This is the first picture from my mobile phone. It’s not a great pic, as you can see, but it was early in the morning, and the light was poor.
The picture is of graffiti I spotted on my walk to work today. It says: Adam Bellemy [sic] is a rapist, and then someone (possibly the same person) has added, some time later, in brackets, the word “still”. The script is quite distinctive, and although it’s either fading or someone has tried to scrub it away, it’s large and clear, and along a main road, close to campus. There’s obviously a story here, and I wish I knew what it was.
It reminds me rather of campaigns in Vancouver to name and shame the kinds of criminals we felt the police were unwilling to pursue: rapists, domestic violence perpetrators, gay bashers. For a while there was quite a lot of graffiti in Vancouver that looked like this, but I don’t know that it worked. I hope whoever wrote this gets what she or he is hoping for out of it, but it seems unlikely, given that they have resorted to writing their complaint on the walls.