The New York Police Department (NYPD), on Monday, released a video that captured the moment a skateboarder was tossing a gray paint on a George Floyd statue in Union Square. The figure was unveiled just three days ago alongside sculptures of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in 2020 by police in Louisville, and John Lewis, the late Congressman who died last summer, shortly after Floyd was killed.
Surveillance footage around 10 a.m. captured the unidentified suspect on a skateboard ducking behind John Lewis’ statue. The vandal then mixed something in a container, skating past Floyd’s statue, hurling gray paint on the face and of the statue, and then riding off. According to a spokesperson for the NYPD, the vandal hasn’t been arrested as of Sunday afternoon.
A moment after the vandalism occurred on Sunday morning; several people have volunteered to scrap the gray paint away as police officers took a report about the vandalism. In June this year, the same statue of Floyd in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was vandalized with stencil marks. The same perpetrators also vandalized another statue of Floyd in Newark, New Jersey.
The matter is under investigation by the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force, who describes the incident as criminal mischief.
