Swastikas removed after three months
A MISCOMMUNICATION between police and City Services in Canberra led to swastika graffiti being left in a park next door to the Chabad ACT centre for three months.
A MISCOMMUNICATION between police and City Services in Canberra led to swastika graffiti being left in a park next door to the Chabad ACT centre for three months.
Chabad ACT said they complained to the Australian Federal Police about the graffiti in late May. “Our community bring their kids to this park regularly. There are still Holocaust survivors in our community,” Chabad ACT said in a statement.
“It needs to be taught that painting swastikas … is also a hate crime.”
The graffiti remained for 12 weeks due to an “administrative error”, but was removed following media reports last week.
Offensive graffiti is usually removed within 24 hours by City Services, however in this case the police did not report that the graffiti was offensive.
Canberra’s Rabbi Shmueli Feldman said he did not think this was a racially motivated incident, and that it was “probably just a bored teenager”.
“We are not going to remove it ourselves as we would like to see the police attend the scene first to look at it properly and see if they can identify the tags etc and document it before removal,” he said prior to the removal.
A spokesperson for ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr told The AJN that this kind of “offensive, disrespectful graffiti is unacceptable in Canberra”.
“There are reporting processes in place within government to remove offensive graffiti like this as soon as possible. This happens regularly – but clearly in this instance, those reporting processes broke down,” the spokesperson said.
“The lengthy delay in removing this graffiti was not acceptable. The ACT government will be reviewing our processes to determine exactly how this delay occurred as well as what can be done to avoid it happening again in the future.”
EVAN ZLATKIS
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