“A blight on the local environment” is a pretty severe judgment of ROA’s furry critters. In fact, many east Londoners think it cheers ol’ Hackney Road up a bit, but a hare-hating council will soon buff the piece away, because they consider it “graffiti.” So it’s bye-bye bunny, without deliberations and regardless of the building owner’s permission, NYC-style.
The Army Corps of Engineers has triumphantly announced that they’ve wiped out graffiti in the LA River. Yes, months after contractors began covering up SABER’s giant piece and MTA’s massive roller, the glorified ditch has been whitewashed, thanks in no small part to more than $800k in federal stimulus funding. Read more »
As it turns out, a Texas judge’s fiery speech sentencing a teenager to eight years in prison for graffiti was all for show. District Court Judge Marisela Saldaña apparently didn’t understand that stacking sentences, which would have forced 18-year-old Sebastian Perez to serve four two-year prison terms consecutively, wasn’t allowed for this case. Yesterday, Judge Saldaña was forced to abide by the law and reduce Perez’s sentence to two years in prison and two years of community service, a still very sizable, serious punishment. |KIII-TV3|
Yesterday, news of a Texas judge’s decision to imprison a teenage vandal for eight years without parole caused quite a stir, with most people agreeing that the punishment was way too extreme. Judge Marisela Saldaña clearly didn’t dole out such an egregious sentence to cover the cost of cleaning up the $7,300 of damage Sebastian Perez caused, after all, his incarceration will run Texas taxpayers than $140,000. And that price tag doesn’t include the considerable public expense and burden of a four-time felon lacking credible experience or job prospects, which is what Perez will be when he’s scheduled for release at age 26 after spending nearly a third of his life locked up. Read more »
Another Texas teenager is being inordinately punished for graffiti. 18-year-old Sebastian Perez was sentenced to 8 years in state prison after pleading guilty to three vandalism charges and one for pot possession. Read more »
Prison is a new prospect for teenagers caught with spray Paint in Manley, Australia. Under the Sydney suburb’s new anti-graffiti laws, minors are banned from possessing spray cans “unless they could prove they were to be used for education, employment or legal art.” If teens fail to refute their presumed guiltiness, they can be fined $1100 or sent to jail for six months. Read more »
Before Mayor Bloomberg hits the streets, sanitation crews are dispatched to pick up garbage, remove graffiti and generally put an extra shine on the area. NY1 reports that “employees on the city payroll seem to be acting as the mayor’s personal clean-up crew,” giving the neighborhoods a polish that Common Cause likens to Beijing’s massive cleanup for the Olympics: “They just built blank walls where there were slums, so that people didn’t see the slums.” The government watchdog group also questions whether the mayor who gets driven to his preferred subway stop is living in a bubble. |NY1|
The City Council has passed an aggressive new bill to buff away public expression unless property owners explicitly tell clean-up crews to back off. Approved by a 44 to 2 vote, the new legislation presumes that any “letter, word, name, number, symbol, slogan, message, drawing, picture, writing or other mark of any kind visible to the public” on a building is “not consented to by the owner.” As Gotham Gazette reports, building owners who receive a clean-up notice from the city will have 35 days to tell them off before their public art displays are subject to destruction. |Gotham Gazette|
Photo by jag9889
Apparently taking a cue from Shepard Fairey’s fight against graffiti, the Los Angeles City Council is considering an ordinance requiring all buildings to have an anti-graffiti coating at least nine feet high. An alternative to using impermeable tile surfaces, the clear coating “often discolors the surface of buildings and is not always environmentally friendly” so the motion provides an exception. Property owners can skip the anti-graffiti treatment if they sign a contract agreeing to clean up vandalism within seven days or 72 hours of being told to do so by police. |NBC|
Photo by ALPC
A forthcoming documentary focuses on anti-graffiti zealots who commit the same crimes they crusade against. In “Vigilante Vigilante,” San Francisco filmmakers Max Good and Nathan Wollman successfully stalk and unmask a local man, known as the “Silver Buff,” who “surreptitiously spray paints metallic silver blobs over existing graffiti, almost always doing more damage than was there to begin with.” Along the way, the filmmakers also profile other prolific graffiti-hating vandals including New Orleans’ “Gray Ghost,” Fred Radtke, who was recently busted for vandalizing a legal mural and ordered to get permission to paint on other people’s property. Watch a preview from “the battle for expression” after the jump. Read more »
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