When we reported on the poop vandal smearing feces on the underside of Capital Bikeshare vehicles on the U Street corridor this month, the first reaction we got, predictably, was “Eeeeeeew!”

But then there was a second response, which was basically, “I’ve seen instances of this, too.”

In addition to the two-week spate of feces smeared underneath bikeshare handles (especially dastardly because it meant that the poop was hidden from view), and the previously known instances of poop placed on bikeshare seats, it turns out that scooters have become targets, as well.

Over the summer, scooters in Alexandria were smeared with feces shortly after they arrived on the city’s streets. And the undersides of scooter handles in Navy Yard have similarly been streaked with poop approximately a dozen times during the past two months. Among the eight brands of dockless scooter currently permitted to operate in D.C., none in particular appear to have been targeted.

Well, for starters, here’s photo evidence from the most recent crime scene last week. Has happened at least a dozen times. pic.twitter.com/xvHW2OPd67

— Parker Williams (@JParkerWDE) November 12, 2019

It remains unclear what kind of feces was used.

Capital Bikeshare has staff trained in Hazmat recovery and removal, a spokesperson for the company told DCist. The bikes in question were cleaned in a warehouse and then inspected again before they were re-released onto the streets of the District.

We’ve reached out to all eight of the companies operating scooters in D.C. to see what their process is for cleaning vehicles that have been struck by a poop vandal.

Lime has experienced a couple of these incidents, and dealt with them by replacing the grips of the scooters in question. But the company doesn’t see the issue as pervasive. Bolt says that its workers are constantly performing quality control inspections and are “trained to take immediate corrective action to damaged or vandalized scooters,” a spokesperson writes over email. And Bird says that it has “zero tolerance for vandalism” and will “aggressively address it when it occurs.”

This still leaves us with the ever-important question of why people decide to smear feces in such a deliberate way on these shared vehicles in the first place.

There are some severe mental disorders that include fecal smearing among their symptoms. However, the instances in question appear targeted and at least somewhat premeditated.

D.C. isn’t the only city where the scooters have fallen victim to bowel movement vandals. A Vice headline from 2018 reads “San Francisco Is Fighting the Scooter Trend With Poop and Vandalism.” The implication is that the poop is a direct reaction to the sudden appearance of the dockless scooters on the city’s streets.

And that is one possibility for whoever is vandalizing the vehicles in the District, says Daniel Lieberman, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University. “The very first thing that comes to mind is anger—it could be anger against these bike riders or it could be anger against society in general,” he says.

Another option he notes is that it’s a prank. “The essence of a practical joke is that it can give us pleasure to watch other people suffer. There are a number of different words for that. One of them is sadism, or schadenfreude—the idea that we get that pleasure watching people get it who have it coming to them.”

He says that smearing feces is often associated with two groups: babies and people with extremely severe psychotic illness, “both people who are extremely powerless.” Lieberman says that it’s possible that “whoever did this is feeling very powerless … Many of us are feeling more and more powerless. It often feels like there’s nothing we can do, and this might be the ultimate in immature protest.”

Lieberman says that smearing feces differs from smearing another substance underneath the handles because “the primary symbolism of it is an enormous sign of disrespect … if you take a dump on somebody’s personal area, that’s about as disrespectful as you can possibly get.” He also says that “feces can be sexually fetishized,” and doesn’t rule out that potential in these incidents.

At the very least, Lieberman says, “to systematically apply it to scooters on more than one occasion, one has to think that whoever is doing that does not have the same disgust reaction to feces as an ordinary person … The first thing that strikes me is the kind of work that went into behavior like that.”

We don’t know who or how many people are doing this. D.C. police did not receive a report for the incidents near U Street NW this month. (And the problem of feces in the streets isn’t by any means limited to shared vehicles. This month, the Mayor’s Office of the Clean City beefed up its “Pride Is Picking Up” campaign to promote the responsible disposal of animal waste.)

But in the interest in figuring out what might motivate a poop vandal, I put out a call on social media last week for folks who have done this. None of the people who replied had specifically smeared waste on a vehicle, though I heard from a few people who engaged in the age-old prank of lighting a bag of dog droppings on someone’s front porch or smearing it on a door handle. All of the people who reached out were targeting specific individuals who they believed had wronged them

One Northern Virginia man says he’s been a poop vandal twice in the past decade. He would only speak to DCist about his experience anonymously, because he still lives in the community, is currently looking for a job, and doesn’t want his name associated with these actions.

The first time, he says, happened about eight years ago, amid issues with people letting their dogs poop on his lawn without cleaning it up. (He’s not the first person with that issue, either.) He was sitting in the kitchen, looking out at the front lawn and saw a woman walking her dog. “The dog stops and poops in our yard and she starts walking down the street without making any attempt to clean up,” he says. He ran outside to ask if she planned on cleaning it up, but “she waves her hands at me” in a dismissive way, he says, and kept on walking. He made a note of which house she went into.

“I sit back down and I just get progressively angrier,” he says. “A few minutes later I thought, to hell with this.” He put her dog waste in a newspaper bag, he says, and later on, he brought the bag of poop and the tongue depressor over to her house.

“I took the poop and smeared it very meticulously on her door handle, on the part where you would not see it, so next time somebody used the front door they got a handful of poop,” he says. “I was kinda thinking that I was teaching her a lesson. As I walked away I was thinking, gosh I wonder if I’m going to hear from the police on this, but I never heard a word, good, bad, or indifferent.”

The other instance, he says, happened a few years later. He had an altercation with a man driving a car with a license plate that “indicated some kind of affinity for Ayn Rand” in a school parking lot when he was dropping off his kid. About a month after that, he saw the same license plated car in the parking lot. He decided to run home.”I had just walked the dog so I had a fresh bag of poo. I grabbed another tongue depressor, went back and smeared under the car door handles where it couldn’t be seen,” he says. “Again, I never told anybody, I don’t know what happened, but hopefully he learned his lesson.”

Those are the consequences, the Virginia man says, for “being a jerk.”

While it may be difficult to determine who or how many people are at fault for the poop vandalism afoot, Lieberman says there’s one possible clue to keep in mind. “Oftentimes, when people pull a prank like this, they want to stick around and see people’s reactions to it,” he says, comparing it to the behavior of arsonists, who studies have shown are keen to remain on the scene of a crime. “When people discover this, it’s very possible the perpetrator is around.”

Previously:
A Poop Smearer Is Hitting The Underside Of Capital Bikeshare Handles