Phoenix stays busy tackling graffiti
From Anthem to Ahwatukee, Phoenix’s anti-graffiti team removed paint, scratches and ink from more than 80,000 sites throughout the city during the 2014 fiscal year.
Graffiti is a problem the city spends about $2 million a year to clean up, according to the Neighborhood Services Department. Phoenix has iPads to track complaints, paint for removal and people to do the work.
It’s a free service for residents, as long as the property owner signs a permission slip for the city. Paint and other supplies are also available at no cost to groups that want to organize the cleanups themselves.
The city runs education programs to prevent graffiti, but removing scratched and sprayed sites immediately is a necessity, city leaders say.
The longer graffiti is left visible, the quicker a neighborhood degrades, said Tim Boling, deputy director of the Neighborhood Services Department. City data shows pockets of Phoenix where more than 500 graffiti sites already have been removed in 2015.
“It attracts more graffiti,” Boling said.
The department runs the Graffiti Busters program, a daily operation to clean up tagged and defaced properties. Residents can report complaints by calling the department or using an app, which triggers a crew to respond.
In March, program staff removed complaints in an average of 2.3 days, Boling said. Other Phoenix departments and state agencies such as the Arizona Department of Transportation remove graffiti on their own property.
There’s no way to determine exactly why some parts of the city are graffiti magnets, Boling said, and it’s not always tied to socioeconomic status of the area. Denser neighborhoods tend to have more graffiti, he said.
The area near 43rd and Thomas avenues, for example, has been a hotspot for removals this year. North of Union Hills Drive, staff has responded to minimal complaints.
And while a portion of Phoenix graffi- In fiscal year 2014: » 80,287 graffiti sites removed. » 16,254 complaints received. » 13,817 gallons of paint used. » 3,320 hours by volunteers. ti is related to gang activity, a lot of it is just blight, Boling said.
“Most of it is just vandalism and taggers,” he said. “It doesn’t have a message in it other than ‘Hey, look at me.’”
Crews responding to graffiti complaints take a photo of each site to store in a database. Police can then access the photos to find similar tags when they’re trying to catch prolific taggers.
Reward money is available for tips that result in an arrest.
Restitution and diversion — like requiring taggers to pay for cleanup or complete an educational program — are key aspects of enforcement, said Phoenix police Sgt. Jamie Rothschild with the Community Relations Bureau. He said graffiti can lead to other types of crime.
Areas dense with graffiti could point to a lack of programs for youth, or a gang or tagging crew presence. In the case of gang-related graffiti, it’s a crime that terrorizes people even when the perpetrator isn’t there, Rothschild said.
“The neighborhood is intimidated all the time,” he said.
Graffiti removal eradicates that fear, said Adela Torres, a Graffiti Busters foreman who has been working on the team for nearly two decades.
The crews recently started using iPads to view complaints, take photos of graffiti and log information like the type of structure it’s on. The team also removes any graffiti near the site of the complaint.