Around Orange County, and across North Carolina, people have recently reported instances of political signs being stolen, damaged or defaced.
In the last two weeks, both the Chapel Hill Police Department and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office have reported several instances of community members’ political signs being taken from their properties. While some say the yard signs simply go missing, others say they’ve been taken multiple times or been defaced. A report from the sheriff’s office Thursday said one Hillsborough resident had a President Donald Trump political sign marked up to say “Make America Racist Again,” while Chapel Hill residents along Smith Road recently found Joe Biden signs torn up and spray painted.
Jeff Nieman is the Assistant District Attorney in Prosecutorial District 18, which includes Orange and Chatham Counties. He says this issue tends to happen close to every election season and often some signs are removed for non-political reasons. There are, however, laws in place to prevent political signs from intentionally being damaged or taken out of spite.
For political signs on public property, there is a North Carolina statute outlawing the vandalizing removal of political signs that fit the lawful criteria. Nieman says doing so is a Class 3 misdemeanor, which has a maximum punishment of 20 days in jail.
“Although that’s pretty rare, that somebody would get the maximum for that level. A Class 3 misdemeanor is the lowest level misdemeanor in our classification. Unless you have a pretty significant prior record, then actually the only punishment you could receive for that offense would be a fine.”
But when political signs are removed from private property, Nieman says it becomes an entirely different scenario. Trespassing onto someone’s property potentially brings its own set of charges, but damaging or stealing someone’s sign also adds onto the potential punishment.
“If you were to deface someone’s sign on their property,” says Nieman, “it would be a Class 2 misdemeanor, punishable up to about 60 days [in jail.] If you were to steal someone’s sign on their property, that would be larceny, which would be punishable by up to about 120 days [in jail.]”
Nieman says from the prosecutor’s perspective, people who are having signs taken or damaged need concrete proof that is the case. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office has suggested to some community members to install video cameras if there’s repeated incidents. The assistant district attorney shares similar sentiments, saying compelling evidence would be needed to ever bring a charge on someone.
“For our [legal] purposes,” he says, “if all we have is ‘there was a sign there’ and then the next day ‘there wasn’t a sign there,’ it probably wouldn’t be clear enough evidence that someone intentionally took it.”
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