Laura Glesby photo
The target found outside Panzarella's house.
Local Peace Garden steward Frank Panzarella raised his hand and held a paper shooting target up for the mayor, police chief, and a crowd of his neighbors to see.
The paper target featured a human-shaped figure with over a dozen BB gun-bullet-sized holes piercing the neck, heart, and gut.
Panzarella and his wife, Paula, had found the paper target Wednesday morning lying in their Edgewood front yard, lying beside a Black Lives Matter sign that they’ve displayed outside for years.
Panzarella believes that the target, which had bits of duct tape on its back, had originally been pasted to the Black Lives Matter sign — the sole lawn sign outside of their house.
He brought it that evening to a town hall organized by newly elected Beaver Hills Alder Gary Hogan inside the Whalley Avenue police substation.
At the town hall, Mayor Justin Elicker and Police Chief Karl Jacobson joined a handful of other city officials to field questions from over two dozen residents of Whalley, Edgewood, and Beaver Hills.
There, Panzarella showed the paper target to his neighbors, explaining that he believed it was intentionally placed with the Black Lives Matter sign.
“I know there’s a lot of pranksters out there,” he said. “I take this to be a threat.”
He pointed, too, to the anti-immigrant flyers that someone scattered around the East Rock neighborhood a week prior.
What can the city do about such expressions of hate? he asked.
Elicker echoed Panzarella’s concern that the target could be part of a trend of rising hate speech. The Trump administration is “emboldening people,” he said.
Jacobson encouraged Panzarella to file a police report about the incident.
Flyers and posters like these can be covered by free speech rights, or else fall within a gray area between an instance of political expression and a threat, Jacobson explained.
Regardless of whether these incidents are considered a crime, Jacobson said, it’s helpful for police to have a record that they happened in case they eventually escalate.
He said that police are investigating the source behind the East Rock flyers in order to determine whether an organized group was behind them.
“We shouldn’t panic about it,” he added, since that may be fulfilling the main goal behind leaving these kinds of flyers in the first place.
Panzarella lingered after the meeting, where a police officer arrived to record the incident.
“I’m not gonna be intimidated by such things,” Panzarella said. The Black Lives Matter sign in his front yard isn’t going anywhere.
Laura Glesby Photo
Frank Panzarella, showing the paper target practice to meeting attendees: “I’m not gonna be intimidated by such things."
Chief Karl Jacobson: Best to document suspected hate speech in case it escalates.