Facebook account. Wright also misled Freeman when the councilor asked Spicer whom she really was.
Neither city councilor was interviewed about their interactions with Wright’s anonymous accounts, nor were others she trolled online. Talking to the people affected, Hanson said, is “standard procedure for an investigation.”
Weinberger did not respond to interview requests regarding the recently disclosed posts, but he initially told Seven Days that he thought Paluba’s report had been thorough.
“Nothing that I read in the investigation makes me think that there’s a need for further work,” he said on January 27, lauding the police department for releasing the full investigative summary.
“The public is aware of everything we’re aware of with respect to Chief Wright’s posts,” the mayor continued. “I hope that having such a fulsome report will allow the public to fully assess what happened.”
Paluba defended her investigatory methods, which relied on reviewing posts that Wright made on the social media accounts that Wright and her attorney provided to the city. That review was stifled, in part, when Wright told investigators she’d forgotten the password for her Sykes account and couldn’t log in to the Spicer one.
“I investigated based on the evidence that I had in front of me,” Paluba said.
City Attorney Eileen Blackwood confirmed that the city opted not to search every comment thread on Facebook.
“You can either keep going and spend a lot more time looking further, or you can decide we’re going to stop,” she said. “As we put in the report, this was with the knowledge that it’s very possible that something more could come out in the future, and that’s where we are.”
Last week, Seven Days performed a search similar to VTDigger’s and located 22 more online posts by Wright that the city did not include in its report. In one from June 2019, Wright defended the lack of diversity among city leadership by commenting on a Seven Days story about the issue.
“Seven Days – how racially diverse is your staff?” Wright wrote. “Last I checked, your writing staff is like winter in Vermont.”
Seven Days‘ review also found that Wright appears to have registered a commenting account on the newspaper’s website under the Spicer alias in 2017. She made two relatively benign comments then and hasn’t been active since.
“Clearly the activity was more widespread than the report indicated,” said Hanson, the city councilor. “Those are important pieces to include in the investigation.”
The city did review the 1,023 tweets Wright sent using her @honeybadger159 account, Blackwood said; none were problematic, she added, and they did not relate to city or police department business. Wright’s badge number is 159, while “honey badger” appears to be a reference to a popular internet meme.
Seven Days could not independently verify Blackwood’s assertion because the account’s profile and tweets were blocked from public view. But both Interim Police Chief Jennifer Morrison and Deputy Chief Jon Murad have interacted with @honeybadger159 online, and each acknowledged last week that they knew the person operating the account.
“That’s not in that report?” Murad asked of the @honeybadger159 handle, referring to the city’s investigation.
Last April, Wright used the account to respond to a private message sent by @OneNorthAvenue, the handle for the police department’s Twitter account that del Pozo operated for much of his tenure. The city withheld the messages in response to a Seven Days public records request. It was the only fully redacted exchange of 19 involving the @OneNorthAvenue account.
“On this short notice, we are not prepared to change the decision to redact,” Blackwood wrote in an email last Friday in response to a request from Seven Days to review the message.
Morrison has pledged to review Wright’s newly revealed public posts. But the interim chief hasn’t committed to reopening the investigation or altering her decision on Wright’s status with the department. The deputy chief is back on the job, but she will lose five vacation days and must serve three additional days of unpaid suspension. Wright, who joined the force in 2001, must also undergo a restorative justice process with some of those with whom she interacted anonymously online. The deputy chief is also temporarily prohibited from speaking “publicly on behalf of the Department,” according to Morrison’s memo. Wright declined to comment for this story.
“The nature of social media is that you will never know if you have it all,” Morrison said in an interview. “It’s my hope that whatever we can find can be reviewed, and then appropriate next steps will be decided.”
City Councilor Adam Roof (I-Ward 8) said the community needs to consider what reopening the investigation would accomplish, though he’s amenable to the conversation.
“Repairing public trust needs to be at the center of anything that we’re thinking about,” Roof said. “We also have to remember Jan Wright is a person who has dedicated a lot of her life to our community, as well. A balance is hard to strike in these situations.”
Burlington Police Commission member Mark Hughes, however, thinks trust can only be rebuilt by going back to the start. The mayor’s handling of the del Pozo imbroglio was poor at best, Hughes charged. Until the public has a complete account of the scandal, the Wright probe is merely a distraction, he said.
“All of this stuff is going to continue to dribble out,” Hughes said. “It’s going to make us all look like bozos.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Search Warranted? | Burlington’s investigation into deputy police chief’s online misconduct falls short, critics say”
Related Stories
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2020.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
I’m still finding this whole story incredibly unbelievable … here we have a major city of Burlington scandal, and yet NO mention of just how much Instant Runoff Voting/Ranked Choice Voting is to blame!
What did we expect when the rogues gallery of Weinberger, Blackwod and Paluda, the trio who covered up the chief’s internet activity, assigned themselves to investigate this matter? Who could ever magine that it might not be a good idea? To borrow the phrase from another excellant commenter, ” another rake stepped on.” They still have a year left and be assured they’ve got plenty of rakes.
Still waiting for Seven Days to ask the city councilors if they have had any fake accounts. Also I would ask about the police commission.
Start digging Seven Days!
Rama- ranked choice voting just died in the Iowa Democrat primary.
While the department handles their internal personnel affairs of their employees, let’s talk about the citizen’s direct reports of councilmen. The progs are using every possible opportunity to advance their anti-law enforcement agenda, from the inclusion of non-residents on the police commission to blowing a social media misstep out of proportion. They want the officers voiceless and cowed, and I sincerely hope the rank and file police union ensures their next contract keeps the politicians and commission at even greater remove from the officers. While Ms. Wright won’t benefit from the union protection, the officers need to recognize that the progs won’t stop on their own as long as their exploitive behavior continues to get a response out of the City and gets them attention. It’s time to stand up to bullies ladies and gentlemen.
“But officer, the guy robbed a dozen different banks!”
– “That’s irrelevant. Once we found out he robbed ONE bank, we didn’t need to continue the investigation. He’s done his time. Just let it go!”
Have we asked ourselves “what is a fake account”? In most social media platforms you cannot even get your given name as a handle…. you use a nickname. We are now spending time digging into random social media posts of private accounts. What have we accomplished? Communicating to city employees and public servants that they do not have right to privacy or free speech. Tearing down the reputation of a stellar officer and servant to Burlington who has dedicated nearly 24 hours per day for 18 years to helping victims of domestic abuse, child victims of sexual assault, assisting people with mental and health crisis, dealing with the gruesomeness of crimes, accidents, and death, protecting the public from a serial killer, and on and on. I wonder whether the public has any idea what it takes to be a police officer, firefighter, or first responder. – After this, who will want to serve you now?
An independent and impartial investigation is needed now. The “investigation” of a city official by fellow city officials was demonstrated to be a deeply flawed process. An obvious conflict of interest. The result is a cover up. The city council should appoint a senior attorney from the criminal defense or civil rights bar to conduct a thorough investigation, to file a public report, and if a violation of law is found, to prosecute.
Can someone please explain how the commenter*s rant about multiple bank robberies relates to this situation? Thanks!
I wonder, would the commenter feel that said bank robber*s jail time should be doubled, trippled, quadrupled, or quintupled if the bank robber were a minority? Or does this self righteous anger over social media posts only apply to a person who’s white and a police officer?