Amid threats of violence, online harassment, CT elected officials look for solutions

A seemingly innocuous mishap — a campaign sign posted in the wrong yard last September — resulted in the most frightening voicemail Rep. Tammy Nuccio has ever received.

Spitting vitriol through the state Capitol’s phone receiver, the man allegedly threatened to shoot Nuccio “in the face.”

“I did not know this person. I’d never spoken to him … I didn’t even know what he looked like,” Nuccio said. “I was terrified, I was panicked. I was closing all the shades in my house. I ended up leaving the state for a few days, almost a week, just till I could try to figure out what was going on.”

Nuccio peeled her “Vote for Tammy” magnets off her bumper. She started shopping outside of town to avoid a chance encounter at the grocery store or gas pump. But even at home, the idea that the man could cross the mile of woods that stretched between his property and Nuccio’s backdoor was a little too tenable.

“I still, to this day, get up and do the dishes in the morning and I have a window that looks out into my backyard and I pull the shade down,” Nuccio said. “My kids that are older, they yell at me all the time and say, ‘You can’t let this affect your life for the rest of your life.’ But, it’s just … you don’t stop thinking about the fact that somebody hated you so much that had never spoken to you, that had never had a debate with you, that had never asked how you felt about anything, could turn around and say that they were going to kill you.”

From the state to the municipal level, public officials in Connecticut are reporting a rise in threats and harassment. The issue, which lawmakers say is stifling healthy discourse and steering qualified candidates away from politics, has only been discussed in terms of anecdotes. A new proposal in the General Assembly aims to quantify the phenomenon in the realm where lawmakers observe some of the highest incidences and fewest protections — social media.

“This is not about people not disagreeing with one another. But this is clearly in the face of a growing trend of online threats escalating to in-person violence,” H.B. 6410 co-sponsor Rep. Aimee Berger-Girvalo said before voting the bill out of committee. “We are simply looking to take a closer look so that we can catch up on an outdated response to a very 21st-century problem that is not going away.”

If passed, H.B. 6410 would create a working group to examine “harassing, abusive or threatening behavior” towards state and municipal officials online and make recommendations for reporting and addressing harmful conduct, including possible changes to state law to “balance a citizen’s right to freedom of speech versus an individual’s right to be free from harassment.”

Berger-Girvalo said the logic behind the bill is “To do something, quite frankly, before we experience a tragedy of our own here in this state.”

Fear ‘comes with the territory’

Between 2021 and 2022 the Connecticut State Capitol Police conducted eight threat and harassment investigations and recorded 72 instances of “disturbing communications.”

The rising wave shook lawmakers and prompted meeting arrangements between the FBI and Capitol Police. But H.B. 6410 co-sponsor Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw said the true number of threatening and harassing communications is likely even higher, with some lawmakers encountering antagonism daily.

Kavros DeGraw said she and colleagues are not quick to report online incidents to law enforcement, often waiting till misogyny-laced messages that threaten rape and murder cross the point where “your safety might be on the line.”

Kavros DeGraw said the ensuing fear is inescapable.

“You take it with you everywhere you are. You take it into the building with you. You take it to public events with you. You take it walking alone,” Kavros DeGraw said. “This isn’t about somebody disagreeing with your policy. This is about somebody invading your personal safety.”

Whereas everyday citizens can hide trolls, delete offensive comments and cultivate their own online communities, First Amendment implications bar public officials from doing the same. H.B. 6410 would help determine what online protections public officials may be entitled to within constitutional guidelines.

“It’s pretty typical that the law often trails advancements in technology,” said Rep. Jennifer Leeper, the bill’s first co-sponsor. “This is not a simple topic, this is really a complex issue and it’s really brushing up against the bedrock of America.”

H.B. 6410 passed out of the Government Administration and Elections Committee last month but not without drawing the ire of skeptics who see the proposal as an attempt to muffle dissenting voices and curtail free speech.

GAE Ranking Member Sen. Rob Sampson called the bill a “bad look.”

In remarks before a 13-6 joint favorable vote that fell along party lines, Sampson recalled a 2019 incident where a woman had to leave a gun legislation hearing after texting, “If I had a gun, I’d blow away Sampson …” But Sampson said if such language is already actionable as a crime, there is no need for H.B. 6410’s working group, alluding that other comments to lawmakers are par for the course.

“It’s our job,” Sampson said. “This is what we sign up for. If you’re going to run for office and be an elected representative of your constituents, effectively, you’re putting yourself in the line of verbal fire, not literal fire, and you’ve got to live with that. You’ve got to recognize that that comes with the territory.”

Leeper and her colleagues say they recognize the importance of social media as a platform for difficult and at times emotional conversations but hope H.B. 6410 can provide public officials the guidance to curb venomous online behavior.

“Nobody’s interested in restricting free speech,” said Leeper, who receives near daily messages calling her a pedophile and commenting on her children. The goal of the legislation “is in no way to push back on dissenting opinions.” Instead, she said, “the purpose is to try to protect our democracy.”

