Panel: Troopers discriminated against Clemmons director

A state commission has found that the Vermont State Police and the Vermont Department of Public Safety illegally discriminated against the African American director of the Clemmons Family Farm based on her race and gender. 

In a 5-0 vote in March, the Vermont Human Rights Commission found there were reasonable grounds to believe that troopers violated Vermont’s Fair Housing and Public Accommodations Act in 2017 in their interactions with Lydia Clemmons, the director of the nonprofit center for African American arts, culture and agriculture in Charlotte. 

They based their vote on a report compiled after a three-year investigation by attorney Nelson Campbell, a commission investigator, who found that state police were adversarial toward Clemmons and challenged her pleas for protection from a man who allegedly harassed and intimidated the family in late 2017. 

In addition to conducting new interviews, Campbell reviewed court documents; more than 2,000 emails, including internal police correspondence and communications with Clemmons and others; photographs; body camera footage; and 911 calls. 

“This case illustrates why people of color and women fear turning to the police, and distrust government agencies of all kinds,” Campbell wrote in her conclusion. “The power that law enforcement has to manipulate the facts through its exercise of discretion in the delivery of services is significant.

“The Vermont State Police allowed Gregory Barreda to prey on Dr. Clemmons and terrorize her and her family and destroy a building on one of the few African American farms left in Vermont.” 

In an interview with Clemmons that was included in the report, she said she believed she would have been treated differently if she were not Black. 

“I remain convinced 1,000 times over that had my family been white, the troopers or the DAs would have intervened and removed Barreda immediately,” Clemmons told Campbell. 

Vermont Public Safety Commissioner Michael Schirling defended his agency’s handling of the case. The report detailed several defenses of police actions, including complicated overlapping of civil and criminal cases; insufficient resources; issues of “proof and fairness”; and more. 

“The report in its entirety and almost every fragment of information that is discussed in the report was taken in the light least favorable to the state police,” Schirling said on June 23.

The Clemmons Family Farm, which was founded by Clemmons’ parents, is the only Black-owned landmark on the state of Vermont’s African American Heritage Trail.

The commission’s investigation was released to several news organizations last week.

The commission concluded that troopers gave preferential treatment to Gregory “Grey” Barreda, who was living at the Clemmons Family Farm for a short time before police became involved.

Instead of enforcing a court order that was supposed to protect Clemmons, troopers repeatedly sided with Barreda, according to Campbell’s report. In a preliminary investigative memo from October 2018, Campbell told the Vermont Attorney General’s Office that Lydia and her brother Josh Clemmons, who managed the family property, said troopers’ behavior went beyond negligence. They believed they were treated in a “markedly hostile” manner by the Vermont State Police. 

In an interview with VTDigger, Clemmons said the state police did little to nothing to protect her, her family and their farm. She said it is important that a third-party authority investigated and reported what happened “because Black people’s stories of discrimination are often not believed.”

“This is a terrible story, and we hope what happened to our family wakes up white Vermonters to just how perilous it is for Black people to live in this state,” she said. “It is critical that Black Vermonters have equal protection under the law. Clearly, this is not the case.”

In reading the report, Clemmons said, she was struck by “the lack of accountability within Vermont’s law enforcement system,” from junior troopers “up to [Attorney General] TJ Donovan’s office.”

“Everyone in Vermont should be concerned,” she said. “The report documents our family, along with several white women, pleading for help, and this predominantly white male law enforcement system from top to bottom turns a blind eye and doesn’t care.”

Schirling said that when he took on his current role in 2019, he was briefed on several matters, including this case. 

“When I got that initial briefing, what was still being telegraphed by the investigator was that there were no indications of discrimination,” he said, adding there were no later signs that view had changed.  

“When the report came out, it was a shock,” Schirling said of his reaction. “It had turned 180 degrees from everything we had been told up until that point.” 

After the commission’s finding had been rendered, Schirling said, he contacted the panel’s chair, Rep. Kevin Christie, D-Hartford, to express his “concern and disagreement” with the report’s conclusions and investigative process.

The commissioner said the report did not contain the “full context” of how operations are done in the field.

He said at times officers try to “schmooze” with people or use other tactics to try to get them to comply with requests or to deescalate a situation, referring to troopers’ interactions with Barreda.

“That’s exactly what was mischaracterized in the assessment of these events,” Schirling said.   

