Graffiti is ongoing struggle
The handwriting is on the walls, on the trash cans and on traffic signs – anywhere taggers leave their marks for the world to see – and the city spends more than $250,000 a year to fight it with cleanup crews daily.
Eleven years ago, the city launched its Graffiti Abatement Program, the start of an aggressive, targeted effort to quickly remove graffiti from public property. As that program has grown and progressed, however, people have noticed that taggers have started to scrawl more of their work on private property.
“If there is graffiti on a building it makes the whole street look bad, “ said Patrick Keilch, deputy director of the city’s Public Works Department. “We believe it is in the public interest to remove it from private property, but we encourage businesses to do more themselves.”
He said graffiti abatement is both a public and private responsibility. The city is able to do removal on private property because graffiti is considered to be a blight on the community.
Deborah Badhia of the Downtown Berkeley Association said she understands that the city is “stretched thin” in terms of abating graffiti. It takes immediate removal to discourage taggers, she said.
“Some of the graffiti (downtown) is on longer than we want it to be,” she said.
Nevertheless, Badhia said that “ultimately the property owners are responsible for much of their own cleanup. It’s part of the equation of living in an urban area.”
In a recent draft of strategies for downtown Berkeley graffiti abatement, Badhia suggested more education for DBA members regarding what they can do themselves to discourage taggers and how they can work more effectively with the Public Works Department.
Last May, property owners along Telegraph Avenue joined together to hire their own graffiti clean-up crew, because they wanted shoppers to visit a clean, attractive district.
Roland Peterson, executive director of the Telegraph Avenue Business Improvement District, said that the amount of graffiti on Telegraph “is not more overwhelming than any other place.”
On a recent morning crew supervisor Mary Isbell and Calvin Kelly removed black spray painted circles on a gray stucco wall. An easy removal, the pair sprayed Goof Off graffiti remover on the wall, wiped it off with rags and then painted over the spot with brushes leaving no trace of graffiti.
This full-time crew or “broom brigade” of four people spends most of its time on other cleaning jobs in the district unrelated to graffiti abatement, said Peterson. The budget for their services is between $90,000 and $100,000 a year.
Peterson said last June when he took the job he walked out in the morning and found about 20 different graffiti samples every day. But the amount decreased to about 10 incidents six months ago and now most days it is fewer than five.
“So there isn’t graffiti left over from the previous day,” said Peterson.
He said the intention of the district’s property owners is to squelch the satisfaction that graffiti makers might get from the public display of their work.
The Public Works Department, in its graffiti-fighting effort, hires workers from three sources: the agency’s Streets Division, which provides two abatement employees; BOSS (Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency), which provides two employees on a contract basis; and a program for high school students, who work on weekends, school vacations and holidays and are supervised by Boss crews.
The BOSS crews do not step up on ladders or hang from roofs to remove graffiti or stickers higher than nine feet, because of cost issues with worker’s compensation and insurance, said Adrian Harper from BOSS.
As of Sunday 20 high school students are working in shifts to remove graffiti in Berkeley.
“I think they understand how much work it is to remove graffiti” said Harper. “They get a much better appreciation of the city.”
Harper said he did not know if the graffiti problem is improving or becoming worse.
“It’s just maintenance. If you don’t have someone out there diligently removing it, the problem is going to be worse.” Spray paint makes it easy for kids to do graffiti, he said.
He recalled the work of one tagger two years ago who spraypainted swastikas on buildings along San Pablo Avenue from Dwight Way to Alcatraz Avenue.
With spray paint, said Harper, a tagger like that one can paint an icon in less than one minute, but it takes about 30 minutes to cover each icon with paint that matches the walls of the building, and it may need more than one coat.
Keilch said the graffiti removal includes steam cleaning under high pressure, and a “soda blaster” that blasts pulverized salt mixed with water onto walls.
A powerful aid in removing marks on stucco, concrete and stone, it is especially useful on brick masonry where paint and solvents don’t work, he said.
He said several kinds of paint removers are on the market, but the city would rather not use them because employees would breathe toxic fumes.
Keilch said prime targets of taggers are the streets and sidewalks in the downtown, on University Avenue and on Telegraph Avenue. But the city’s 27 parks and five recreation centers are hit the hardest. He said they could receive as much as half of all the tagging activity in the summer.
Taggers who deface buildings with graffiti here because they seek recognition or because they are marking gang territory mainly are youthful offenders, and not all of them come from Berkeley, said Sgt. Steve Odom of the police department’s Youth Services Bureau.
He said his department investigates graffiti cases, depending on its location and its content – whether its gang-related or more “artistic.” Officers may photograph the graffiti before removal if they think the graffiti is associated with gang activity.
Youthful offenders are required to make restitution to property owners and they receive education to understand the impact and consequences of doing graffiti, said Odom.
He said he has seen a decrease in tagging in recent years. He credited recently retired Sgt. Frank Reynolds with avidly collecting information that helped the police shut down more taggers.
Odom said that in 1996 Berkeley placed 48 taggers on probation in the Oakland Juvenile Court. In 1997 there were 56 taggers placed on probation. In 1998 the number dropped to 17, and only 13 referrals were made in 1999. Odom said that so far this year there only has been one.
An aggressive attack on the problem in the Graffiti Abatement Program and by police, said Odom, got the word out to the network of taggers that Berkeley is knowledgeable, comprehensive and tough on taggers. “So they didn’t mess with us.”
