An 18-year-old teenager is charged with defacing Winston Churchill’s Westminster statue.
According to the British Police, they have charged an 18-year-old teenager on Friday for defacing the statue of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill opposite parliament.
18-year-old Benjamin Clark, who is from Hertford has been charged with criminal damage and is due to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on October 9.
This is the second time in four months that the statue of Sir Winston Churchill has been sprayed with graffiti. The plinth was sprayed with yellow color paint with the words “is a racist” during a climate change protest.
In June during the protest over the death of George Floyd, the statue was defaced. Floyd’s death not just sparked protests about racial inequality across the US and Europe, but also rekindle the debate in the UK about monuments of those figures who were involved in the country’s imperialism past.
Commander Jane Connors described these protests as a challenge during a public health crisis.
The Commander said that the public has a right to protest, but they don’t have a right to cause any kind of disruption to the communities an to the businesses. She further said that they will take actions and arrest all who will disrupt.
She further stated that a large policing operation and they will continue to investigate all those people who we suspect to have committed offenses so the number of arrests will rise.
Benjamin Clark was one of at least 680 people who were arrested in the connection with 10 days of Extinction Rebellion Protests. Others have been arrested on the suspicion of breaching conditions of protest under the public order act and also blocking the highway.