Gang Graffiti

Gang Graffiti

Graffiti can be petty annoyances by juvenile vandals, attempts at artistic expression, or signs that street gangs have moved into the neighborhood.
The public has become concerned about graffiti in the last 10 to 15 years for three reasons: the invention of the spray-paint can, enabling taggers to quickly make big, colorful graffiti that are hard to remove; graffiti on buses and subway cars, which move all over a city; and the association of graffiti in citizens’ minds with gangs. There is an important distinction between two major categories of contemporary graffiti. Tagger graffiti, or what some people call street art, are personal expressions of the taggers, and they are an end in themselves, not a threat of something else. Gang graffiti, on the other hand, are intended to represent the presence of a gang. They convey a threat of gang violence in the neighborhood.
In New York City, subway graffitists came to be known as “taggers” because they signed their work with their chosen nicknames or tags. To the tagger, the important thing was “getting up,” that is, putting his or her tag on as many surfaces as possible. While artistic quality and uniqueness were also important, a tagger’s reputation rested on sheer volume.
Tagging is now occurring all over the United States and the gap between taggers and gangs is being closed. Taggers often form into groups called “crews” and adopt crew tags. The larger a tagger crew, the more it begins to look and acts like a street gang. While street gangs look down on individual taggers with disdain, they are more likely to regard large crews as a threat that must be dealt with. Then the two begin to act like Rival Street gangs, even though the crew may have started out with less dangerous purposes.
When graffiti are thought to be gang graffiti, they create the impression that the unknown graffitists are gang members, suggesting menace and violence. Gang graffiti tell police officers who is in what gang, what gangs are claiming what territories, who is challenging whom, and who is trying to move or expand. Gang graffiti can become dialogue between gangs and eventually a record of gang wars—from initial territorial claims, to challenges to individuals and gangs, to records of individual deaths. Graffiti are the gangs’ daily newspaper, printed for all to see.

Graffiti are easy and cheap to put up and entail relatively low risk for the gang graffitist, particularly when compared to other forms of gang activity.
Even the risk of getting caught is not terribly threatening to the gang graffitist because legal sanctions, if they are imposed at all, are not heavy.
All three sides of the gang-problem triangle—offender, victim, and place— are involved in graffiti. Both taggers and gang graffitists are offenders in the gang-problem triangle. Taggers often target particular victims, such as a public transit system. And gang graffitists often target other gangs in their graffiti. Everyone involved relies on “tools”—the instruments offenders use to commit their offenses and the instruments and devices that guardians and managers use to defend themselves and their property.
Spray-paint cans on which different cap sizes can be interchanged are the favorite tools of graffiti writers.
The broad categories of graffiti sites are fairly obvious: residential, commercial, industrial, recreational, public, and transitional spaces. Residential properties are at greatest risk of becoming targets of graffiti when the residents and surrounding neighborhood have little stake in the property.
Commercial and industrial sites most at risk are those that have broad surfaces on which graffitists can write and those distant from other buildings with exterior surfaces visible to passers-by.
Public recreational areas have been particularly tempting targets for both taggers and gang graffitists. Problems get very serious when gangs take over public places as their own domain, intimidating and endangering ordinary citizens. Of public spaces, schools are the most likely to have trouble with gang graffiti simply because gang members, like other youth, have a right to be in school as students.
Matching problem properties with responsible people is most difficult with open public and transitional spaces—parks, streets, and street corners.
Graffiti are often seen on bridges, street and traffic signs, and billboards.
The managers of these spaces, employees of the government agencies responsible for maintaining them, are seldom present because maintenance does not require daily attention.
It is important for a community to have an anti-graffiti policy, which may fall to the local government, businesses, community residents, or a combination of these stakeholders. A combination approach is most likely to succeed.
Graffitists do not invest heavily in their art, preferring to shoplift rather than buy their spray-paint cans. So an effective first step is to encourage stores that sell spray paints to make them difficult to shoplift.
Quick removal of graffiti is a standard anti-graffiti recommendation, the underlying idea being that graffitists soon tire of having their work obliterated and give up. Also, removing graffiti shows that the community will not tolerate them. Taggers may regard removal campaigns as a challenge—a game between them and the community—but even taggers ultimately tire of the game.
When property owners are cleaning or repairing surfaces that have been hit, they should consider taking steps to make them less vulnerable. Designers of new structures should take their vulnerability to graffiti into account.
If they cannot change the surface, perhaps they can alter access to the surface.
The essential problem with both criminal and civil approaches is that graffitists are hard to catch. One alternative to sanctioning offenders is sanctioning victims. Some ordinances require graffiti removal within a relatively short period of time, perhaps a few days. Fines are imposed on property owners who fail to clean up their property promptly.
The final step of a graffiti policy is assessing the results of the community’s responses. The assessment should determine whether graffiti has completely disappeared from the community or at least been so reduced in quantity and offensiveness that the community no longer regards them as a serious problem.

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