The Metropolitan Police Department says it is investigating an anti-Semitic slur spray painted on a building near Georgetown as a hate crime.

Someone spray-painted “kike,” a derogatory word for a Jewish person, on one of two brick buildings used to store recreation equipment at a field that belongs to the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. It isn’t clear exactly when it went up in the Burleith neighborhood, but residents say it is very recent.

“I am sure, personally, that this went up after Charlottesville. There’s no way [it had been up for long],” says Kishan Putta, who lives around the corner and was alerted to the graffiti’s presence yesterday by a neighbor. He participated in a neighborhood clean-up recently that started from the site, and it was not defaced at the time. When Putta went jogging on the track this morning, workers had already covered it over with brick-red paint.

“So many people walk by there. Even though its a quiet neighborhood it a very walking-heavy—neighborhood dog walkers and residents and the university, tons and tons of students, and then people associated with the hospital,” he says. “This graffiti was not in the center of the city; it wasn’t on monuments or trying to make a national statement. It’s trying to make a local statement—trying to scare our neighbors.”

Georgetown University invested in the refurbishment of the track more than a decade ago and it continues to maintain the site, which the university’s track team regularly uses. A spokesperson for the school said the Georgetown University Police Department is offering assistance to MPD.

A graduate student alerted the university to the graffiti and MPD was contacted, according to Eric Langenbacher, the president of the Burleith Citizens Association and a professor at the university.

“I can’t believe this is happening in 2017—especially in our community. I condemn this act and the underlying sentiments unequivocally and vehemently,” Langenbacher wrote to a local listserv yesterday. “This is not what Burleithians, Washingtonians, or Americans stand for.”

Georgetown University spokesperson Rachel Pugh says the school notified MPD immediately yesterday upon learning about the graffiti.

Commander Melvin Gresham of the 2nd District responded to messages from Putta and Langenbacher shortly before noon today. “I did not have prior knowledge of this incident. I can assure you that the MPD will exhaust all means in an attempt to find those responsible,” Gresham wrote on the 2D listserv.

A police report was completed late this afternoon. The responding officer wrote that the slur had already been painted over by the time they arrived.

“MPD urges the community to call us immediately whenever they need a response, including derogatory graffiti,” says D.C. police spokesperson Rachel Reid. She did not return a request for comment about why police didn’t respond the day that it was reported by Georgetown officials.

The incident was reported to the Department of General Services, which manages District-owned buildings, on August 15 and removed the following morning.

“The Department of General Services typically removes offensive graffiti within 24 hours of reporting,” spokesperson Donna Harris said in an emailed statement. In a follow-up message, she said that DGS took photographs of the vandalism and submitted them to police.

“The Charlottesville terrorism is thought of as pro-Confederate, anti-black, but it was hate of all forms. Hate against immigrants, non-Christian religions, anti-Semitism. Some of the loudest chants were about Jews,” Putta says. “It is bad enough to know that we have people not only harboring such views living near us, but for them to want to share that publicly and strike terror in their neighbors.”

Of the 18 reported incidents of bias-related crimes related to religion in 2016 (up from 5 the year prior), 12 were directed at the Jewish community.

Earlier this year, someone drew a swastika in the bathroom of the School Without Walls. Last summer, a Chinatown crosswalk was repeatedly defaced with swastikas and the word “JEW” inside the rats before police made an arrest. Later, that same crosswalk was the site of anti-Muslim graffiti.

Elsewhere in the region, anti-Semitic graffiti was also found at a Jewish community center and at a church in Fairfax, Virginia, among a number of other hate crimes and racist incidents.

Bias-related crimes rose 62 percent in 2016 in the District from the year prior, D.C. police announced earlier this year.

The biggest increases were in crimes related to ethnicity or national origin, which quadrupled, and those related to religion, which tripled. “We will not accept this as the new norm,” Police Chief Peter Newsham said at the time.

The spike in hate crimes led Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh to call for the creation of a dedicated Muslim liaison unit.

“It’s important when you have communities that may be targets of prejudice or hate that there be a connection to MPD because there has to be a level of trust that’s built up so that people know they can rely on MPD, and so officers in a special unit can be trained in a way so they understand the special concerns that people in these communities have,” she told DCist in March.

Legislation calling for a liaison unit focused on religious minorities was introduced and co-sponsored by 10 members of the D.C. Council in March.

“It is particularly relevant to this case,” says Putta, who sits on the D.C. Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs and has advocated for MPD to create such a unit. “Hate crimes are hitting home in D.C. not only against Muslims, but Jews as well.”

MPD says it has already expanded outreach to minority religious communities in 2017 and plans to add more training.

“We have officers coordinating with the Jewish and Islamic communities, which have both been targets of hate crimes in the past 18 months,” Reid says. “We are also developing training for officers on minority religious communities in the District.”

Calling the slur a “crude and hateful word that has been used for a century to intimidate and offend the Jewish community,” the Anti-Defamation League lauded MPD, the Georgetown Police, D.C. Public Schools, and Georgetown for their response. “We are pleased that the community has come together to collectively reject this demonstration of hate, and reaffirm DC’s values of diversity and respect,” said Doron Ezickson, the ADL’s Washington D.C. regional director, in a statement.

Putta also says that a vigil or meeting for the community is planned.

“I think its important to show that we’re united against this,” he says, “That we’re not going to allow such hate and terrorism to thrive in D.C.”

This post has been updated with comment from Georgetown University, the Department of General Services, the ADL, and information from the police report, as well as to correct a photo credit and information about the community clean-up.

Filed Under: anti semitism, crime, georgetown, grafitti, mpd,