"The group were spoken to and given a warning and made to wash the chalk off the statue," the spokesman said.
In 2017 calls went out to remove the statue in Ōtāhuhu of Colonel Marmaduke Nixon, who led troops in attacks against Waikato Māori during the New Zealand Wars.
In February 1864 he took 1500 colonial troops into the village of Rangiaōwhia, where elderly men, women and children were living, leaving 12 people dead.
Nixon was shot and his troops set alight a building where the last defenders had gathered, said to be the town's church. He died about three months later, in May.
Aucklander Shane Te Pou started a petition to remove the statue, and it culminated in the descendants of Nixon and his victims entering dialogue over how to appropriately commemorate the history.
Auckland Council manager Treaty settlements John Hutton said new signage would be installed at the Ōtāhuhu memorial later this year.
The Auckland incidents come as a wave of protests against racism and oppression sweep the globe after the killing of African American George Floyd at the hands of United States police, which has triggered a national discussion on the place of colonial monuments, statues and names.
In Hamilton on Friday, at the request of Waikato-Tainui iwi, Hamilton City Council removed from Civic Square the statue of Captain John Fane Charles Hamilton, who killed Māori in the Waikato land war and never set foot in the city that takes his name.
Waikato-Tainui also renewed its call to have the city renamed the original Māori name Kirikiriroa.
"Kirikiriroa was acquired as a result of the New Zealand Settlements Act passed in 1863, and that resulted in just over 1.2 million hectares of our land being confiscated," iwi chair Rukumoana Schaafhausen previously said.
"The name Hamilton does really confront us as the stark reminder of the raupatu - the confiscations."
In Dunedin, Captain Cook Hotel announced it would be changing its name.
A post on the venue's Facebook page, believed to be from operator Mike McLeod, last night outlined the reasons for changing the name, saying Captain Cook was a symbol of colonisation and oppression.
"Because people are hurting, and I didn't do this to ostracise and hurt people, I didn't want to remind people of oppression and suffering when they came to the venue," the post read.
Also in Dunedin, on Saturday morning protester Andrew Tait placed a necklace made of potatoes around the neck of the Queen Victoria statue in Queens Gardens, to remind the public she was on the throne in the 1840s when Ireland was under English rule, and hundreds of thousands of Irish died when a blight ruined potatoes, their main food source.
As a result, she is often referred to as the "Famine Queen".
"Queen Victoria presided over a famine which saw something like a third of the Irish population die of starvation, while England was exporting grain to other countries overseas at the same time," Tait said.
Rather than pull down the Robbie Burns statue in the Octagon, someone hung signs from it, saying "complicit in slavery" and "rapist".
Critics of Burns have alleged he planned to make his fortune in the slave trade before his early death.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern this morning repeated her view that the removal of colonial statues that many are calling for is a decision that local communities need to make.
Ardern said in Gisborne there are statues of James Cook but there's now also a statue of Te Maro of Ngāti Oneone who was killed during Cook's arrival.
She said leadership decisions like teaching New Zealand history to school children are the kind that create change.
On Saturday it was revealed another statue of Cook in Gisborne had been defaced, with graffiti been sprayed across the monument, which sits alongside the Tūranganui River in Waikanae Park.
The graffiti said "Black Lives Matter and so do Maori" and "Take this racist headstone of my people down before I do". Swastikas were also sprayed on the statue.
