By Ed Koch
LAS VEGAS SUN
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-other/2004/jun/10/516998518.html
With summer coming and more teens expected to be spending later hours on the streets, authorities say they will be on the lookout for increased graffiti.
Graffiti is most prevalent when teens are out of school, experts said.
Last year, taxpayers in the Las Vegas Valley spent about $1 million to clean up graffiti, with much of that money spent in the summer.
But graffiti is a year-round problem that has gotten worse as the valley's population has grown.
In unincorporated Clark County in 1996, code enforcement officials responded to 564 graffiti complaint calls, about seven each workweek. Last year the county responded to 5,270 graffiti removal requests, about 14-15 calls a day.
And the vandalism is continuing to spread, those who battle the problem said.
"We expect to respond to more than 6,000 calls this year," said Darryl Kresser, a graffiti abatement painter for Clark County, one of three county workers who cover graffiti with high-powered spray-painting equipment.
"It has just gotten so overwhelming. We go to schools to talk to kids. We also talk to homeowner associations and to groups at community centers and libraries. But the problem is getting harder to control."
The county also looks to other communities worldwide to learn what they are doing to stem graffiti.
To that end, Wayne Smith, deputy mayor of Casey, Victoria, Australia, is slated to observe Clark County's abatement program on June 28 and share what his community is doing about the problem.
Community volunteers
Joe Boteilho, Clark County's chief of code enforcement, said last year, for the first time since 1996, the number of graffiti hotline calls dipped (the record of 5,455 calls was set in 2002). But Boteilho says the drop is not a sign graffiti is on the decline, but rather that neighbors are handling the problem themselves.
"We are seeing success with our Neighborhood Pride Zone program, where residents paint over the graffiti in their neighborhood with paint we provide them for free," Boteilho said.
"Because of the the number of calls we get, it can take up to 30 days for us to respond. This program allows residents to get rid of graffiti themselves a lot faster. If they can remove graffiti quickly, many taggers will get frustrated and move on, leaving those neighborhoods alone."
Harry O'Quinn, a Las Vegas resident of 46 years, started removing graffiti locally 16 years ago when he was 65 and stopped earlier this year at age 81. His Neighborhood Pride Zone territory was around Burnham Avenue and Desert Inn Road, which he patrolled daily, paintbrush at the ready.
"Graffiti is getting worse today because of what I call the broken window syndrome," O'Quinn said. "That's where a house becomes abandoned and a kid throws a rock through a window. It is not repaired quickly, so more kids throw more rocks, breaking all of the windows.
"Graffiti works the same way. If you don't do something about one marking, the whole wall will be covered within a week. When you do what I did for so long you get a sense of satisfaction. That's the only reward I ever sought."
O'Quinn, who several months ago sold his house and moved to a condominium in another part of town, said he has traveled through his old neighborhood several times. Appparently no one took up the cause when he left because walls in his old neighborhood now are covered with graffiti.
"Of course, I find it very sad," O'Quinn said. "It doesn't take much time to be a good citizen. Four neighbors can each keep a can of paint in their garage, watch out for each other and take turns painting over the graffiti."
Blake and Alicia Lareau, who in January moved from California to their new home in a neighborhood near Lamb and Charleston boulevards, said fighting graffiti is a constant battle.
"It is very alarming the amount of it," Blake said. "It brings the whole area and the property values down when it gets out of hand. Many of the kids who do this will one day become homeowners. I can tell you they won't like it when it happens to them."
Although they are not part of the Neighborhood Pride Zone program, the Lareaus bought their own white paint and have repeatedly recovered their cinder block wall after it has been tagged.
"We listen when our dogs bark and we keep an eye on things, especially when kids get out of school" Alicia said. "I'm not worried. I've got five gallons of white paint in the garage."
Graffiti online
Boteilho and Kresser said that while area governments have ordinances that require stores to keep spray paint locked up and that prohibit shops from selling aerosol spray paint to those younger than 18, underage taggers have found ways to get the tools of their destructive trade.
