George,

Your ambivalence on the effect of graffiti on urban life ("artistic freedom" he muses) is dismaying.

While it may be difficult to demonstrate empirically that graffiti inexorably leads to slums and the South Bronx, there is little doubt that graffiti is found in urban areas where other problems exist.

Does the former cause the latter? Probably not.

Does acceptance of the former (or indifference to the visual evidence of lawlessness) contribute to a lack of civic pride. Yes. And, in the end, civic pride is what makes a place worth calling home.

The city's efforts, and expenses, to clean up the graffiti should be lauded, and the criminals defacing public and private property prosecuted and made to clean up the mess.

Do you know that folks doing the clean up are not being paid a living wage?

Al Weed (electronic mail, May 10, 2002)

Al --

I am not at all personally ambivalent about graffiti.

I believe graffiti is UNPROTECTED cultural, social, artistic and political speech, subject to the same community standards as other such speech. The question for me is what the standard should be and how it should be enforced.

Locally, we have deemed 'graffiti' acceptable in some public locations (at Beta Bridge and Eighth Street Northwest and Page and have more than likely chosen to leave some private locations alone.

Throughout the nation, we have allowed graffiti to remain on overpasses along with the now ubiquitous American flags and messages which were a spontaneous civic response to September 11th. All of this seems to fall within the community standard that most of us seem willing or happy to apply.

In Charlottesville, we have initiated a program at city expense to clean up graffiti, mostly in the downtown business district. This graffiti abatement program may be understood as a matter of civic pride. It may be understood as the city's contribution to the creation of a vibrant tourist district [similar to or different from efforts to remove alcoholics from the mall and removal of benches where they might sit]. It may also be understood as a contribution to law enforcement efforts directed against vandalism and destruction.

Should we tolerate visual evidence of lawlessness in the form of graffiti? Assuming that the graffiti does not meet our own community standard, I should say not.

Are individuals who enage in defacement criminals? It depends, once again, on the community standard.

Should we use public monies to remove it? Only if the program is coordinated with other efforts to (a) locate and prosecute the individuals involved in the defacement and (b) to address the social, political, and economic problems which they point to.

As you might imagine, this is a tall order. Locating and prosecuting individuals involved in defacement would more than likely require an expensive sustained undercover effort on the part of the local police, possibly outweighing the immediate gain incurred from making them clean up the mess.

An alternative to an undercover effort would be to place videocams everywhere throughout the community which is a point of civic pride. Personally, I believe the costs in the violation of civil liberties would outweigh the gains which might result from such a policy.

Then, assuming that we do locate the individuals involved in the defacement, the question remains as to whether we as a community are willing to actively address the underlying problems associated with slums and urban life.

Graffiti in some instances may be found in areas where urban problems exist, but graffiti is not the cause of those problems and the removal of the graffiti is not the solution to those problems.

George Loper (electronic mail, May 10, 2002)

P.S. To my knowledge there is only one individual who has a contract with the city to remove graffiti and he does not wish to be interviewed about graffiti removal or about living wage. However, it is our understanding that because no individual graffiti abatement project will exceed $15,000, he and/or his employees are not subject to the Living Wage policy of the city.

George,

I think a discussion about what graffiti means to the perception of the quality of urban life is of value. In one sense, for Charlottesville, the presence of big city "urban art" (the picture you have of the AG Edwards Building, for example) suggests a trend towards urbanization that, I suspect, many locals will not appreciate. For visitors, such graffiti will detract from what is unique about C'ville with tagging but a reminder of where they may have come from.

It is a problem similar to what we have in a relatively unspoiled rural community with franchise signs and cookie cutter architecture. Every time someone seeks to create their own identity they do so at the expense of the existing identity. If that is not the desire of the community -- either in Nelson or Charlottesville -- it should be discouraged.

To some extent -- the nuances of free speech, for example -- we may be talking past each other, but graffiti as a modern-day symbol of urban decline is a fact. The ability to control it may reflect a vitality that we should value. I am not sure yet that we should yet give in to this form of visual terrorism.

Al Weed (electronic mail, May 10, 2002)