‘This kind of stuff is not tolerated’: Calgary man removes hate stickers from city fixtures – Calgary | 24CA News
A Calgary man is singlehandedly taking it upon himself to take away messages of intolerance from mild poles and indicators positioned there by hate-based teams throughout town since final yr.
Using a paint scraper, Graeme says he’s been eradicating stickers with hate speech which have been affixed to metropolis fixtures since March 2022.
Some of those stickers he says he’s eliminated learn, “white lives matter” and “defend the white race,” and “white revolution is the only solution,” which he calls an “absolute disrespect to the community.”
“A lot of it is hate speech. Especially for the hate speech, it’s just, I don’t want it in my neighbourhood, I don’t want to see it and I know a lot of other people don’t want to see it,” says Graeme.
Graeme began noticing the stickers round Calgary following the 2022 trucker blockades alongside the Coutts border. Since then, he estimates that he’s eliminated greater than a thousand of them.
Since he started eradicating the stickers over yr in the past, he says he’s been harassed and even adopted by teams for eradicating the stickers and clearing messages from sidewalks written in chalk.
Global News has agreed to maintain his final identify non-public on account of worries about potential violence towards him if anybody from the hate teams acknowledge him.
“There’s been a couple scary situations where I’ve had to call up police and there’s been real fears that they would assault me or enact violence,” he says.
On Wednesday, the Calgary Police Service hate crimes unit offered stats to the police fee which confirmed hate crimes within the metropolis are on a regarding rise.
Between 2019 and 2022, hate-motivated incidents and crimes have greater than doubled, going from 115 to 246, whereas investigations have additionally climbed throughout the identical timeframe from 160 to 371.
Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek says the rise is a name for concern.
“For those of us who feel it every day, the level of hate is escalating in ways that I haven’t seen before,” she says.
“When the RCMP issues a report and Calgary Police Service also issued a similar report that hate is becoming deeper and more embedded in our society.”
She calls the rise an indication that individuals have to rally collectively towards hate, however provides that legal guidelines have to be enforced as nicely.
“We need the Crown on board. Without the Crown exercising its authority to make sure that we are pressing charges and those charges stick, all of the enforcement measures in the world will not work,” she says.
Until there are extra penalties, Graeme says he’ll proceed his every day chore of discovering methods to erase the messages.
“This kind of stuff is not tolerated, and I think that’s an important message to send,” he concluded.
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