In the past week we’ve had two more major graffiti vandal arrests along with another minor arrest. Meth was arrested Monday along with another lesser-known tagger named Zen. Then last week a tagger thought to be Atak was arrested in Amherst for DWI, and he just happened to have graffiti materials, photos of his work, and an intoxicated, overly talkative girlfriend in the car with him. These three arrests (Atak and Meth being the most important) along with the other seven or so tagger arrests earlier last year, make ten official arrests, including four of the areais top taggers.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours working with these kids over the past few years while they work off their community service hours (usually after at least some jail time) in our communities. I’ve also been part of court ordered community meetings with some of them where we’ve had a chance to ask them what the hell they are thinking when they are vandalizing our neighborhoods.
You’d be surprised to hear the answers, to see who they really are, and to experience their indifferent attitudes change into shame as they begin to truly understand the damage they are playfully (in their minds) inflicting on us as a community.
Almost all of the taggers that we’ve arrested for vandalizing our city neighborhoods hail from the suburbs. They come to the city to tag for a few reasonsOe they think they are less likely to get caught, and many of them look down on the city. One of the tagging groups caught early last year actually added CBS to all their tags. CBS stands for Can’t Be Stopped – or at least it did until they were caught. These guys were pretty bold. One of our neighbors spent up to six hours a week removing all their tags just to have them come back again a day or two later. It was a game to them. eSport for the empathy-challenged.i
I myself grew up in the suburbs. Growing up, I was conditioned to look down on the city, which in my case was Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was told not go into town because it was edangerousi, and was left to wonder how all “those people” could live that way. After moving to Buffalo and living in the city for the past nine years it’s hard to understand how I could have ever thought that way – but it does help to give me some insight into the minds of these kids.
The taggers I’ve met with over the past few years were all shocked that they were actually arrested. It seems that the tagger community assumes that not only will they not get caught, but they will not be prosecuted if they are caught (at least with the younger members of the culture). Although there is more infighting than you’d think, the younger taggers generally respect the more notorious ones (like Meth, Attack, Merk, & Lyons), and the more experienced taggers set expectations with the younger ones (the ones we catch most often) that they won’t be caught, and if they are, they won’t be arrested. The first overnight in jail for these guys is an education I wouldn’t wish on anyone. They tend to eplay it downi as being no big deal. You can tell from their body language though, that if they had any idea that they would be arrested and would have to spend time in jail, they would have thought twice about tagging.
They see it as a game, and they even think that they are improving our neighborhoods in the process – they actually justify the damage they are doing to our neighborhoods by telling themselves (and each other) that their tags are benefiting the city. I’ve heard this repeatedly. They see our neighborhoods as wastelands where no one cares about the buildings and see their tags as attractive urban art. They are very proud of their tags and enjoy the game of cat and mouse. They are often shocked to see just how hard urban activists are working to improve our neighborhoods and quite often appear genuinely ashamed of the damage that they are causing.
Most of our neighbors don’t know that the tags are primarily coming from suburban kids. We’ve had to deal with more than one sweet old lady who was so terrified by what she saw as gang graffiti, that she wouldn’t even come out of her house anymore. Other neighbors had to buy her groceries!
I’ve gotten to know several of our taggers and they are a pretty sad lot once you get to know them, and once they start seeing what harm they’ve been doing to the neighborhoods. They appear to have been previously blind to the devastation they have caused. I always introduce them to the little old ladies they’ve been terrorizing, mostly so the grandmothers will feel less afraid of these marauders. I also introduce the taggers to all the neighbors who spend their days trying to keep up with all the graffiti in the neighborhoods.
Because I often get them assigned to me for their community service (sometimes hundreds of hours plus jail time and fines), I put them to work on removing their own graffiti. I start out by giving them an otherwise unpainted brick wall, a wire brush, and graffiti removal cleaner. I tell them it will take a while but after about 45 minutes the wall should be clean – just keep working at it. Then I come back a couple hours later to see that they are still scrubbing and very frustrated. I then show them another scrubbing method and tell them how surprised I am that it’s not coming off. I then come back one hour later and find them sitting underneath the graffiti, totally defeated and not really sure what they are doing wrong (and sore as hell). At this point I tell them that it’s obviously not coming off, and without paying for very expensive equipment, it can’t be removed from raw brick no matter how hard they scrub. This is what the neighborhood has to deal with every day. At this point, the taggers still have 197 hours of community service to go, but they are already starting to understand why we are so angry with them. Somehow it’s not a game anymore.
I don’t like seeing people arrested in general because I’m never sure that our current justice system works well enough to fix the real problem, but we’ve spent so much time removing graffiti in our neighborhoods this year that if arresting the taggers is what it takes to stop themOe then not only am I happy to see them arrested, I’ll be right there with the rest of the community requesting that they are fully prosecuted. I’ll be happy to ask for maximum sentences. And I’ll work them to exhaustion as they complete their community service by removing the tags in our neighborhoods (and I’ll probably find a few other really nasty jobs for them to do as well).
I’ve asked these guys if graffiti competitions and sanctioned walls would cut back on all the vandalism, and I’ve been told repeatedly that it wouldn’t, that the real excitement is in getting up as many tags as possible, in the most visible and impressive places possible, and not getting caught. Although there is a great deal of pride in the art of tagging and improving their tags with practice, it’s a game far more than a legitimate art form. This comes from those that are caught – prior to being caught they say they really didn’t think much about it.
I’m happy to see Atak, Merk, Lyons, and Meth behind bars and being prosecuted to the extent of the law. But once you get to know the younger kids, you’d rather not see them arrested and spending time in jail along with some really bad characters. If that’s what it takes to stop them from destroying our neighborhoods and terrorizing our elderly, then I’m ready to do whatever it takes.