Holocaust Memorial Vandalized -- Yes, Again. The Culprit: All of San Francisco
For the third time in a period of only several months, an unknown vandal hit San Francisco's Holcaust memorial -- meaning, whatever other adjectives you could use to describe someone who sees fit to desecrate the memories of 6 million Jews and 11 million victims of the Nazis, add "unoriginal."
Also unoriginal was the description police released of the man witnesses claim they saw defacing the monument: Six feet tall with a black bike messenger bag. Good Lord! That's ... ME! But it's not just me -- it's an appreciable portion of San Francisco. This begs the question -- what is the use of releasing to the general public a description that could result in the incarceration of the entire Lower Haight?
Sgt. Lyn Tomioka of the San Francisco Police Department confirmed that the eyewitness to this crime was not Stephen Colbert -- who cannot see race. Whomever it is the police interviewed saw enough to note that the man had a black bag and a white bandana, but couldn't peg what race the alleged perpetrator is. We don't want to wade too deeply into racial politics -- it's the holidays! -- but I think we can agree that the color of one's skin could be a useful tool to release to the general public if you hope to actually find this miscreant -- and its absence makes such an ID impossible and the inclusion of the rest of the description irrelevant. At the very least, it could help rule people out of this incredibly broad swath of six-foot-tall bike-bag carrying men if we knew if the suspect's skin tone more closely resembled Conan O'Brien's or Djimon Hounsou's, no?
Oh well. We'll catch the next bastard to deface the Holocaust memorial, right? Right?
Also unoriginal was the description police released of the man witnesses claim they saw defacing the monument: Six feet tall with a black bike messenger bag. Good Lord! That's ... ME! But it's not just me -- it's an appreciable portion of San Francisco. This begs the question -- what is the use of releasing to the general public a description that could result in the incarceration of the entire Lower Haight?
Sgt. Lyn Tomioka of the San Francisco Police Department confirmed that the eyewitness to this crime was not Stephen Colbert -- who cannot see race. Whomever it is the police interviewed saw enough to note that the man had a black bag and a white bandana, but couldn't peg what race the alleged perpetrator is. We don't want to wade too deeply into racial politics -- it's the holidays! -- but I think we can agree that the color of one's skin could be a useful tool to release to the general public if you hope to actually find this miscreant -- and its absence makes such an ID impossible and the inclusion of the rest of the description irrelevant. At the very least, it could help rule people out of this incredibly broad swath of six-foot-tall bike-bag carrying men if we knew if the suspect's skin tone more closely resembled Conan O'Brien's or Djimon Hounsou's, no?
Oh well. We'll catch the next bastard to deface the Holocaust memorial, right? Right?
-- Joe Eskenazi
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