Schirling’s comments mirrored those in a statement the state Department of Public Safety issued June 23 regarding the case. 

“Our disagreement with the findings here should not diminish the public’s willingness to engage the [Human Rights Commission] when there is a perceived or real grievance,” the commissioner said. “We just think the findings in this case are not supported by the facts.” 

In addition to the statement, the Department of Public Safety posted on its website June 23 “all public information” relating to the incidents in the case. 

Among the documents posted on the website is a July 2020 memo from Campbell stating at that point Campbell was “unable to find evidence that would sustain a finding of discrimination based on race, sex or color.” 

In the final report, issued four months later in November 2020, Campbell wrote about having differing views of the matter. 

“This investigator’s own perspective shifted over almost three years as the evidence kept coming in — from sympathy for the Clemmons(es), to an acceptance of the VSP’s defenses, then finally, back to a recommendation of reasonable grounds,” Campbell wrote.

Since the commission investigation was made available to the press last week, Clemmons has been scrambling to find private security for the farm and a place for her 98-year-old parents who are in frail health. She is concerned about “blue lives matter” backlash and how Barreda might react to the report. And she is “in anguish” by what she saw as troopers’ unwillingness to protect the farm and the family. 

“Where does that leave you as a taxpaying citizen of Vermont?” Clemmons asked. 

The commission’s discrimination ruling comes on the heels of similar allegations of racism by law enforcement and a failure to protect state Rep. Kiah Morris, another Black woman whose case was investigated by the Human Rights Commission, culminating in a report released earlier this year. 

Morris and her husband, James Lawton, say they were the victims of racial harassment by a white supremacist, and a systemic failure by local law enforcement, the state’s attorney and the Vermont Attorney General’s Office to protect them. 

Morris, one of several Black lawmakers in the General Assembly, dropped out of her third race for the House of Representatives in 2018 because of the threats to her family that began in 2016. 

The commission report issued in May concluded that the Bennington Police Department discriminated against the couple, downplayed threats to their safety and failed to disclose information that could have helped protect them. Several weeks before the report came out, the town issued a formal apology and paid a $137,500 settlement to Morris and Lawton. 

Messages left at two phone numbers listed for Barreda were not returned. 

Escalating threats 

The report details a four-month period in late 2017 in which Barreda moved into a building on the Clemmons’ Charlotte property, known as the Barn House, which included several bedrooms, an event space and an Airbnb. 

The Clemmons family first met Barreda that year when he presented himself as a young sheep farmer who needed pasture for grazing. The Clemmons family wanted to bring livestock back to the farm and agreed to lease an area for his flock.

In addition, according to the report, they “reluctantly” allowed him to rent a room on the third floor of the Barn House.

It soon became apparent, however, that the 45-year-old Tunbridge resident had no sheep.

And there were other oddities: Barreda didn’t have the cash he needed to pay a $1,000 security deposit, according to the commission investigation, and although the Clemmonses were “initially hesitant,” they allowed him to pay in silver coins, as he said that was all he had.

Clemmons thought the payment was strange, and after researching the coins on the internet, she alerted state police. Barreda was detained and charged with grand larceny for allegedly stealing silver coins worth more than $27,000 from a landlord in Windsor County who had evicted him, according to the report. After Barreda was arraigned, he was released and immediately returned to the farm.

The Windsor County court issued a protective order prohibiting Barreda from contacting, abusing or harassing Clemmons and four other witnesses in the case. The court also ordered Barreda to abide by his lease, which restricted access to areas of the Barn House outside his room on the third floor. 

At the same time, the Clemmonses began eviction proceedings to remove Barreda from the Barn House, according to the report. 

The two separate cases — the criminal grand larceny case and subsequent conditions of release barring Barreda from harassing Clemmons, and the civil eviction case in which Clemmons was trying to evict Barreda from the property — became increasingly tangled in the troopers’ response.

In several email exchanges detailed in the report, they complained of using state police resources on a civil landlord-tenant dispute. At other times they suggested the language in the court’s orders was unclear. 

Troopers from the Williston barracks failed to enforce the order for more than two months, the commission investigation found. At one point in mid-October 2017, after the court issued a new clarifying order specifying Barreda could not come within 300 feet of Clemmons, her residence, her place of employment and her motor vehicle, it took troopers more than two weeks to serve Barreda, for reasons that the investigator could not determine. 

