(2003-03-11) — After learning that they would not be arrested for destroying privately-owned American flags because police consider it ‘free speech’, a group of anti-war protestors in La Habra, CA, have taken to breaking windows in private homes and cars in the neighborhood.
“We’re damaging these homes and vehicles as a form of political speech,” said one unnamed protestor as she slammed a brick through the window of a Lexus. “We object to the military-industrial complex and capitalist oppression.”
Before they started exercising their free speech rights on windows the antiwar protesters had burned and ripped up flags, flowers and patriotic signs at a Sept. 11 memorial that residents erected on a fence along Whittier Boulevard, according to a report in the Whittier Daily News.
Although police witnessed the vandalism Saturday afternoon, they did not arrest three people seen damaging the display because they were “exercising the same freedom of speech that the people who put up the flags were,’ La Habra Police Capt. John Rees said Monday. “For this to be vandalism, there had to be an ill-will intent.“
The protestors insisted they bore no ill-will against the people whose property they were destroying. Local police passively observed as one protestor set a house on fire to dramatically express what might happen to oil wells in Iraq if the U.S. attacks.

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