FRANKLIN, N.H. — Police Chief David Goldstein hasn’t said much since he caught flak for publicly rebuking a local restaurant owner on Facebook last month. His controversial post has since been removed. But he and city officials haven’t issued an apology or a retraction.
Goldstein wrote his Feb. 16 post in response to concerns that Miriam Kovacs, owner of the Broken Spoon, had expressed about how the Franklin Police Department and other city officials responded after white nationalists bombarded her business last summer with a deluge of online harassment, including fake reviews with antisemitic messages.
Goldstein’s post named Kovacs and accused her of wrongly implying that the city had taken no action. He said his department responded appropriately, consulting with state and federal law enforcement partners on an investigation that’s still open. City officials, meanwhile, published a statement on hate and intolerance and established a task force to address hate-related concerns, he noted.
“I welcome honest discourse, even if it runs counter to my own,” he wrote in the since-deleted post. “But facts are important and should not be ignored because they may be a counterpoint to an expressed opinion.”
Kovacs called the chief’s pushback a form of “retaliation” that sparked a fresh wave of online harassment against her, as the Globe reported earlier this month.
Goldstein’s 379-word statement was publicly available on the department’s page for at least three weeks after it sparked public outcry. It had collected hundreds of comments questioning his decision to rebuke a community member by name. Some commenters called for his resignation. Then it disappeared.
Kovacs said her partner, a police officer who used to work for Goldstein, saw the post had been taken down. He alerted her on Monday, but nobody from the city has contacted her, she said.
“I’m surprised they would just let it mysteriously fade away like that,” she added.
City Manager Judie Milner, who has spoken publicly in support of Goldstein this month, said on Tuesday that the chief’s post was removed without explanation because that’s how the department typically handles items it posts on social media.
“It is normal department procedure to remove articles after they have served their purpose,” Milner told the Globe in an e-mail. “For example, the posting regarding Halloween hours is taken down (after) Halloween. I’m told typically one month after.”
Posts about a drug arrest made in January, a hoax about active shooter threats in early December 2022, a career day held in November 2022, the Franklin Fall Fest held in October 2021, and a McDonald’s fundraiser advertised in September 2021 were all still visible on the department’s Facebook page on Tuesday, among many other posts that appeared to have served their purposes.
Goldstein defended his post against the initial backlash last month, telling The Concord Monitor that he would not have publicly named Kovacs if her name had not already been in the public square through her own commentary and press interviews.
More recently, Goldstein has kept mum. He has not responded to interview requests from the Globe. When a reporter approached him at city hall last week, he emphatically declined to comment.
When asked about the post’s removal, Mayor Jo Brown said this situation is being handled by Milner, Goldstein, and city attorney Paul Fitzgerald. Brown referred questions about the post’s removal to Milner.
Kovacs said the police chief’s post illustrated how she feels local officials view her and behave toward her. She wondered whether they might have hoped no one would notice the post was gone. But removing it doesn’t un-ring the bell of the harm done, she said.
“I don’t think people can do something of that magnitude and delete it and just expect that to make the repercussions go away,” she said.
The quiet removal comes as Franklin officials deal with a multi-layered controversy in and around the city’s police department. It’s not just about Goldstein’s displeasure with Kovacs. It’s also about a formal warning he issued to officer Mark Faro for dating Kovacs. And it’s about conflict with members of the police union who publicly announced a vote of “no confidence” and accused Goldstein’s leadership team of fostering an environment of retaliation.
Faro left the department last month for a new job, and officer Jacob Drouin, the union leader who signed a statement explaining the “no confidence” vote, was placed on paid leave the night before a Dec. 17, 2022, union meeting he was organizing.
City manager Milner told the Globe on Tuesday that Drouin is on paid administrative leave; however, Drouin told the Globe on Tuesday that his paid leave was converted to unpaid leave on March 3, the day after the Globe published a story in which he was quoted.
Drouin declined to comment on the details of the city’s charges against him, but he described them as non-criminal alleged policy violations.
In switching his leave from paid to unpaid, city officials cited the results of an internal investigation, not his comments to the press, Drouin said. He emphasized that he is speaking to the press in his individual capacity, as allowed by a state law that protects freedom of speech for public employees.
Drouin said city officials have wrongly treated him like a malcontent or disgruntled employee.
“I’m neither,” he said. “I’m just trying to uphold the standards of accountability.”
Steven Porter can be reached at steven.porter@globe.com. Follow him @reporterporter.