Records show some Wichita protesters arrested after using sidewalk chalk

Some protesters calling to defund Wichita police were arrested and now face criminal charges for drawing on sidewalks with chalk, according to police and court records.

Police refused to comment about the chalk.

The arrests happened at the beginning of August but police records were not released until Friday. The Eagle requested municipal court records that better outline the charges against those arrested: Charles Preston Ellis II, Bryant Edward Jacobs, Marissa Renee Gonzalez and Gabrielle Nyette Griffie.

All four were arrested in one night in connection to protests, including the one where police noted multiple people using “sidewalk chalk to write and draw on the sidewalk and roads,” according to police reports.

Police had been helping block off traffic for protesters to march at 100 E. Douglas near Main when the chalking occurred, one report says.

“This was also done in Old Town square at 2nd and Rock Island and at the tower monument at Douglas and Sycamore,” the report says, with the officer saying they took photos and videos.

Wichita received “numerous citizen complaints to 911” about the graffiti on public spaces, according to Wichita spokesperson Megan Lovely. Six city workers spent five hours using power washers to clean off roughly 1,500 spots of graffiti, including chalk from protesters, Lovely wrote in an email.

Of the four arrested, Gonzalez and Griffie had both been arrested earlier that same week. Griffie, the executive director of Project Justice ICT, which has organized protests and called on police to be defunded, did not respond to questions from The Eagle.

After she was first jailed, Griffie told The Eagle that the arrests were a “blatant scare tactic to try to keep the organizers of Project Justice ICT from marching in the streets.”

The four were arrested days later and face differing charges:

The early August arrests caused one protester to hold a chalk event at Naftzger Park on Aug. 8.

“What I have a problem with is that 99.99% of the time (police) don’t have an issue with chalk on the sidewalk. But they do have an issue when they don’t like the message,” she said. “I really just wanted to encourage people to express their first amendment right to express themselves and protest things they have issues with. And also just have fun with chalk and decorate the sidewalk and I guess kind of show the harmlessness and fun of chalk. I found it just kind of ridiculous that a graffiti charge was chalk on the sidewalk.”

Wichita ordinance only mentions chalk under the graffiti ordinance. Chalk is mentioned under a definition of paint stick or graffiti stick, along with “other similar substance capable of being applied to a surface by pressure and leaving a mark of at least one-eighth of an inch in width.”

Graffiti is defined as any unauthorized writing that is marked or scratched on a “building, structure, fence, wall or other facility, regardless of the nature of the material used in its application or upon which it is applied.”

The defacement or damage of property by graffiti carries a potential fine between $250 to $1,000 and up to six months in jail or both.

The two graffiti charges occurred at 100 E. Douglas and 500 W. Douglas and involved public property. The records say they happened on the sidewalk and without consent. Some information in the documents had been redacted.

Contributing: Amy Renee Leiker with The Eagle