Clemmons maintained — and the investigator agreed — that troopers’ focus on the civil case was misplaced. She argued they should have charged Barreda with violations of his release conditions in the criminal matter, and failed to charge him with threatening behavior and property damage, including breaking smoke detectors, locks and more. 

As the response dragged on, Clemmons said, the threats escalated. In the earliest weeks, Clemmons said, Barreda was disrupting events, parking his truck in ways that blocked the entrance to the property, and allowing unleashed doberman pinschers to roam. He left out machetes, underwear and dirty dishes in areas he was not supposed to be in, according to the report. 

By December, according to the report, Clemmons had hired private security on the property because she feared for her safety. The report found Barreda brought firearms into the Barn House and stored them outside of his room, and that Clemmons was concerned that materials Barreda had left out could be used to make a bomb.

The Williston barracks received 65 calls from both parties September to December 2017, according to the Human Rights Commission report. About eight troopers appear to have been involved in the case, based on email records. 

Meanwhile, an investigator for the commission found that, while troopers often extended the benefit of the doubt to Barreda, their behind-the-scenes attitude toward Clemmons was “hostile.” One sent internal emails in response to Clemmons’ calls for help by urging his colleagues to “stop the madness.” Another described her as “intelligent, persistent and manipulative.”

Sometimes, the report found, that extended to interactions with the Clemmonses: In an early encounter in October, audio footage from a body camera worn by Vermont State Police Cpl. Andrew Leise depicted his initial tone toward Clemmons as “alternately impatient, brusque, accusatory, and confrontational, peppered with occasional perfunctory politeness,” according to the report. 

The report notes that prosecutors in Chittenden and Windsor counties became increasingly involved in the case as the Clemmons family’s lawyer complained, but that there was an “attitude … of deference to the (Vermont State Police).”

Clemmons’ direct appeals to Vermont Attorney General Donovan were ignored, Clemmons said. She reached out to him personally in 2017, again in 2018 and then sent a formal letter to Donovan and the Department of Public Safety in February 2019. 

Charity Clark, chief of staff for the Vermont attorney general, confirmed in an email that the Clemmons family reached out to the office.

She added that, when that happened, the office was “responsive” and tried to “facilitate a law enforcement response” with the appropriate police agencies and prosecutors’ offices, while also representing the Vermont State Police, an adverse party in the Human Rights Commission proceeding. 

In 2019, Barreda was found not mentally competent to stand trial on the grand larceny charges.

A judge ultimately granted Clemmons a one-year no-stalking order against Barreda in December 2017, records show. The order was extended in February 2019 for a three-year period, according to court documents.

Meanwhile, the Human Rights Commission investigation took more than three years.

During that time, the statute of limitations for illegal discrimination under the Fair Housing and Public Accommodations Act lapsed, meaning the Clemmons family has no legal recourse. 

Schirling, the public safety commissioner, said that, in response to this case, the department has been working on how in the future to handle similar situations where there are repeated responses to the same parties over a period of time. 

One option, he said, would be to assign a specific investigator.

“Rather than having three, four, five, six, 10 different people responding depending on the day of week, time of day, to have more of a case manager,” he said. “So that you have someone who understands all the nuances, can develop relationships with the parties involved, and try to problem-solve on another level, that is one of the takeaways.”  

The Human Rights Commission is currently in negotiations with the Vermont Attorney General’s Office and retains the right to file a lawsuit within six months of any ruling, according to Bor Yang, executive director of the commission, who declined to comment. 

Physical damages to the Barn House building, unpaid leave, legal fees, moving fees and private security totaled in excess of $100,000, according to Clemmons. As a result of the harassment and damage, the family business was forced to close from October 2017 to May 2018. 

In the report, Clemmons said it would be “impossible to attach a financial value” to her family’s experience, and she found the state police’s conduct to be “far more painful, more humiliating and more haunting to us than anything Barreda ever did to us.” 

Barreda did not swear a duty to protect her family, she said, but the state police did. 

“I cannot begin to describe to you how it felt for our family to be treated the way we were treated by the VSP. As if our lives, our property, our business, and our longstanding position in this state and in our local community meant less than nothing,” Clemmons said in the report. “We will never forget this, and we will never, ever get over this.”