Remorse and graffitists

I was driving home along the motorway yesterday evening and noticed that the volume of graffiti is getting higher and higher. I feel personally connected with this problem, partly because I wrote to the county manager and suggested that there might be a more effective way to tackle the problem of graffiti.

He wrote back and passed me on to someone with specific responsibility for bridges and overpasses where most of this graffiti appears.

I gave him just enough information to make him curious yet he seemed to not want any more detail so I left him to it.

There was clear evidence that he was doing something different to address the problem for a few weeks but since then little has been done to address the problem and it's getting worse. The graffitists are winning the battle for now.

The idea of dealing with graffiti came from reading the book "The Tipping Point" but this was not the original source of the idea. The original idea came from a programme run by the State of New Jersey, the programme was known as the "Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program".

A central part of the programme (I'll use the European spelling if you don't mind) involved putting a whole load of police officers back on "the beat", patrolling neighbourhoods on foot like in the old days. Now you can imagine that this went down like a lead balloon with the Police Department in New Jersey but grudgingly they agreed and went back on the beat.

The outcome of the programme was documented in "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1982 by two writers named George Kelling and James Wilson. The outcome was a surprise at the time, and continues to amaze people ever since.

In summary, just being there on the street, keeping an eye on things and physically demonstrating that law and order is present and enforced, the crime rate for petty crime plummeted. This had a knock-on effect on more serious crime. None of this was anticipated.

"Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars."

What has this got to do with the graffiti on the motorway. Well in The Tipping Point, Gladwell goes on to show that Kelling, a co-author of the aforementioned article, was hired as a consultant by the NY Transit authority and the first major problem he had to tackle was trash and graffiti. How did he resolve it? He attacked the problem when it was small.

This in essence is what I suggested should be done with the motorway bridges and overpasses. Why has it not worked? In true budget-obsessed fashion it seems some bright spark has decided it makes "economic sense" to wait until the graffiti has built-up to a significant level before sending out a cleaning/painting crew.

Clearly this is to miss the point. If you send the message that no matter how small a piece of graffiti is put on a wall, it won't be on the wall for longer than a single day. Eventually as graffitists get bored re-spraying the same thing over and over, they either move on (not likely since graffitists are opportunistic and not strategic - they are not actually marketing any real message) or they get bored and do something else.

I might pick this up again with the county manager, in the spirit of doing a good deed and maybe saving some time and effort if the problem is better understood.

All of this got me thinking about the concept of remorse among the graffitist community. I wonder has anyone ever gone home after a night of spraying graffiti, sat down on the edge of the bed and thought "what have I done?" More interesting is the question of whether anyone has ever gone back to the scene, climbed the fence, and proceded to spray over their graffiti tag with some nice bland grey paint?

Is there something in the genetic make-up of graffitists that inhibits remorse?