"Many of them buy online from art supply Web sites that sell everything from the paint to spray tips of various sizes,"said Kresser, 43, who trained under an apprenticeship program before he got a job in 1998 painting the interior of the under-construction Venetian Hotel. A year later, he took the county job.
Kresser, who also is chairman of the Southern Nevada Graffiti Coalition, a group of government officials and citizens who address potential solutions to the problem, said there also are Web sites where taggers display photos of their work as well as go to chat rooms to boast about their graffiti.
But the Internet also serves as a tool to educate the public about graffiti.
"Hip-hop taggers ... operate in "crews" (three-to-five person teams), which usually have a unique, three-digit name (and) each member of the crew usually has a unique graffiti moniker," says no-graffiti.com. "Thus, a vandalism site is typically marked with one or more monikers plus the crew name.
"Within the subculture, there is a hierarchy of graffiti: simple tags in a single color; throw-ups (bubble-type graffiti, with at least two colors); and pieces (or 'masterpieces,' the most complex)."
The Web site says there are more than 1,000 graffiti sites on the Internet.
"The vandals cannot achieve 'fame' if their 'art' is not seen," the Web site says. "Thus, it is applied to billboards, traffic light control boxes, freeway signs, downtown buildings -- places where many will see it.
Art or vandalism?
Local artist Iceberg Slick, who though his organization, 5ive Finger Miscount at the Arts Factory downtown, runs a program that he says turns taggers into artists. While he opposes tagging, he understand the viewpoint of some of his students who fluctuate between the worlds of art and vandalism.
"Graffiti has been around for centuries -- since ancient times -- and you are never going to get rid of it," said 30-year-old Slick, a native Las Vegan whose given name was Emmett Gates.
"When someone tags a wall with his initials or a symbol he is saying 'I am here.' There is a desire in youth to rebel against the establishment. And there is a desire in many of us to somehow leave our mark. Spray-painting walls is how taggers choose to do both of those things."
Slick, who as a student at Las Vegas High published underground comics in the style of urban artists Robert Crumb and Ralph Bakshi, said there is "an unwritten code" that many of today's taggers have rejected.
"The code is you do not tag places such as small businesses, churches or cemetery headstones," Slick said. "While some taggers still live by that code, many others do not. That bothers me because small businesses are our community's backbone and it is just disrespectful to tag a church."
Slick said to influence students to confine their artwork to canvas or to buildings where they are contracted to paint murals, he has brought in respected graffiti artists to talk to them.
"You can't teach everyone art because many taggers are not artists," Slick said. "But a number of graffiti artists have gone on to do album covers and work as artists for major companies including Coca-Cola. There is a market for graffiti art to reach young consumers."
Dray, a Las Vegas "urban artist" whose work includes a controversial spray-painted mural of a nude woman on the front of his downtown studio, says graffiti "is just another art form, but tagging is pretty much what it is. It's not art."
Kresser said: "The difference between graffiti being vandalism or art is simply permission. If you have permission to paint on a wall it's art no matter how bad it may look. If you don't have permission its vandalism no matter how cool it may appear."
Graffiti justice
Clark County officials estimate that, working with Metro Police, they will take 45 to 50 taggers to court this year on graffiti-related charges.
But, with pressure on prosecutors to crack down on crimes such as murder, drugs and drunken driving, attorneys often reach plea bargains to keep lesser crimes such as tagging from clogging the courts.
Although local municipalities have their own anti-graffiti ordinances, they do not have prosecution statistics readily available, officials said. Graffiti generally is lumped in with vandalism or destruction of property statistics, officials said.
Also, because many graffiti crimes are committed by minors, municipalities hand the cases over to juvenile authorities.
And even when authorities catch alleged taggers, they can't keep them locked up until trial. That leaves people such as Christian Ortega, whose arrest in January heightened graffiti awareness, are at large.
Ortega, 26, was arrested in January and charged with vandalizing more than 15 businesess, several homes, utility poles and street lights in the area of Pecos Road, McLeod Drive and Desert Inn Road.
Ortega was out on bail and was supposed to show up in court Monday for his arraignment, but he did not so Justice of the Peace Deborah Lippis issued a bench warrant for his arrest.
