Denver’s mayor and City Council have enough on their plate without the distraction of a New York graffiti promoter who is trying to paint a First Amendment violation.
No one from city hall has told spray-can virtuoso Marc Ecko that he can’t hold a competition for aspiring young graffiti artists, who’d be painting on canvas provided by Ecko. Yet Ecko and his lawyer, David A. Lane, demanded in an April 8 letter that Denver repeal an ordinance restricting possession of spray paint by persons under age 18 by Monday .
Lane says Ecko “wants to hold an art festival, and that’s constitutionally protected. And the means of expression he wishes to use is spray paint. There’s nothing intrinsically evil about spray paint. … It’s a legitimate medium of artistic expression.”
Ecko wants to have minors in the competition use spray paint on canvases, but because of the city ordinance, “they can’t participate.” As of Tuesday, Lane said a legal challenge was “rolling along.”
“It’s a straw dog,” says Council President Rosemary Rodriguez, who has been battling graffiti vandalism for a long time in her west Denver district. “What he really wants is to overturn the ordinance.” The city should hold its ground; the ordinance is useful law that has dulled the damage of graffiti here.
Even though City Attorney Cole Finegan has said it would be “foolish” to prosecute Ecko’s theoretical graffiti kids, Lane insists that the possibility of prosecution is enough to cause a chilling effect on a person’s First Amendment right of expression.
Oh sure. Assistant City Attorney David Broadwell says the 1995 ordinance has “a number of safe harbor provisions where graffiti materials may be possessed by minors” and that the ordinance provides “plenty of opportunities for people to express themselves with graffiti materials.” One provision allows minors to possess the materials on property with the owner’s consent.
Denver passed the ordinance because graffiti had become an expensive nuisance (up 50 percent from 2005 during the first quarter). Tagging – painting or drawing a personal symbol – is the most common genre. Large “crews” render huge (sometimes admittedly well-executed) murals on buildings, retaining walls, bridges and other structures. Often, though, it’s an eyesore.
The city spends about $950,000 a year cleaning up graffiti, according to Gary Price of the solid waste management division.
But there’s another good reason for restricting minors’ access to spray paint: to help prevent deadly paint-sniffing.
The city doesn’t intend to “bust” anybody at Ecko’s yet-to-be scheduled event, much less stifle creative expression. Legal action, real or imagined, looks like a ploy to generate publicity for Ecko’s happening without wasting any spray paint for handbills.
