For Rigel Robinson, serving on the Berkeley City Council in California was “incredible.” In a district that he calls the “epicenter” of the city’s housing crisis, he’d been able to lock in zoning reforms and get approval for more than 2,000 new housing units since he was first elected in 2018. Then the youngest person ever on the council, he’d gone on to run for mayor last year. “We have materially reduced homelessness during the last five years,” he says, “and I think it has a lot to do with the new perspectives . . . on our council.”
Those new perspectives come from younger candidates and candidates of color, says Robinson, a 27-year-old Korean American. However, they’re not always the most popular. “We’ve upset a lot of people,” he admits. “The People’s Park [Housing] project is the epicenter of that.”
A controversial plan to build residences that serve students and unhoused people on a historic public space, it’s been the focus of relentless threats directed at Robinson by his constituents. Some have followed him around with megaphones, yelling that he was funded by the Ku Klux Klan or “owned” by the University of California, Berkeley—“all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories,” he says. Antagonists wearing disguises would pop up at Robinson’s public appearances to film him. They threatened his life.
For years, Robinson accepted the harassment as part of the job, a necessary evil of performing public service. But when threatening messages began appearing at his home, which he shares with his fiancée, he decided the abuse had gone too far. He remembers telling his fiancée, “If someone ever throws a brick through our window, I’m resigning immediately,” he says. “Sometime after that I realized, if that was a serious conversation we were having, then we were already way past that point. That’s not normal.” Robinson acted with his family’s safety in mind—he quit his job and ended his mayoral run.
Robinson isn’t the only public official facing a surge of abuse. A January report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute, found that 89% of state legislators and 52% of local officeholders experienced abuse ranging from insults to harassment and stalking. Of the more than 1,700 public officials surveyed from all 50 U.S. states, 43% at the state level and 18% at the local level were attacked or threatened.
In a political climate marked by the January 6 Capitol attack and a stranger attacking former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband at their home, more than 40% of local officeholders reported being less willing to run for office again due to the abuse they face. Some 20% of state legislators and 40% of local officials said the abuse made them “less willing to work on controversial topics,” with guns and abortion being the two biggest.
Female officeholders disproportionately feel these effects. Along with officeholders of color and LGBTQ+ officials, women experience identity-based hate speech, creating a particularly hostile work environment. To avoid the stream of vitriol, many officeholders say they have held back from engaging with their constituents in public forums, both online and in person.
That’s a huge problem, since communicating with constituents is how “democracy is supposed to work,” Robinson says. Officeholders who responded to the Brennan Center’s survey emphasized how much they welcome debate and disagreement, says one author, Gowri Ramachandran, deputy director in the elections and government program. “They just really don’t want to have to, as part of that, be afraid for their own safety.”
Previously praised for granting constituents easy and widespread access to their representatives, social media has become a minefield, say public officials surveyed. The seamlessness for people to anonymously post legitimate concerns extends to bad actors, who “feel freer to say intimidating or abusive things,” says Ramachandran, adding that the hate flies between constituents, too.
Social platforms are also ground zero for misinformation that spurs hate, which Robinson observed firsthand. “It does worry me when so many people in our community . . . are more eager to believe inflammatory infographics from anonymous social media pages than . . . reputable journalists in our community,” he says, referring to how some harassment directed at him echoed incorrect information posted online about his work.
Another big problem is who is most discouraged from participating in politics because of abuse. With 50% of women reporting that continued harassment made them consider leaving politics, there’s a concern that some recent increases in diverse representation might reverse. (Per a December CNN report, the vast majority of those prosecuted for threatening public officials—95%—were male.) Democrat Cyndi Munson, the minority leader in Oklahoma’s House of Representatives, says she got into politics to help women and girls in a state with one of the highest female incarceration rates in the country. Now she gets criticism for “being a young woman, an Asian American woman, and an outspoken woman,” she says.
The harassment hasn’t pushed her to resign. “It only encourages me to keep going,” she says. But graver threats and physical attacks engender further obstacles for officeholders, particularly financial. While the president has the Secret Service for protection, lower-level officials must pay for their safety out of pocket. “People may have to take cabs and rideshares more so they’re not driving home alone from events [and] set up alarm systems for their homes,” Ramachandran says. “That’s just one more way [that] makes it harder for people of lower financial means to run for office.”
Robinson knows of politicians who’ve paid for security at their private residences, but for him that was never an option. “I’m a tenant in an apartment building,” he says. “For as long as I’ve been in this job, my primary expense has been rent. Installing cameras or hiring a security detail . . . these are just not serious conversations for me.”
To mitigate threats to public officials, the U.S. Joint Counterterrorism Assessment Team recommends officeholders maintain close relationships with law enforcement, who can do things like case public speaking sites in advance. The Brennan Center offers recommendations like training officeholders in bystander intervention techniques for resisting hate-based violence. States could also offer security detail to incumbents and allow candidates to spend campaign finances on protection. Law enforcement could monitor threats to public officials, but in a transparent way that “preserves civil liberties,” Ramachandran says.
At Munson’s office, her legislative assistants sort through email and phone abuse so that she’s “not bogged down with negativity each day,” she says. Robinson had contemplated filing a civil restraining order at one point, but none of his harassers’ actions met the requirements for him to go that route.
“I almost remember wishing truly and deeply that one of [the people threatening me] would finally get around to actually punching me in the face so that I could pursue that action, because their behavior was so persistent, so chaotic,” Robinson says.
Harassment takes a toll on public officials’ mental health as well, and services addressing that tend to be scant in officeholders’ workplaces. In Oklahoma, Munson cites a dearth of services beyond the Highway Patrol and State Bureau of Investigation. “I believe lawmakers and our staff need on-site access to mental health professionals who are not tied to faith-based or religious organizations,” she says. Since traumatic situations come up regularly in their line of work, “having an on-site counselor to talk to immediately after those moments would go a long way in terms of resiliency in doing the job.”
If these types of changes aren’t made to protect officeholders and candidates, Ramachandran fears it will “reduce the pool of people who are willing to serve the public,” resulting in “harmful long-term consequences,” like less-accessible representatives and those other than wealthy white men avoiding political posts. During Donald Trump’s presidency, politically motivated threats to public officials increased 178%.
A few weeks after resigning, Robinson feels like he made the right decision. The threats and harassment stopped almost immediately, and the urge to move out of his home has dissipated.
“I’m so very lucky that I feel resolute . . . to say that enough was enough. To say that my happiness, my significant other, my family, and my future were more [important] to me. I don’t regret that,” he said in early February, between “furiously” applying for jobs. He’s looking for posts where he can make the same kind of impact but in the background—the kind of job where megaphone-wielding strangers won’t follow him down the street.
That doesn’t mean leaving the City Council was easy for him. “I’ll always have complicated feelings about stepping away from something that I found so much purpose in,” Robinson says. “That, frankly, I think I was pretty good at.”
