Stratford Police open hate crime investigation after online exchange about Confederate flag

Police in Stratford, Ont. have launched a hate crime investigation after a social media discussion about the image of a Confederate flag quickly plunged into a flurry of sexually and racially charged insults, sparking public outrage. 

The image of the Confederate flag was posted to social media on June 26 after being spotted through an apartment window from the street by E.B. Smith, a veteran Stratford Festival actor and director who had spent the past decade living in the Ontario theatre town.

The controversy comes at a time when a number of North American institutions are under pressure to retire symbols of the Confederacy. The push has meant the emblem has been removed from the Mississippi state flag and banned by NASCAR. In many cities across the United States, statues of Confederate leaders have been toppled, defaced or removed. 

Smith said he noticed the flag while he was out walking his dog in the evening. He noticed the din of a party emanating from another apartment on the building's upper floors. 

"I looked up because I heard a party going on and times being as they are, with the whole pandemic, I was a little concerned. I saw through the window, in that apartment where the party was, the top third of a Confederate flag that was in view of the street."

Online taunts take violent, racist turn

Smith snapped a picture and posted it to a Facebook group called Stratford Connect, where the discussion around the image quickly spiralled into a frenzy of insults and racially abusive comments, the likes of at least one Facebook user said made him feel embarrassed to call the city his hometown. 

"The vitriol that came back was pretty astonishing," Smith said. "Comments on the thread initially started out that I had invaded somebody's privacy and that quickly snowballed into categorizing me as a predator, as a Peeping Tom, as a stalker."

"One commenter tried to portray me as a pedophile who was looking into windows to try and find underage children to photograph."

"At one point someone commented, 'Why don't you just man up and knock on the door?' And then someone responded, 'Well, then the racists might kill him.' And then the original commenter said 'Well, problem solved.'"

The thread on the Facebook group has since been taken down. A spokesman for the Stratford Police Service said Monday that officers are looking into whether a hate crime took place after receiving "multiple complaints" from the public. 

For Smith, who moved back to his native Ohio on July 1 to continue his studies, the June 26 racist incident was just the latest in a string of such experiences that have coloured his 10-year stay in the community. 

"Over those 10 years I experienced numerous incidents at bars and restaurants and on the streets where people would make various snide comments toward me, hurl epithets my way, sometimes threaten physical violence," he said. 

"My time in Stratford was largely positive but it was always tinged with a sense of caution because I didn't know when I was going to encounter someone who was aggressive."

"Racism needs fertile soil and if those few points and oppressive and racist practice take root, wherever it's happening, they feel encouraged to do so through tacit encouragement or silence. In a way, I hold all of Stratford responsible for this sort of cancer in our midst."

"I'm hopeful Stratford as a community is going to do the right thing," he said. "It's a hard town for people of colour to live and I think that needs to be first and foremost in the community's action plan going forward."

Celebration of diversity undermined by willful ignorance

Stratford is an Ontario tourist town that likes to portray itself as a sophisticated and welcoming place, but, as in many Canadian communities, that collective effort to celebrate diversity is easily undermined by the insidious nature of prejudice, bigotry and willful ignorance. 

Trevor Patt, who is another Stratford transplant working as an actor in the city, said he's spotted swastikas etched in public places in the city at least twice in the last year. 

Patt, who is half Jewish, said he spotted the first scrawled on a washroom stall in a local bar. He decided the best thing to do was to take care of it himself. 

"I had my work bag with me so I just grabbed my sharpie out of my bag and turned to the little swastika into a box."

A few months later Patt saw another one, this time written in the dirty window pane of an idle information kiosk not far from Stratford's famous Festival theatre. 

"The glass was quite dirty and somebody with their finger, had drawn quite a large swastika on the one side, on the other side they wrote 'Porky Pig.'"

"I didn't want someone else to stumble upon it and see that symbol of hate and have their night ruined, so I rubbed it out."

Patt reported the incident to Stratford Police. The actor, who is physically fit and more than six feet tall, said because of his size he often doesn't feel intimidated, but the experience left him rattled. 

"It's pretty upsetting. It's disappointing," he said. "When I see that symbol of hate and I think about what my ancestors went through in the name of that symbol, it's terrifying."

"I don't feel safe."