Graffiti News

The tagging virus infected the bike-path surface, memorial plaques beside bike-path benches, street signs, fences, a U.S. mail box near the Sonoma Community Center on East Napa Street, numerous signs and poles along lower Broadway and other locations around town.

With that said, however, Sonoma Police Sgt. Dave Thompson reported last week his department had received only five reports of graffiti-associated vandalism in the past two weeks and most of those were minor.

Most annoying, perhaps, has been the incidence of gang-related graffiti, particularly around the high school where a spate of tagging occurred in March when gang signs and symbols sprouted on street signs and poles, guard rails and fences.

Malinka Bates, the city’s acting public works director, said there have been more than 75 individual taggings over the past month. The cost of the manpower, truck and equipment needed to remove them comes to about $70 an hour, she said, and it takes a good hour to remove just two or three tags. Add it up and you’ve got a removal cost of $1,750 right there.

During a council meeting April 2, Sanders referred to taggers as “riff raff who are spray painting graffiti …” all over town. “It’s just rampant,” she said later on, describing tags on signs in front of her Broadway business office and on the East Napa Street mailbox near her home.

No arrests have been made in Sonoma’s latest graffiti wave, but Santa Rosa police caught four juveniles on March 20, charging them with felony vandalism and conspiracy. They e-mailed photos of the juveniles’ tagging, which shows their “monikers,” to Bates to see if the names match any graffiti in Sonoma.

Bates said no one has yet been able to identify the latest crop of taggers, but she said some witnesses report seeing four young boys dressed in black riding the bus between tagging sites.

The primary strategy for preventing graffiti is removing it as soon as possible, because one tag invites another and another in an inevitable chain reaction. Graffiti abatement programs abound in cities all over the country but it is rare to find any jurisdiction that has tamed the problem.

Estimates of the national cost of removing and combating graffiti go as high as $8 billion a year. Communities with the most success in fighting it have developed proactive programs with heavy citizen involvement.

According to Graffiti Hurts, a national nonprofit community education program, there are a dozen common-sense solutions that can go a long way in combating graffiti.

They include keeping up the neighborhood, immediate removal, encouraging citizen reporting, enforcing anti-graffiti laws, educating youth, adopting specific graffiti “spots,” creating a community mural, controlling access to graffiti surfaces, using graffiti-resistant surfaces, monitoring popular locations, employing youth curfews and providing creative alternatives.

Still, the front line of defense is immediate removal and that is not always as easy as it sounds. Bates said her volunteer crew can only get out about once a month. The sheriff’s department has a mobile graffiti removal truck, but must cover the entire county. And then there’s the issue of access.

Bates said both PG&E and AT&T have provided permission and paint to cover graffiti on their poles. But the picture is a little different for mail boxes, like the one by the community center which has a big blue blotch of graffiti with drips of paint running the length of the box.

Bates can’t touch a federal mailbox without permission. And she can’t match the mailbox blue without post office paint.

She has contacted the Sonoma post office several times, she said. “I have not been successful in getting anyone to respond. If they would just provide us with the permission and the paint, we’ll do it.”