PJ claims no bias in two graffiti cases

The Judiciary Police (PJ) has taken two different approaches in two cases of damage done to a wall in Travessa da Paixão, according to a report by Cheng Pou. Last week, a 17-year-old schoolboy was charged by the PJ with damaging the wall. On October 29, the boy, together with two other teenagers, was spotted graffitiing the wall with correction fluid.

Earlier, the son of gaming tycoon Stanley Ho and lawmaker Angela Leong, Mario Ho, graffitied a wall on the same street. The Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) claims it spoke with the relevant governmental department regarding Ho’s behavior. However, no updates have been provided on this matter.

After the more recent teenager’s case was announced, some members of the public accused the police authority of treating the two apparently similar cases differently.

The PJ claimed in a statement that in Ho’s case, he had graffitied a private building, not a building considered to be a cultural relic, whereas the teenage boy graffitied the wall of a classified cultural relic, which means the boy violated the city’s cultural relics’ protection law.

“The definition of the law is very clear. The two cases are very different, and the public should not be confused,” the PJ statement reads.

The PJ claimed that, as a criminal police organ, it has acted strictly in accordance with the law and that there was absolutely no bias. JZ