At one of Denver’s District 4 police Cmdr. Rudy Sandoval’s recent community meetings, someone brings up graffiti.
It comes up every meeting. It’s mentioned with the weary aggravation displayed by couples about to start one of those discussions they’ve had a thousand times before and will have a thousand times hence with little hope anything will change.
Years of talking about the scourge of graffiti, of press conferences and meetings, and of city cleaning crews busting their butts, and what do you get? You get Steve Tran, manager of Da Lat on South Federal Boulevard, transforming from amiable restaurateur to ticked-off taxpayer at the mere utterance of the g-word.
“It’s terrible! Terrible! I call Public Works, and they clean it, and the next day, there it is again. We need more police to find them, arrest them. We need to punish them real bad. We don’t want it clean. We want it stopped.”
You get Ginger Schlote, the one-woman armada. Out snapping photos of tags, recording locations, firing off letters to the powers that be. “Why do they want to destroy our neighborhood?” she asks, and if you do not know her, you might think she sounds plaintive. But Ginger Schlote does not do plaintive.
What do you get? A department still short of resources. Punishment that’s been beefed up but still strikes many as too lenient. You get the map. “Denver Partners Against Graffiti. 2009 Graffiti Data by Police District.” Removed graffiti is marked by red diamonds, chicken pox inflaming a body. Thirty-three thousand sites, 19,600 gallons of paint.
Most of the dots lie west of Downing Street. Federal is a clogged artery. Last year, city crews removed 4,035,490 square feet of graffiti. More than half was in District 4.
“Whatcha got George, Gerard?” Sandoval asks.
Detectives George Gray and Gerard Alarcon are the department’s only two full-time graffiti detectives, stationed at District 1 in northwest Denver. Gray comes out of the SWAT unit; Alarcon from District 4, where he says, grinning, he “was the low man on the totem pole” and so handled graffiti crimes. The graffiti unit is not typically a place a cop wants to land. A lot of work, a lot of platitudes, a lot of punks. Alarcon says tackling graffiti cases is “like holding a tea cup in a waterfall.”
The surprise here is not only that the two applied for the job but that they are enthusiastic about it. They are building databases, working taggers, coordinating with the Metro Area Graffiti Taskforce, inviting prosecutors and judges on graffiti tours. Along the way, they’ve won some devoted fans among city residents.
“Graffiti is obviously not going away,” Gray reports. “We caught two prolific taggers. We got a call from a woman who said her son was being threatened by a crew. There was a car outside their house, and the same car showed up at his school. Turns out, he’s been crossing out their tags. They know where he lives. They know where he goes to school. I tell people who do this, ‘You’ve just involved your whole family.’ “
You think these are a bunch of kids. They’re not. The crews are a mix of adults and juveniles. You think they work in haphazard fashion. They do not. At the District 4 meeting, Gray and Alarcon educate residents in the ways of crews’ regular meetings, of log books and productivity quotas and lagging taggers put on crew probation. They speak of a house where such meetings are said to occur and everyone says, let’s put the heat on them. (Speaking of which, call 311, ask for a graffiti-removal authorization form, get it back to the city. The next time you’re tagged, they’ll come out and paint it over for free.)
A tagging crew exists to spread its name. To be both invisible and widely seen. The spray-painted names are declarations. Been here. Been here too. Been here after you, fool.
Alarcon gives me the tour. As we drive through District 4 in southwest Denver, he says, “We could be out here all day.” I look out the truck window at spray-painted tags on walls, curbs, light poles, stop signs, Dumpsters. Look up, he says, and there they are on rooflines and roofs themselves, on billboards.
Let’s acknowledge the city is working on the problem, including tougher consequences, though Alarcon and Gray join those who say the punishment isn’t tough enough.
They interviewed a young woman not long ago, one of the most prolific taggers of one of the most prolific crews in Denver.
“Does she have a record?” Sandoval asks at the meeting. “A long one,” Gray says. “A lot are sex assaults. Either as the suspect or the victim. All girls.”
She was picked up in Jefferson County on a warrant, ordered held on $20,000 bail and transferred to Denver, where she was released on a personal recognizance bond. She’s supposed to appear in court Monday. Neither Gray nor Alarcon is counting on it.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
