Penn Hills meeting hijacked briefly by callers using racial slurs, profanity

Multiple people who have yet to be identified hijacked a virtual Penn Hills Council meeting Monday, interjecting loudly with racial slurs and profanity.

The comments came at a point in the meeting when Scott Andrejchak, the municipality’s manager, began presenting to council and the public his proposed budget for 2021. It is unclear, however, if the comments were directed at him or anyone in particular.

Soon after the vulgarity, Jesse Toth, the municipality’s Information Technology Director, booted the callers off the publicly available meeting. Toth said he kicked off more than five callers.

He said he began by muting one of the callers.

“But since they wouldn’t stay muted, I had to remove them from the meeting so we could continue with the meeting and get on to important topics on the agenda,” Toth said.

He said he wasn’t sure of the source of the comments, saying it could have been a recording being played on multiple calls. Toth said he also noticed one caller using the meeting’s comments field to use racial slurs.

Prior to the outburst of racial slurs and profanity by a male voice, audience members were speaking about an ordinance aimed at regulating bed and breakfast establishments – an ordinance that was tabled in October. Council did not act on the ordinance, instead delaying a vote until December or January.

At several times early in the discussion, different voices interjected with “Can you hear me?” and other garbled feedback. Penn Hills council members and the manager reminded audience members to mute their microphones.

But the microphones did not get muted and several male and female voices became clearer and louder, culminating in a volley of racial slurs and profanity directed at no one in particular. The person did not name anybody.

At the onslaught, Mayor Pauline Calabrese said “we’re getting hijacked.”

Andrejchak paused his presentation to allow Toth the time to remove those callers from the meeting.

The manager later called the episode “reprehensible” and apologized to everyone who heard the comments.

“Whoever did that should be ashamed of themselves,” he said, adding he condemns the words in the strongest terms possible.

He said the municipality is having internal discussions on what they can do to prevent something similar from happening again.

Toth said the municipality pays around $30 a month to use GoToMeeting, a web-based software that allows people to host and join online meetings. He said the municipality’s administration has considered migrating to Microsoft programs by spring 2021. If that’s the case, the municipality would switch to using Microsoft Teams.

In the meantime, Toth said, the municipality will continue to use GoToMeeting, and he will continue to monitor meetings.

“That was the first time this has happened. We hope that it doesn’t happen in the future,” he said.

But as more public entities have moved to hosting virtual meetings during the coronavirus pandemic, cases of so-called “Zoom-bombings” have become prevalent across the country. Uninvited hackers get into online meetings and disrupt them — sometimes with pornographic images, hate images and threatening language.

By the end of May, the FBI had reported that it had received nearly 200 reports since March in which people had broadcast pornographic material. Officials have said people who engage in that criminal activity could face state and federal charges such as disrupting a public meeting, computer intrusion, using a computer to commit a crime, hate crimes, fraud or transmitting threatening communications.

Andrejchak said the municipality will prosecute those responsible to the fullest extent of the law.

Penn Hills Police Chief Howard Burton was not immediately available to comment.