Matty’s Park victim of vandalism

Last week, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake (MCK) announced that the bathrooms in Matty’s Park had been vandalized on the evening of April 23 – although Asset Management director Kanento Patton said that what had been damaged is easily replaceable, for the most part.

“The toilet seat, toilet paper dispensers - not major damage. There’s not a lot that they can damage in that Matty’s Park bathroom, because it’s all concrete and cinder block walls,” said Patton, who added that those repairs and replacements were done the next day.

What is less easy to replace, and what clued in Asset Management that something had happened, was the outside door.

“We would come in from the weekend, and we would find the door open, unlocked, so we thought somebody was just leaving the door unlocked for a while. So, we would go in there, lock it, close the door, and then the next weekend, the door is unlocked again. We were asking everybody who keeps unlocking this thing,” said Patton.

“We finally realized that somebody had been kicking the door in, and they go in and break stuff.”

The old door will be replaced by a steel door on a steel frame that opens outwards, not inwards, to prevent that kind of thing from happening again.

“They can kick it all day long if they want, but they won’t be able to kick it in,” said Patton.

This is not the first time that there has been an instance of vandalism in a park facility, and Patton said that, like a lot of vandalism incidents in town, they suspect that teenagers are the cause.

He said that park bathrooms in town are designed to be easily repaired and don’t have much in the way of expensive items that would need to be repaired or replaced because of those incidents, but that it is nevertheless a problem.

“It’s a nuisance for us, but it’s actually just as much of a nuisance for the community, because when they destroy things, depending on what they’ve done, we have to close the bathroom down until we clean it up,” said Patton, who added that operating hours of bathrooms have also been modified in the past to close earlier when the sun goes down earlier to limit potential issues.

Patton said they can’t always be surveilling parks for trouble, but community members can help with that.

“They can see them, and if they know these kids, they can talk some sense into them,” said Patton.

Kahnawake Peacekeeper spokesperson Kyle Zachary echoed that message of community collaboration in preventing these incidents from happening.

Parks in town are on patrol routes, but if an incident is not happening out in the open, it can be hard for patrolling officers to respond before the damage is done.

“We rely on community members for certain things, like pointing us in the right direction in some cases, because we can’t be everywhere at the same time,” said Zachary.

The Peacekeepers ask that anyone who has information about the incident, or if any other incident occurs, to contact the station at 450-632-6505.

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