photo by: City of Lawrence screenshot

Misty Bosch-Hastings is pictured at a Lawrence City Commission meeting on Oct. 17, 2023.

In the wake of a Lawrence city commissioner expressing ongoing concerns about abusive behavior at public meetings, a city department head has spoken out about similar issues, alleging that city staff members have been subjected to not just highly uncivil, but also criminal behavior, as they perform their jobs.

“Where else can you go to work and be verbally assaulted, bullied, screamed at while spit is flying in your face and it’s ok?” Misty Bosch-Hastings, director of the city’s Homeless Solutions Division, wrote on social media Thursday evening. “I can’t imagine anyone would be ok with this behavior if it was happening to you. Civil servant doesn’t mean deserving of abuse.”

Bosch-Hastings then went on to describe some of the abuse she said she and her team had received.

“I and my colleagues that work trying to end homelessness have been on the receiving end of some of these attention seekers[‘] attacks in the community, just for working for the city,” she wrote in Facebook comments on a Journal-World story about Commissioner Amber Sellers having chosen in the past to observe general public comment remotely instead of in the commission room. “I’ve had their spit flying in my face while they screamed at me. They broke into my office and pushed me. They’ve [set booby] traps hoping my colleagues would fall in them and injure themselves.”

Bosch-Hastings did not name names or provide any specifics about the allegations, and she did not reply to followup emails from the Journal-World, but she said in her comments that she found the treatment “disgusting and NOT ok in any work environment.”

Like Sellers, she expressed disappointment that the behaviors seemed to have become normalized, referring to people who “feel that working for the government means you sign up for this kind of treatment. That it’s part of the territory. It’s absolutely not.”

Bosch-Hastings said that her concerns were not related to receiving criticism.

“Absolutely agree a civil servant must do that,” she wrote. “It guides the work and lets me know if I was out of line. Gives me different [perspectives] to consider. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.”

Sellers expressed similar sentiments in September, when she wrote that enduring abusive behavior — including derogatory name calling, racial slurs, threats and bullying at public meetings — should not be considered as “just part of the job.” She said the prevalence of such behavior at the city’s business meetings — which she distinguished from offering criticism — could lead to a dangerous mentality and potentially embolden someone to act with violence.

Bosch-Hastings was hired as the city’s homeless programs coordinator in the summer of 2023, and in February of this year she was named as director of the Homeless Solutions Division, a new city department created to address a rising tide of homelessness across the nation that has deeply impacted Lawrence in recent years.