In mid-November, Brendan Ng, a social worker, discovered a backward swastika spray-painted onto a telephone pole at the intersection of Mercer and Belmont on Capitol Hill.
“I was totally shocked when I first found it,” he recently told The Stranger. “I didn’t think it would affect me as much as it did. I almost started to hyperventilate.”
Although communities of color have a tenuous relationship with police, local nonprofit leaders (and Seattle Police Department officials—surprise!) encourage the public to report hateful vandalism, which is on the rise. In the 10 days after Donald Trump’s election, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that 867 hate incidents, which range from hateful graffiti to public intimidation, were reported across the United States. Forty-eight of those incidents happened right here in Washington State.
