Dallas first graffiti czar may add punch to cleanup effort

08:18 AM CST on Sunday, February 18, 2007
By ALLEN HOUSTON / The Dallas Morning News
ahouston@dallasnews.com

Lisa Fullerton peered out the police cruiser's dusty window at the sprawling graffiti covering stop signs, electrical boxes, light poles and buildings on Oak Cliff's Jefferson Street.


JIM MAHONEY/DMN
As head of Dallas' graffiti abatement program, Lisa Fullerton is leading wipeout crews to clear the city of graffiti, like this sketch on a warehouse near South Lamar Street. Sgt. Mark Langford of the Dallas Police Department's gang unit pointed out voluminous graffiti artists' tags to her, including one that reads "DPD Ain't Catching Me."

That bravado, however, may be short-lived.

In January, Ms. Fullerton became the city's first graffiti abatement coordinator. In plain speak, she's Dallas' graffiti czar. In that role, she leads a graffiti cleanup crew that began work last week. She oversees neighborhood and citywide graffiti wipeout events, acts as a liaison with police and is in charge of educating the public on the city's anti-graffiti efforts.

Ms. Fullerton comes to the position after 18 months with the city's Storm Water Management outreach team. Before that, she worked as a science teacher in South Dallas.

"Graffiti touches everyone in the city, and this position is something where you can affect people instantaneously," she said.

Her hiring is the latest front in Dallas' graffiti battle. In May, the Dallas City Council passed an ordinance allowing police to arrest individuals carrying spray paint and graffiti tools, even if they weren't painting. Dallas police said they don't track the number of people arrested on those graffiti charges.

"The ordinance is a step in the right direction," said City Council member Angela Hunt, who's been key in starting the graffiti abatement program. "It's going to take another couple of years to see how it's working and whether it's effective or not."

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Around the time the ordinance was passed, Dallas hosted its first citywide graffiti cleanup, with 700 volunteers cleaning about 200 buildings. The next graffiti wipeout is scheduled for May 19.

The City Council has budgeted $196,000 for the first year of the graffiti abatement program.

"A lot of times people accept graffiti like it's part of the scenery, and Dallas is saying that it doesn't have to be that way," Ms. Fullerton said.

The city also just received a $6,000 graffiti camera from Keep Dallas Beautiful. The camera will be placed in areas with high concentrations of tagging. A motion sensor will photograph graffiti artists, known as taggers, as they vandalize walls or other structures.


Education initiative

One of Ms. Fullerton's first initiatives will be educating the community on how the new graffiti effort works.

The program allows residents and businesses to have graffiti painted over on their property at no cost by calling 311. The new full-time graffiti team that Ms. Fullerton will lead consists of a supervisor and two laborers in the code compliance department who will paint over graffiti.

Before they can do that, the city has to receive a consent form from residents and businesses. In cases where property owners receive a warning about graffiti on their property, owners are also given the form. If they decline, they must paint over it themselves within 21 days. Failure to do so will result in a citation ranging from $200 to $500.

The consent form allows the city to abate graffiti on that property until the property is sold or the owners change their minds. In the past, the city abated graffiti only on public property such as light poles and parks.

According to city records, Dallas handed out 60 graffiti-related citations in 2004, 110 in 2005 and 234 in 2006. The citations were handed out to property owners who failed to paint over graffiti on their property in the allotted time.

Calls to the city's 311 system about graffiti have increased dramatically during the past three years. There were 1,991 graffiti-related calls in 2004, 2,597 in 2005 and 3,481 in 2006.

Part of her job is also to monitor graffiti-related 311 calls. She also works closely with Bradley Dirks, a detective in DPD's gang unit. The two discuss where police are seeing increases in graffiti, and Ms. Fullerton reports trends in 311 calls.

Today, tagging is by far the most prevalent type of graffiti in Dallas. Police said that's a change from 10 years ago, when gang graffiti was most dominant.

"The philosophy that the taggers try to portray is that this isn't a crime, that it's freedom of expression," Sgt. Langford said. "Writing on someone else's property without their permission is a crime. It doesn't get any simpler than that."

According to 311 calls, the main areas of graffiti concentration are in north Oak Cliff, downtown Dallas, East Dallas and northeast Dallas.

"If you have a vacant lot or boarded-up property, it's most likely going to get tagged, which in turn brings other criminal elements such as drug dealing and prostitution," Ms. Fullerton said. "That's why our partnership with the police is so important."


Crime watch

Local crime watches are joining the graffiti battle.

Michele DeSalme, crime watch graffiti co-chairwoman in Lakewood, cruises her neighborhood on weekends, notebook in hand, writing down locations where graffiti is prevalent. She e-mails that list to Ms. Fullerton, who catalogs the sites for the crew to clean.

"It makes me so dadgum mad when people spray paint our neighborhood," Ms. DeSalme said. "I finally had to get out and do something about it."

As Ms. Fullerton's recent tour of Jefferson Street concluded, Sgt. Langford said the graffiti problem will take time to contain.

"Graffiti didn't show up overnight," he said. "It's built up over years to the point that it's at now. We hope that the city program will get to the point where graffiti can be abated cheaply and quickly, where it disappears almost as quickly as they put it up."