Someone switched a construction sign in South Carolina to read: “Honk If You Hate N*ggers.” Yes, it’s offensive, but is it actually a crime? The local police think so and are offering a huge reward for the arrest of the perpetrator but seriously, offending people isn’t against the law.
Yahoo! News reports:
Police are on a search in South Carolina for the person who tampered with an electronic road sign, changing its text to display a racial slur.
The text on the sign, set up in the city of Sumter, was altered to display an offensive command that included the n-word.
“HONK IF YOU HATE N*GGERS,” the sign read.
The Sumter Police Department said its officers were notified about the situation around 4:30 p.m. on Saturday.
The digital message board was placed in a high-traffic area on on South Pike West near US Route 76 in East Sumter to warn drivers about an ongoing road construction project, officials say.
Seems like the sign was warning drivers of something entirely different than a construction project. Also, what’s up with that lame blur job? We can still totally read the sign.
The racist language on the sign has been removed, police said.
Sumter Police Chief Russell Roark characterized the incident as an extremely disturbing “scar on the city and its residents that is in no way indicative of the community where we work and live.”
“We will investigate this to the fullest,” Roark said in a statement.
Just out of curiosity, how long was the alternate message up and how many people honked? The answers to those questions could disprove Chief Roark’s claim that the sign wasn’t indicative of the community.
The Sumter Police released images of a man they think may be responsible for switching the sign:
The cops are offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever did this but there’s another bit of information that makes that a little ridiculous:
The department has since learned that the sign belongs to a paving company involved with an ongoing road improvement project on South Pike West.
The sign is owned by a private company, not the city, county, or state. If it was a public sign, a charge of vandalism or maybe disorderly conduct could be used, but it’s not. As long as the person who did this didn’t break anything to alter the sign, there’s no crime.
There’s no potential hate crime either because the message wasn’t a threat. It didn’t instruct anyone to hurt or kill black people, it just asked folks to honk if they hate them. Again, this is offensive but being an asshole isn’t against the law. If it were, every democrat would be in jail right now.
Speaking of which, the timing of this makes me think something else is going on. This outrageously racist thing just so happened to coincide with the 3-day MLK holiday. It won’t be a shock if this was perpetrated by a black activist or democratic party operative to stoke the flames of racial unrest.
If that’s the case, this is the last any of us will hear about it.