While some graffiti offenders get jail time and others pay fines, rarely does a government entity win restitution from the courts.
Boteilho said, since 1998, six major graffiti offenders have been ordered by the District Court to pay restitution to the county. The amounts range from $4,266 from a January 2002 case to $722,290 from a June 2003 case.
For those half-dozen cases, the county was awarded $837,634. To date, the county has received $109,213 through restitution payment plans in those cases.
Kresser said when he paints over a graffiti-stained wall of a residence and documents it with photos and a report. County taxpayers are victims who deserve to be repaid for the graffiti abatement efforts that they fund, Kresser and others said.
The county has become more aggressive in going after restitution to defray the costs of fighting graffiti and to let taggers know they can face serious consequences if their acts cause serious damage, Kresser said.
And serious damage is the right description for one particular vandalism trend -- "etching," which involves using a tool or acid to to scratch on metal or glass.
Some of the vandalism that Ortega allegedly committed involved acid-etching on windows.
"Etching has become such a serious problem that San Francisco recently approved a maximum $10,000 fine for such acts of vandalism," Kresser said. "Our ordinances regarding graffiti makes it (etching) a misdemeanor with a maximum $1,000 fine."
Even Slick agrees that the new wave of permanent graffiti is troublesome.
"We've had our windows etched at the gallery," he said. "The only way to fix it is to replace the glass. And that can get real expensive."
Municipalities react
Perhaps no one knows how expensive graffiti better than local government entities that are struggling to keep graffiti under control as much as they can with limited budgets and resources. Each local entity has its own approach to the problem.
"We respond to graffiti complaints within 48 hours -- 24 hours if the complaint comes from a councilman's office," said Dave Semenza, manager of the city of Las Vegas Neighborhood Response Division. "We're holding even."
Semenza said his crews are so busy abating the problem there is little time to be proactive.
"Our job is one of rapid response and maintenance," he said. "They mark up walls and we cover them as a deterrent. We have more paint than they have."
The city of North Las Vegas, which raises money specifically to fight graffiti via a 25-cent-per-month fee on residential and business water bills, takes a more proactive approach to the problem.
"We go to the schools and try to educate the kids that they are costing the public money," Code Enforcement Manager Sheldon Klain said, noting that graffiti is abated within 48 hours of a call to his office.
Klain said North Las Vegas also has implemented what has worked in other communities, such as a Phoenix program that requires kids convicted of graffiti crimes to work on graffiti cleanup crews and a Los Angeles program where cameras are set up in hot spot areas to capture spray-painting vandals in the act.
While Henderson perhaps is the least impacted of local municipalities, it nonetheless has seen its graffiti complaint calls nearly double since 2001.
"It has not been a real serious problem but rather an ongoing problem we have to address to keep up with it," said Luke Smith, traffic maintenance supervisor for Henderson.
"We have to be efficient. We've found that if we are quick enough to eliminate graffiti the taggers lose interest in that wall and move on."
Richard Aguayo, supervisor of the Nevada Department of Transportation's Bingo Squad, which removes graffiti and litter and repairs tortoise fences, complains that taggers who hit highway soundwalls and other large structures "have so much room to work with, and they strike at night when we are not working."
"We spend as much as six hours of our eight-hour shift painting over graffiti or using cleaning agents to remove graffiti from highway signs," Aguayo said.
He said NDOT is experimenting with anti-graffiti paint that prevents aerosol spray paint from sticking to the protective-coated surfaces.
"Anti-graffiti paint will be a big help to us." he said."Right now we are just trying to hold our ground" against the vandals.
Kresser said it will take a multi-faceted approach to reduce graffiti in the valley. Community volunteers need to be encouraged to paint over graffiti as soon as it is seen, children and teens -- and perhaps more importantly, their parents -- need to be educated about the negative impacts of graffiti and the costs incurred by taxpayers to clean it up, and taggers need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and also forced to pay back taxpayers for cleaning up after them."
Darryl Kresser
GRAFFITI ABATEMENT PAINTER