The notebook on Dan Medina’s desk at Denver’s Abraham Lincoln High is 4 inches thick. It contains Polaroids of graffiti once found in the school.
The pictures include a lot of initials and very little sophistication. That’s because what you’re looking at are advertisements for gangs, not works of art.
“I have a clique; you have a clique; now you have gangs,” Medina said of Denver’s young tagging crews that have turned increasingly violent as one group paints over the initials of another.
These days, Lincoln remains largely clean of graffiti because Medina, a community liaison officer, hunts down taggers, gets cops to write them tickets for vandalism and then puts them to work removing their handiwork.
“I make it rough,” he said. “You put in some elbow grease.”
Across town, at Capitol Hill United Neighborhoods Inc. – or CHUN – Drew O’Connor cannot make the guilty pay. But like Medina, he grasps the importance of getting rid of graffiti.
O’Connor hopes to rally at least 40 volunteers Saturday at 9 a.m. at Panera Bread at 13th Avenue and Grant Street to get free paint. Then, they’ll set out to cover 135 pieces of graffiti that CHUN identified in a February canvass of an area bounded by Broadway and Downing Street between East 13th and East 17th avenues.
“This is about not being tolerant of small criminal activity,” O’Connor said. “It’s a push back to connect people more, to create more caring.”
The Denver neighborhood near Lincoln that Medina calls home could use similar nonviolent vigilantes.
“There was an old man named Mr. Baca,” Medina said. “Every week, he and a group of senior citizens used to paint over graffiti on Alameda.”
Mr. Baca died. The taggers did not. Spray paint now defaces street signs and buildings. The place looks like a slum.
The kids doing this all over the city don’t get it, Medina said.
“It goes back to instant gratification, advertising themselves,” he said. “We live in a society like that – visual. That’s what they care about.”
They sure don’t care about quality.
What O’Connor encountered on Capitol Hill was “mostly tagging and mostly gang,” he said. “And I have a loose interpretation of art.”
So does Medina.
Graffiti can be artwork, he said. “But gangs have seized on it to advertise.”
Medina keeps an exhaustive list of gang and tagging crew initials. He breaks bad on any member of any group he can identify for vandalism. But he also works to find ways for teenagers to out-draw themselves with pencils instead of pistols.
He pulls several drawings and paintings from his desk. The colors and shapes testify to talent, not thuggery. Nevertheless, Medina has asked the cops to bless each one. He vetted them himself, even looking at them in a mirror to make sure gang symbols have not been blended into the swirls in reverse.
“I tell kids, ‘I’ll find a place to show your work,”‘ Medina said. “‘You need to display it where you can show your parents and they’ll be proud.”‘
That’s what artists do. They don’t stab and shoot each other as warring groups of taggers have started to do in Denver.
And they don’t trash their neighborhoods.
O’Connor doesn’t know how much graffiti will reappear after Saturday’s Capitol Hill paint-out. He is, however, willing to keep fighting the little nuisances because he knows that unaddressed, they only beget bigger nuisances.
It may not be a case of out of sight, out of mind. But it can’t hurt to make taggers think twice.
That’s why on a recent home visit to a truant student, Medina insisted on going in the teen’s bedroom.
“He had tagged the name of his crew all over his own room,” Medina said.
The liaison officer had seen the same tag all over the neighborhood.
“I went to Home Depot and bought two gallons of white paint,” Medina said. “I told him, ‘You have until tomorrow to cover this up or I’m turning you in.”‘
To see examples of graffiti that Dan Medina calls art, go to www.denverpostbloghouse.com/spencer/.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at jspencer@denverpost.com or 303-954-1771.
