“You get some older ones in there, some outliers, but that's usually the bulk of your taggers,” Kephart said. The majority of taggers are young – ranging from 12 to 18 years old. The more difficult the spot is to reach, the more impressive the tag. In most cases, taggers come up with a moniker and are driven primarily by tagging that moniker in as many places as possible, like freeways, bathrooms and construction sites. Contrary to popular belief, taggers – not gangs – produce the most graffiti, which can range from high-volume simple hits to complex street art. Of these four, of most concern to law enforcement in terms of day-to-day operations is tagger and gang graffiti. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, there are four main types of graffiti: gang, ideological, spontaneous and tagger. But if the police were to catch you vandalizing and smashing 50 car windows, the courts are going to take that a lot more seriously, and it's the same thing with graffiti.”Īccording to the U.S. It's kind of like if you're going down the street and you smash a car window, you're probably going to get a pretty light sentence. So the judge is able to see the severity and the proliferation of this individual and their vandalism. They're usually sending to court cases where there's dozens of incidents. “So it's not like they're catching a kid that just did one piece of graffiti and that's it. “The cities we work with – they're spending millions of dollars a year, and when they go and they catch a kid because they're tracking it, they have this kid's chronological history of vandalism that could be 30, 40, 50 or 60 incidents of graffiti,” Kephart said. ![]() In the end, they're spending more money than if they were actually going after the perpetrators. But that doesn't really solve the issue when they're not prosecuting the people who are responsible. Timothy Kephart, founder and CEO of GraffitiTracker, a web-based solution that helps identify, track, prosecute and seek restitution from graffiti vandals, sees the issue in many cities: they're attacking the problem by just doing cleanup. But perhaps a more compelling argument for city officials who need to be convinced of the importance of law enforcement’s role in combatting graffiti is cost and restitution. WHY INVESTIGATING AND PROSECUTING GRAFFITI VANDALS MATTERSįrom broken windows theory to studies that have tracked the correlation between graffiti and other crime, there’s no denying the criminal cost of graffiti.
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