47 tickets to victim of graffiti vandals are 47 too many
Thousands of dollars in fines sound like a real breakdown in urban practice
It was a bit discouraging to read earlier this month in the West Island Gazette that one of the commercial property owners in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue had received 47 tickets, amounting to a whopping $7,000+ in fines, because he didn’t remove graffiti from his property.
How many pads of tickets did the building inspector go through to reach 47? Was he or she going for a record? Is it the record? Why didn’t someone — like his or her supervisor or a directorgeneral or the mayor perhaps — intervene to try to mediate? Was, perhaps, the town administration going for a record? Did the council at the time know this was happening? Is this normal procedure in one of our towns?
The questions are reasonable. And it’s not surprising that the municipal judge, Marie Brouillet, who recently heard the case won’t give a judgment until she’s established whether 47 tickets and more than $7,000 in fines is normal practice.
It isn’t. And it shouldn’t be. It makes a farce of the graffiti bylaw.
It sounds like a real breakdown in urban practice.
It is hard to imagine that the graffiti bylaws, even if the onus is on the property owner to clean offending graffiti, were written to be applied in this way. Clearly, there must have been a serious breakdown in communication or practice.
In fact, I think it is unfair to penalize a building’s owner when he or she is already a victim of public mischief. Which is why I was glad that during my last mandate as mayor in Ste-Anne (20059) the town had specialized equipment to facilitate the removal of graffiti. We even looked at specialized cleaning products. As far as I remember, we arrived at the following standard procedure: graffiti appeared, the town visited the owner-victim, there were some negotiations and the graffiti was erased. There was no dispute, brief or protracted, with, after all, understandably aggrieved building owners. There would be no torrent of tickets raining down on them after being victimized by underground artists.
Regardless of what you think about graffiti, there is only a thin line between public art (the murals, for example, we had painted on various walls by a local artist over the years) and malicious, messy, unwanted graffiti. Some modern art would be very comfortable on public walls and some major gallery artists, like Jean-Michel Basquiat, grew out of street art and the world of graffiti. There are immensely successful graffiti artists. But the kind of graffiti we’re talking about is usually just a series of irritating unsightly visual tags written in an underground language of the street that no one asked for. It’s just plain ugly and defaces an urban landscape.
In my time at town hall we were lucky enough to have access to police personnel who specialized in countering this kind of mischief. We had access to a police expert on the topic who had local responsibility for graffiti control. He ran us through his files, a folder full of photographs of graffiti with dates and descriptions. And many graffiti perpetrators were caught. I remember the late former mayor of Beaconsfield, Roy Kemp, even had some work routine for punishing graffiti artists.
One recommendation from the police experts I remember well was get rid of graffiti as quickly as you can. And based on that recommendation in the early post-demerger period, Ste-Annede-Bellevue had that specialized equipment for removing graffiti, a trailer and sprays. There was no battling with property owners to get them to clean up their buildings: the town graffiti squad went at it right away.
But the town issuing 47 tickets is 47 too many. When you take into consideration the precarious state of the retail environment on Ste-Anne Street, it isn’t a healthy precedent. It’s not as if a line of bold and adventurous businessmen and women are lining up around the block at the newly renovated town hall door begging to open new retail businesses on the main street. It’s not as if we’re back in the late 1980s, when businesspeople, particularly restaurateurs, were competing fiercely for space. As a shopping destination, as a dining area, the town is, at the moment, underwhelming. There are a handful of flourishing businesses, but the overall impression is that it hasn’t recovered from all the inconveniences of the last five years of renovations. It took too long and it wasn’t managed well. Morale is low and prospects for retail success are far from bright.
Abusive application of a graffiti bylaw isn’t the way to create a healthy business environment.