Sebastopol woke up this morning to find several buildings around town defaced with bizarre graffiti. Targets included the Sebastopol Veterans Building/Center for the Arts, the Sportago building on Burnett, an office building wall along High Street, The Redwood on Main Street, Ramen Gaijin on the downtown square and several walls within Ives Park.
The graffiti messaging was anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and seemed fixated on child sexual abuse.
Most disturbing, perhaps, was the graffiti covering the entire walkway leading into the polling place at SebArts. Poll volunteers discovered the graffiti on the walkway when they arrived early this morning before sunrise and contacted the police. The poll workers created a walkway carpet of plastic, duct tape and floor mats that covered the graffiti.
Police Chief Sean McDonagh said he believes the graffiti around town was done between midnight and 6 am. He noted that they had security footage of a person with a backpack walking next to the SebArts building at 2:58 am.
The graffiti vandal also evinced pro-ICE and pro-police sentiments. Red X’s were scrawled across the anti-ICE posters in the windows of the two restaurants. One graffiti in Ives Park said simply “Fund Police” with two hearts.
Not wanting to show the more graphic and disturbing graffiti images, the Sebastopol Police put the “Fund Police” image on the department’s Facebook post about the graffiti incident, noting, “While we are certainly always appreciative of additional funding that would allow us to provide even greater public safety services to our community, this is absolutely NOT the way to advocate for it.”
McDonagh said the Sebastopol Public Works Department worked diligently in the rain this morning to cover the graffiti. By early afternoon, the graffiti in Ives Park had been covered with white paint; the restaurants were able to remove the graffiti on their windows with razor blades; and Sportago had blotted out the graffiti on its building as well. Only the message on the High Street office building remained by the end of the day.
“We’re certainly treating it like it’s a hate incident—a hate crime, quite possibly,” McDonagh said, “and we’ll use the full extent of the law to deal with that if we can find who did it.”
McDonagh asked for help from the public in identifying the perpetrator. He said he was particularly interested in “security camera footage of people walking around the city in those areas any time between midnight and 6 am.” If you have security camera footage or any information about the incident, contact the Sebastopol Police Department’s non-emergency line at (707) 829-4400.
Thank you for reporting on this. As soon as we heard about the graffiti on our building (Sportago/The Livery) this afternoon, we asked one of our employees, Kevin, to try to clean it off. Unfortunately, a passer-by in a car mistook him for the vandal, yelled at him, and called the cops! It really rattled him! He wasn’t able to get the red paint off today, so we plan to paint over it tomorrow. Such a bummer… I hope they identify and prosecute the real vandal.