Why We Watch for Gangs and Graffiti

Twenty-five years ago a Stanford University professor conducted an experiment with two identical cars. One he placed on a Bronx street without its license plates and with the hood up. It was stripped in a day.

The other he parked on a Palo Alto street where it remained unmolested for over a week.

(I bet you're thinking, "Well, it's a longer way from the Bronx to Palo Alto than just geography!")

The scientist then smashed one of the Palo Alto car's windows and it, too, was stripped within hours.

The psychologist, Philip Zimbardo, proved that the environment invites mischief in his now-famous "broken window" hypothesis. High grass, piles of junk and trash, peeling paint, standing graffiti all contribute to criminal behavior.

"Criminals, the theory suggests, respond to their immediate environments," writes Malcolm Gladwell in the Washington Post. "They take advantage of situations that seem to invite deviance. And communities that clearly articulate and enforce a standard of public behavior and order can discourage criminal activity."

In the same Post article, Mr. Gladwell notes that "a large, two-family home in Prospect Park, N.J., sells for 20 to 25 percent more than the same house just a few blocks away in Paterson, N.J." Prospect Park has a full-time "construction official" and very toothy code laws he enforces.

While we can nudge our city fathers into tightening up code enforcement, that's a very slow process. But by capitalizing on Oxnard's active anti-gang, anti-graffiti efforts, we can help keep both our neighborhood clean and our property values up.

In the late 1980s New York's Transit Authority ruled that no graffiti-splattered car would leave the yard. When "writers" broke into a train yard, they exclusively "decorated" the dirty cars "because they knew if they painted the clean cars, they would never get to see their graffiti again," according to George Kelling, a Northeastern University criminologist who consulted to the project.

This, coupled with catching "fare beaters" (people who jump over the turnstiles), brought robberies in the subway system down 75 percent and reduced felonies 66 percent.

Gladwell writes, "There was a time when police departments and communities considered crime a deep-rooted and implacable social phenomenon, something that at best could be contained and at worst would just have to be tolerated. But if picking up trash and mowing lawns can make even a small difference, it suggests that criminal behavior is far less intransigent."

All this leaves the other side nonplussed. Recently Vibe magazine asked a tagger, "With all this pressure that's been put on writers lately, where do you write?"

"When I first started writing in '79, I noticed tags in the projects... Bombin' walls ain't really nothing... When we went to layups and train yards, you always had that risk of getting caught. So I'd rather hit, like, something that's, you know, illegal something where there's a risk of getting caught. That seems to go along with the art, if you ask me. If you wanna see a real writer, send him over to Singapore and see what he's gonna paint over there."

Another fellow, miffed by his city's stopping their legal wall program, said, "The graffiti ... started becoming more and more destructive it started appearing on people's homes, their fences, everywhere! It's funny how the people of Fresno don't see the connection, but then again, most people don't want to think of solutions they only want to put fines on people and put them in jail. Another interesting thing is that since the spray paint has been put under lock and key, graffiti has only increased."

This same person also feels that, "The more you shut the graf community out, the more destructive the graf is going to become. If writers don't feel safe doing what they are doing, then they are going to spend less time with each expression, bringing down the quality of graffiti in their cities."

So, we have one tagger, who thrills in the chance of getting caught, and one graffiti artist, seemingly only interested in his "art," upset at not having a legal place to practice his craft.

Then there are gang members marking their territory, so to speak.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get one of them to 'fess up nor could I find an outspoken one on the Internet.

In every case, however, they do not want to see their efforts painted over or erased.

As you can see from the charts on this page, the sooner we remove the graffiti, and the nearer we come to restoring the original surface, the less likely we'll get hit again in that area.

More gang-related info from:

What You Know About Gangs Could Save Your Child's Life
National Crime Prevention Council
The Coroner's Report
Criminal Justice Resources: Gangs (Univ. of Michigan)