By Brittney Matejka

Racist graffiti has been on downtown building for 8 months

Aug 21, 2017 | 5:43 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – A downtown building in Medicine Hat has had the letters K-K-K scrawled across it for several months. Inspector Joe West with the Medicine Hat Police Service said that the racist tag isn’t new and has been there since January.

“It’s the property owners responsibility to clean that graffiti up and we do have a graffiti bylaw that requires within a certain time period for property owners to cover that graffiti up,” he said.

Andrea Webb was walking downtown on Saturday morning when she spotted the tag and reported it to bylaw officials. She believes that symbols like these are having a bigger impact here at home after the demonstrations in Charlottesville, VA by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups turned deadly.

“I think that it grows in silence and its really important for the people that these types of groups attack to know that there are others who are willing to stand up for them and with them, and that they aren’t alone and we won’t stand for this type of thing,” she said.

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West said he does not believe there has been an increase in hateful graffiti in light of the recent events.

“We see some where a great deal of attention time and paint is taken to do elaborate tags and we see graffiti with no meaning at all and more an expression of foolishness than anything else,” he explained.

Bylaw officials say a notice will be issued to the property owner with the expectation that is will be cleaned up in the next one to two weeks.