Vancouver police are investigating yet another act of troubling vandalism in the city’s historic Chinatown.
The latest incident involves graffiti on a pair of lion statues outside the Vancouver Chinese Cultural Centre at Pender and Carrall streets.
Patrol officers spotted the damage, which includes graffiti on the front and back of the statues and what appears to be green paint poured on top of them, just after midnight Friday morning.
“This is so upsetting yet to see another senseless act happen within the Chinatown neighbourhood,” Const. Tania Visintin said, adding that the VPD’s hate crime unit was engaged in the case.
“This community has gone through so much over the last couple of months and really since the beginning of the pandemic, from all the hate crimes that have been targeted at those of east Asian descent, and just the general urban decay of the neighbourhood.”
In January, the south wall of the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, which is on the same block as the cultural centre, was also defaced by graffiti.
Earlier that month, a 47-year-old man was sentenced to eight months in jail for writing racist graffiti on the cultural centre’s windows.
Another pair of lion statues at Chinatown’s Millennium Gate have also been defaced repeatedly with racist graffiti over the past two years.
The incidents have come amid a documented surge in anti-Asian racism coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic.