Police investigating hate-related graffiti in Toronto’s east end

Toronto police say they are investigating graffiti spray-painted in the city’s east end as hate motivated.

Police said Wednesday that officers were called Sunday to Phin Park near Danforth and Jones avenues.

Investigators said an unknown person had spray-painted hate-related graffiti on structures within the park.

Photos posted to social media suggest the vandalism took aim at Black and Jewish communities, with racist language and swastikas spray-painted.

“I feel that such incidents are designed to prevent Jewish (and Black) members of the public from feeling as if they can engage like normal citizens,” said researcher Richard Robertson with B’nai Brith Canada.

The investigation marks the third instance of hate graffiti reported in the city’s east-end since late November, when similar imagery was reported at Monarch Park. Last month, anti-semitic vandalism was found outside the Toronto United Mennonite Church in The Beaches.

“After consultation with the service’s specialized Hate Crime Unit, the investigation is being treated as a suspected hate-motivated offence,” Toronto police said.

City Coun. Paula Fletcher, who represents the area, said “this neighbourhood is such an inclusive, peaceful, accepting neighbourhood. So, whoever is doing this, it’s actually terrible.”

“I don’t want to speculate too much but there used to be an active Nazi-type group in the east-end of Toronto. That was a generation ago. I don’t know if that’s starting back up. Many, many years ago the neighbourhood held a rally against the (Ku-Klux-Klan). This is not the community of today. I’m very happy the police are treating this latest incident as a hate crime.”

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network told Global News it is possible the incidents could be connected.

“Our suspicion is that it’s one individual. I also wouldn’t rule out that it was more than one individual,” said executive director Evan Balgord.

“Young men tend to disproportionately carry out these kinds of hate offences.”

Balgord added that the normalization of hate rhetoric online is a driving force behind the surge of hate crimes in Canada.

According to Statistics Canada, in 2021 there were more than 3,300 police-reported hate crimes across the country. That was an increase of 27 per cent over the previous year.

More than half of victims were targeted for their race or ethnicity, while religion was a factor in roughly 25 per cent of reported incidents. Twelve per cent were victimized for their sexual orientation.

“When we look at hate crime statistics, those are statistics provided by the police and we know that other survey data collected by Statistics Canada that those police report statistics actually only represent one per cent of hate crimes in Canada,” Balgord said.

“A lot of people don’t report to police either because they don’t think they’re going to be taken seriously or they don’t want to be victimized. An even larger part of it is that the police only report hate crime statistics that they themselves have bothered to investigate, that they themselves have found some evidence for.”

Robertson says action and education are paramount to combatting hate motivated offences.

“History has a propensity to repeat itself if we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past.”