WOODSTOCK — The town’s police department has hired a new patrol officer to replace Joe Swanson, the former police chief whose employment saga has included two attempted demotions and an ongoing legal fight with the village.
A lawyer representing Woodstock informed Swanson that he effectively resigned when declined to report for patrol duty after Village Trustees last month upheld a second attempt by Municipal Manager Eric Duffy to demote Swanson.
In an April 20 email, attorney John Klesch wrote: “(Swanson) has chosen to no longer be employed by the Village unless it is as chief of police. Given the police chief position is not available to him because he has been removed from that position, he has voluntarily resigned employment.”
Swanson’s attorney Linda Fraas objected to the town’s rationale.
“They’re claiming resignation,” Fraas said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’m claiming: How can you resign from a job you never applied for?”
In March of this year, the Woodstock Village Trustees held a second hearing to consider whether Swanson should be demoted. The first was held in April 2025, stretched for 14.5 hours and finished around midnight.
Following the first marathon hearing, the Village Trustees voted to uphold Duffy’s decision to demote Swanson based largely on staff complaints about Swanson’s management style and conduct on the job.
Swanson appealed, and in December, a Windsor County judge ruled that the trustees did not follow the appropriate steps to remove Swanson from office last year and reversed the decision.
So Duffy moved to demote Swanson again. In March, trustees then held a second round of hearings and subsequently upheld the decision to demote Swanson again, hoping this time the process would pass legal muster.
The trustees determined there was just cause for Duffy’s demotion of Swanson to patrol officer, “given his serious and egregious violations of numerous workplace rules,” according to the decision.
After the trustees’ decision, Fraas filed another appeal in Windsor Superior Court that claimed the latest demotion constituted unlawful breach of contract, no “just cause” existed as a matter of law, no prior notice was given to Swanson before his demotion, no egregious acts were committed by Swanson, and there were also issues with due process and evidence of bias.
Fraas has said that Swanson will soon be seeking to double the civil suit of $5 million filed against the town in May 2025 following the initial demotion.
Both the appeal and the civil suit remain pending.
Court filings show that Klesch, Woodstock’s attorney, is seeking an extension to file a response to Swanson’s appeal from the standard 30-day requirement to 90 days, due to the length of Swanson’s appeal and the voluminous transcript from the hearings.
Amid this legal back and forth, the Woodstock Police Department hired a new patrol officer last week.
Chief Deputy Claude Weyant of the Windsor County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that Deputy Jabri Black resigned from the department last week for a job at the Woodstock Police Department.
Black, the 27-year-old former full-time deputy originally from Asheville, N.C., told the Valley News in a phone interview on Wednesday that he is now working in Woodstock.
On his decision to leave the Windsor County Sheriff’s Department after three years, Black said, “there’s just a lot of uncertainties. I’m not entirely sure what direction the department’s going to go.”
Efforts to reach Duffy, Klesch and Police Chief Chris O’Keefe were unsuccessful on Wednesday.
