The Writing is on the Wall
Ogden Point - Victoria, BC
Recently, I attended The Anti Graffiti Symposium (TAGS) in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia. Hosted by the Victoria Police Department and the Township of Esquimalt it proved to be an interesting couple of days with a variety of exceptional speakers, both local and International. The objective of the 2009 TAGS event was to educate law enforcement agencies, government, crime prevention professionals and the general public about issues of graffiti crime in their communities and to clarify some of the following questions about this type of vandalism: Who is doing it, what does it mean, how do we investigate it, how do we prevent and control it?
Speakers from as far away as Sweden and Australia joined other experts from various US cities and Canadian authorities from British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba to offer their insights on the subject. As a Crime Prevention practitioner specializing in Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED), it provided me with an abundance of information that can now be shared with my own community and others throughout Central Alberta.
Recent Graffiti in Red Deer, AB
The lingo that “taggers” use is part of a subculture that has been around for years and is still evolving. As Constable Valerie Spicer of the Vancouver Police Department suggested, the more connected a person is to graffiti subculture the more likely they will become involved in violence. There is no doubt that she is considered an expert by her peers. With many credentials she is also a PhD candidate in the Criminology program at Simon Fraser University and co-initiated the RESTART program which is a restorative justice art program for graffiti offenders. Education and awareness is key and she points out that this problem typically begins in Grades 8 – 10, with 94% of the offenders being male.
During the symposium, I sensed the dedication and passion that many of these speakers possess and it reminded me of how important some crime-related issues really are to the overall health of our communities. Graffiti impacts our quality of life and contributes to the fear of crime. That being said, without the social development element or what we now refer to as 2nd Generation CPTED being utilized, standard CPTED practices will ultimately fail. This problem is far reaching, from risky behavior and the theft of spray paint from retailers to more violent crime.
There is a lot to be said for utilizing best practices, especially when they support more than just CPTED. Often, the writing really is on the wall, we only have to look for a well-balanced approach to find a solution. Is Graffiti art? Absolutely not, in fact all of the speakers agreed that the difference between art and graffiti has everything to do with one word – PERMISSION! If there is no permission, it is vandalism. There is no doubt that murals work well in many cases and add an artistic element to our communities. So how about a Graffiti Mural Competition? Brilliant!
Did I leave the best for last … you bet I did. TAGS 2010 will be held in Calgary, Alberta
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You know Steven, it is fascinating watching these anti-graffiti efforts from the benefit of 20 years hindsight in CPTED! We all know basic 1st Gen CPTED might have some limited impact (anti-graffiti sprays, moss walls, etc). But as you say, 2nd Gen social strategies and proper management methods are the key to sustainable success.
Decades of graffiti experience show us this. Witness the turnaround in Sydney, Australia I wrote about in my SafeGrowth blog last month
(http://safe-growth.blogspot.com/2010/01/surfing-sydneys-graffiti.html)
How appropriate the conference was in Victoria, a place with the worst graffiti among any city in Canada I’ve seen – including Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver (which have some pretty horrid graffiti areas). Whatever is happening in Victoria to combat graffiti clearly is not working!
I hope the experts you saw at this conference talked about the successful programs in Sydney, and instead did not rehash old, tired, and ineffective territorial reinforcement and natural surveillance ideas. I hope they talked about successes such as the story we reported in the last issue of the August 2009 issue of the ICA newsletter “CPTED Perspective” titled “Britain’s New Robin Hood” and the 2009 Can’s festival by graffiti artists
http://www.cpted.net/PDF/newsletters/aug09.pdf
The last thing we need is to forget our history and reinvent tired old prevention wheels that are by now worn out and flat!