The front porch: When graffiti strikes, time for snappy comeback

Brenda Yates drives with a can of gray spray paint tucked next to her seat, and she knows how to use it.

Trust her, she’s a cop.

Yates doesn’t have time to paint over all the graffiti she sees, but she gets some of it. “If it’s on public property and I can clean it up, I do,” said Yates, a neighborhood resource officer who works out of three COPS shops, one downtown and two on the South Side.

Yates is the first to admit that Spokane has “many, many” other crimes that are a bigger deal than graffiti. But she believes that graffiti is a “gateway crime,” a little crime that paves the way for bigger crimes.

That’s why, after police and residents noticed a rise in graffiti last summer, they decided that as the weather warmed up this year, they’d rally volunteers and residents to combat the problem. Yates says their effort is already having an effect – as she gave me a tour of Graffiti’s Greatest South Side Hits this week, she also pointed out spots where property owners have painted over or power-washed away graffiti (“no less than four times” on the west wall of the old Safeway building at Third Avenue and Maple Street; along a Regal Street homeowner’s fence).

Still, there was plenty to see, little of it pretty. As police resources are stretched and as those many other crimes remain, Yates says the solution is for residents to document and report graffiti and then paint it over as soon as possible.

It’s tough to swallow. Why should I spend my time and money painting over the “PMS” on my garage door just because some hooligans got bored? (And why did they pick my garage? How did they know? Is it that glaring?) Because, as volunteer graffiti fighter Lois D’Ewart told me: “If they think you don’t care, they’re gonna come back and do worse.”

Maybe a quick cleanup sends the message that your building front or fence or utility box is no longer available as a canvas or that such monkeyshines are just not acceptable in your neighborhood – and that if little crimes aren’t tolerated, more serious ones certainly won’t be.

Whatever the reason, a quick response seems to work, Yates said. It shows ownership of an area by the people who live there.

Yates said that when she lived in the South Perry area years ago, graffiti was common. Now, with the neighborhood’s “huge sense of pride and regeneration … there’s no graffiti up there. There’s none. I mean, it’s marvelous.”

Residents intent on cleanup face a long backlog, though. And much of the South Side’s graffiti is actually logged. Volunteer D’Ewart, a retired accountant who lives in the East Central neighborhood, spends about two hours a day several days a week responding to reports of graffiti made to her neighborhood’s COPS shop. After my tour with Yates, I visited the shop, where D’Ewart maintains meticulous stacks of photographs and forms listing locations and types of graffiti.

“I hate graffiti,” she said. “I spend most of my life with graffiti anymore.”

D’Ewart plugs away. Volunteers’ efforts provide police with evidence they can use to connect multiple instances of graffiti to one person. When aggregate damage costs at least $250 to repair, it’s a felony charge, Yates said.

The evidence also is used to determine whether graffiti is gang-related. Gang graffiti can, in a double-whammy, net property owners a ticket when they don’t clean it up, according to city code.

Graffiti counts as gang-related if it’s intended to communicate a message from one group to another. Determining whether than applies is tricky, although there are some symbols and words – crowns, pitchforks, “Murder 1,” “Killer” – that police can show are historically connected to gangs. Yates estimated that 90 percent of Spokane’s graffiti is not gang-related, but created by taggers, people who invent a recognizable signature for themselves.

Sometimes those signatures reflect talent. While South Side graffiti painters seem like the toddlers of the “public art” world – lots of scribbling – I’ve always kind of secretly liked graffiti when it’s done well, big splashes of color and energy in otherwise gray and grubby environs.

I asked Yates whether she could see graffiti as an art form, a valid means of expression.

“I’m pretty liberal, so I could totally go for that,” she said. “But there has to be some appropriateness that goes into that. Artistic license doesn’t give somebody the right to damage someone else’s property.”

Police were lenient about graffiti at the skateboard park downtown, she said, because it wasn’t gang-related, just an “expression of the psyche” of the young people who hung out there. There was no victim, because the people who did the painting were the people who spent time there; the space was for them. But drug dealers and gang members started showing up, adding their own graffiti, angering some skaters and creating a dilemma for police.

Yates pointed out several city-sanctioned murals painted on concrete walls and underpass supports. They offer a public art outlet and brighten drab spaces, and graffiti artists don’t deface them.

She said she plans to work with the city to set aside more spaces for murals.

“Some of the kids who do this are very artistic. They’re not all jerks,” she said. “There are other, more responsible ways to have a sense of ownership and a sense of expression.”