Polarization and online anonymity

Amanda Crawford, a journalism professor at the University of Connecticut whose studies include misinformation and the role of journalism in democracy, said the threats and harassment aimed at municipal and state leaders are the byproducts of rising tensions, extremism and conspiracies on the national level.

“We’re very divided as a nation. And it’s not that just we’re split over public policy, we’re split over reality itself, about what is really happening in our world, what is real, what is false,” Crawford said. “We’re portraying our political opponents as evil, as enemies, rather than just as someone who disagrees with us on a policy notion. And that kind of attitude is trickled down from our national politics and our national polarization down to the level of our school boards.”

Crawford said the distance social media provides between the harasser and the harassed only amplifies this vitriol.

“On social media, people get to hide behind anonymity. They get to hide behind their computer screen. And what we’ve seen for many years now is that people will say things online, they probably wouldn’t say in person,” Crawford said. “When we see a bulk of threats now, is it possible that some of those threats are rooted in real hate and real intended action? Absolutely.”

For Crawford, the fault and the solution lie among our political leaders. With improved media literacy, civic education and national leaders who stand by truth instead of misinformation, Crawford sees a way out.

“We definitely need to find our way to lower the temperature, right? To find places where we all agree on issues. And you would hope that places like our local governments would be the places that we could find that kind of common ground. But as long as people are paying attention to these big national fights and allowing themselves to be motivated by these emotional issues, that’s going to be a challenge,” Crawford said.

But local boards of education have emerged as an ideological battleground. In Enfield, Amanda Pickett said debates have mirrored national controversies. She said the board began to see more pushback from radical constituents railing against critical race theory. That expanded to opposition against anything related to the LGBTQ community and questions about the school health curriculum.

When she joined the Enfield Board of Education in 2021, Pickett said she wasn’t naive to the fact that her town is “a small microcosm of the larger society,” but Picket never thought she would encounter the level of vitriol that she has experienced in her tenure.

Last year, when Pickett opted for a more inclusive school calendar that ditched “Christmas Break” for “Winter Break,” Pickett said Enfield’s Republican town committee posted her personal number and address on Facebook, encouraging members to reach out. Within minutes Pickett said her phone line blew up with some callers warning that she “better move out of town.”

Then, on Feb. 15 of this year, Pickett and her fellow board members received a document mailed to their home addresses. When Pickett opened her envelope, she said the letter was filled with offensive language, racist threats and hateful intimidation.

“I am married to a man of color, I have two children in my home, and that incident really just kind of tipped it over for me,” Pickett said. “The climate has been really ugly and it’s really scary as a concerned mom and parent sitting on a volunteer school board. … What we’re facing now, for our board of ed is when we’re trying to get new members to try to run and elect, it’s not really something that folks want to be part of.”

After receiving the letter, Pickett said, her family immediately left their home. Once they returned, Pickett said she “made some lifestyle changes” like adopting a dog and installing a security system.

Talking to her children about what happened was one of the most difficult parts.

“My kids are only in kindergarten in second grade. And although we have a lot of courageous conversations in my home about lots of topics, I wasn’t quite ready to share with them the level of threats that arrived at our doorstep,” Pickett said. “My kindergarten student could feel like something wasn’t right. So I kind of just shared with her that some not nice things were sent in the mail and that Mommy had to talk to the police about it.”

How prevalent is harassment?

A 2021 study from the National League of Cities found that 81% of local officials who participated in their survey “reported experiencing harassment, threats and violence.” Seventy-nine percent said they experienced these incidents on social media and 66% said harmful communications occurred online via email or public forums.

In another study of local officials conducted between 2020 and 2022, researchers from the Anti-Defamation League and Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative estimated that women officials are targeted with harassment and threats at a rate 3.4 higher than their male colleagues.

Since joining the General Assembly in 2009, State Sen. Patricia Billie Miller said political tensions have only grown more chaotic, particularly after the election of President Donald Trump.

Many Connecticut legislators cited the attack on the husband of former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or the Jan. 6 insurrection, as a tipping point where they began to question their own safety in our polarized nation.

But, for Miller, the moment she paused and pondered the perils that could accompany her political position was in January of 2011, when a young assailant shot then-U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords and 18 others during a town hall in a supermarket parking lot outside of Tucson.

At the time, Miller would hold “Let’s Talk” coffee sessions to meet her constituents, but after the shooting, Miller said she became “very cautious of exposing” herself to that type of situation. She stopped the coffee sessions and never started them again.

Last year when three bullets shot through the state Capitol’s south side windows, Miller said it once again shook perceptions of safety.

“We live in a very volatile society now. … The things that I’m hearing, the things that people are saying even about me online, I never thought that I would witness that in Connecticut,” Miller said. “It’s been a state where we respected each other’s opinions, and I just don’t see that happening as much anymore.”

Miller said she’s hopeful that if H.B. 6410 passes, that the studies conducted by the working group will help move conversations about the security of public officials forward.

“You have to study it, because it’s such a new area that we have to be careful that we don’t infringe constitutional rights,” Miller said. “But I think that there should be some protection, that elected officials should be protected.”