Put aside the chatter, finger-pointing and obfuscation. If you’re a property owner, residential or business, and your property has been tagged, you know the story on the front page of this week’s SUN regarding graffiti is a big old tandem-truck trailer full of horse manure.
The city police blame the juvenile probation. They, in turn, point a finger at the District Attorney’s office. The new DA is still trying to find her desk. The “graffiti officer” (whatever that is) says graffiti bandits are doing community service. Who knows how much of any of that is true and to what degree. All the agencies blaming each other have much more important things to do than chase brats with spray paint.
Full disclosure: we’re really tired of painting the walls at the Rio Grande SUN and would like something done about it. The last time our building was tagged the police were called and the answer we got was, “What would you like us to do?” Maybe what you’re paid to do?
What we do know is walls, signs, buildings, utility boxes and dumpsters all over town are continually tagged and it’s not slowing down. Additionally, we’re not seeing any city employee effort to cover up the graffiti. We see citizens and business owners painting their property . . . over and over.
Graffiti officer Jaime Martinez says he’s drafting an ordinance to make buying spray paint more difficult. Good luck with that. When a juvenile can’t buy paint, they just get an “adult” to do it for them. Has the drinking age being set at 21 done anything to curb teen drinking? Children use the same work-around: get someone of legal age.
Honestly, there’s probably not a lot city police or lawyers can do about the problem. It’s more of a parent problem and you can’t legislate parenting. Bad parents have bad children and that’s where our tagging community originates and thrives.
We’ve found the biggest deterrent is painting over the graffiti immediately. It’s just no fun for the vandals to get out of school and cruise by the building to show their friends what they did last night, only to find it’s gone. Pretty disappointing.
This is another problem more police, laws and legal proceedings will not alleviate. It’s going to take a community to come together and attack the problem of poor parenting and city blight together. When we all no longer accept it, we’ll all do something about it.