GRAFENWOEHR, Germany -- Military police are investigating after a Confederate flag was found flying from a flagpole outside 2nd Cavalry Regiment headquarters Monday and removed upon discovery, Army officials said.

An American flag and a German flag also were stolen from inside the headquarters building in Vilseck sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning by an unknown person, regiment spokesman Maj. John Ambelang said.

The incident at Rose Barracks, which is home to a regiment of about 4,800 soldiers, comes more than a year after the Defense Department effectively banned the Confederate flags and other symbols deemed divisive from public display on military bases.

"The regiment takes this misconduct very seriously," Ambelang said in a statement. "Should the culprit be identified, the command will take appropriate action after considering all the facts surrounding the incident."

Commanders across the regiment conveyed the seriousness of the situation to soldiers at a morning formation, the statement said.

Neither the theft nor the display of the Confederate battle flag align with the Army’s values, Ambelang said.

A Black Navy veteran in Virginia who has been subjected to months of racist harassment by a neighbor took to the national airwaves to share her ordeal, which police say they can do little to remedy.

Jannique Martinez and her family moved to Jessamine Court in Virginia Beach five years ago, she told CNN’s Don Lemon. Soon afterward, the neighbor began blaring recordings to antagonize other residents, and has now stepped it up by playing monkey noises and racial slurs whenever her family steps out of the house.

Martinez said her youngest son, who is 7, is terrified of the man. In addition to more typical bad-neighbor behavior like yelling at kids who step on his lawn, he has the cul-de-sac’s residents under the eye of eight security cameras, she said.

As soon as she opens her front door, his lights flash or the speakers boom with the racist recordings. The noises were tailored to taunt whichever neighbor triggers the sensors after such innocuous behavior as pulling into their own driveway, she said.

The Virginia Beach Police Department has responded to several calls related to nuisance and loud music on the block, but it “has no authority to intervene,” it tweeted this week.

“As appalling and offensive as the neighbors’ behaviors are, the city attorney and Virginia magistrates have separately determined that the actions reported thus far did not rise to the level that Virginia law defines as criminal behavior,” police said Thursday.

Martinez’s only direct interaction with the neighbor over the noise came about a year ago, when she was working from home and her children were starting virtual classes during the pandemic, she said. She asked him to turn down music that was blasting from his open window at 8 a.m.

“His response to me was, ‘Well, let me call the police to make sure I’m in good standing with the law to play my music,’” she said on CNN. “I was floored, because how about you just be a neighborly person, a parent, just anything to understand where I’m coming from, and he was adamant that he was doing nothing wrong.”

After her repeated complaints about the loud music, he set the sounds that played for her family to include screeching monkeys and skits using the N-word.

“So racist it’s disgusting,” she told the local NBC station WAVY News last week. “I don’t even know how else to explain it.”

The Pentagon asked the internet for help replacing names honoring Confederate troops on iconic bases such as Fort Bragg and Fort Benning.

It got more help than it bargained for.

"Some of those suggestions on the website are quite intense," retired Adm. Michelle Howard, the chair of the Naming Commission in charge of the effort, said following an update to Congress Thursday. "There are some folks who are distinctly opposed and the verbiage that [they] use is quite deliberate and they make it clear they do not support the commission."

The public has so far submitted 27,000 suggestions since the request was posted Sept. 7, and the commission plans to keep accepting ideas until December. The effort, mandated by Congress in January, requires the U.S. military to remove names of Confederates on bases, ships, buildings and streets that commemorate slavery and racism against Black Americans.

The process is expected to result in Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first Black person to serve in that position, announcing new names for some of the country's most iconic military facilities in 2023. At least 10 Army installations will likely be among the final list of assets to be renamed.

The commission has not made the long and growing list of suggestions public. The online deluge and a series of trips to visit bases over the summer has yielded up to 5,000 suggestions for names of individual bases.

"There's women, there's people of color. Some of those suggestions highlight people of lesser-known religious faiths," Howard, who was the first Black woman to become a four-star admiral in the Navy, said during a briefing to reporters. "I think the hard part for the commission is going to be picking from the list."

Hundreds of local military, government and civic leaders have met with commission members since May in visits to facilities in Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia. The panel plans to wrap up the tour by November with visits to Fort Pickett, Virginia, and Fort Polk, Louisiana, both named after Confederate generals.

The visits also have hit resistance at times from locals who feel their history is being scrubbed.

"They're very tied to the history of the area," Howard said. "But in the end, they understand that the law has already been written, that it's not a decision for the commission whether to rename, and that decision has already been made by Congress."