Editorial: The political sign stealers and vandals

Published 5:00 am Sunday, September 22, 2024

We saw a man uproot a political yard sign Tuesday in the clear evening light and throw it on the ground.

It wasn’t his yard. It wasn’t his sign.

It was across from Harmon Park in Bend. The sign was a Harris/Walz sign. That is not the point.

We were walking the dog, crossing Harmon Boulevard. Straight ahead, there was a woman pulling on the arm of a man in a yard with several yard signs.

Something wasn’t right.

Then he pulled up the sign and threw it to the ground.

We have spoken with a person who lives there. It wasn’t them.

Perhaps foolishly, and emboldened by our German shepherd-looking companion, we got involved.

“Is that your yard?” we asked.

“No,” he said.

“Then why are you messing with it?” we said.

He didn’t answer. The woman with him, though, repeated what we said to him: “Why are you messing with it?”

The man and the woman crossed the street toward Harmon Park. By then, we were on the sidewalk in front of the house.

We thought about marching in and putting the sign back up. But we decided that might provoke a messy confrontation. Sure enough, when we glanced back, he was standing on the other side of the street facing us and waiting. We figure he was looking to see if we put the sign back up.

We walked on and that was it.

We didn’t call the police. Didn’t think it would be worth their time.

We asked Bend Police Lt. Adam Juhnke later about pulling up a yard sign and leaving it on the ground. Is that a crime?

“It depends on the specifics, it ‘could’ be trespassing (ORS 164.245) depending on the location of the yard sign, it ‘could’ be criminal mischief III (ORS 163.345) if there was a ‘substantial inconvenience’ to the owner or another person or tampers/interferes with the property of another,” he wrote us in an email. “It also depends who owns the sign. For example, many political signs are the property of the political candidate or party. If there was a large political party banner on a fence and the banner was damaged but not the fence the owner (political candidate) could possibly be the victim but not the property owner. There can be a lot of factors, and unfortunately, it is not as simple as yes/no, always/never, but rather depends on the totality of the circumstances in each specific incident.”

We hear about people vandalizing or stealing political signs almost every election. It’s the first time we have seen it happen.

Is taking down signs simply free speech? Nearly harmless political shenanigans? A sign of a Constitutional doom cycle? Desmadre?

None of those strike us as right.

We don’t know what was going on in the man’s head. Whatever it was, it seems sad. The sign was back up, last we checked.