On May 18, five city officials scoured four dense, urban areas in Seattle searching for examples of graffiti tags and street art—street art being a more pleasing type of graf-fiti, still illegal, but described by the city as “colorful or complex… masterpieces.”
What they found were 556 examples of graffiti but “no instances of what could be called artistic tagging.”
These efforts were part of a three-months-in-the-making city auditor’s report commissioned by Seattle City Council members Tim Burgess and Tom Rasmussen. The report will be officially released later this month, but The Stranger obtained a draft copy. “Graffiti has been identified as a problem by many residents,” says Rasmussen, explaining the need for the document. “What I wanted to know—in a nutshell—was how big of a problem graffiti is, what our procedures for handling it are, and how those can be improved.”
But out of the 900 people surveyed about graffiti by the city auditor, only 40 percent called it a “medium to very big problem.” This would include Queen Anne residents. Two months ago residents formed a neighborhood watch called Neighbors Working Together for a Clean and Safe Queen Anne to battle what they call a growing graffiti problem in their neighborhood. They canvassed the neighborhood with signs encouraging residents to call 9-1-1 if they spot “any suspicious looking graffiti-related activity.”
However, local graffiti artists say the city can’t hope to improve its “graffiti problem” if it can’t—or won’t—acknowledge any of it as art.
“Whether a specific piece of graffiti is art or not is highly subjective,” says Scratchmaster Joe of Handsome Murals, a duo that specializes in graffiti-styled public art. But Seattle Streetart, a flickr group devoted to capturing the city’s fleeting graffiti masterpieces, boasts over 35,000 images and 1,800 members. Clearly, someone thinks its art.
But local graffiti artists say the city can’t hope to improve its “graffiti problem” if it can’t—or won’t—acknowledge any of it as art, and the draft report itself suggests that city officials still don’t get this and other basic facets of the issue.
“Whether a specific piece of graffiti is art or not is highly subjective,” says Scratchmaster Joe of Handsome Murals, a duo that specializes in graffiti-style public art. Subjective, indeed: Out of 900 people surveyed about graffiti by the city auditor, only 40 percent considered it to be a “medium to very big problem.”
Whether or not you want to call graffiti a big problem, here are a few other interesting findings from the report: Stickers, which aren’t officially considered graffiti, are nonetheless the most prevalent type of tagging in Seattle; the daylong street sweep of graffiti, which covered areas in downtown, First Hill, and Capitol Hill, recorded that 40 percent of all tags were stickers. And, contrary to what you hear from the property owners and businesspeople who are lobbying the council to get tougher on graffiti, the auditor’s report states that public property—like streets signs and utility poles—is twice as likely to be tagged as private property.
Currently, the city deals with graffiti in two ways: by cleaning up city property and by requiring private property owners to clean up tags on private property within 10 days (two days if its considered gang or “hate” related graffiti). The city spent $1.8 million abating graffiti from public property in 2009. On average, according to the auditor’s report, private property owners spent about $817 per year.
Meanwhile, graffiti artists—the few who are caught (234 arrests were made in 2008 and only 41 in 2009)—can face up to a year in jail and/or a $5,000 fine.
The city auditor’s report makes nine recommendations for updating how the city handles graffiti, which include adding stickers as a subcategory, making graffiti artists subject to higher rates of restitution, acquiring a dedicated graffiti cop to patrol the streets, and creating diversion programs for offenders.
But graffiti artists say these efforts won’t accomplish much. “I already thought stickers were illegal,” says one artist who requested his name not be used. “What good is one cop going to do? And what are they going to divert me to—soccer?”
But here’s an idea that does work: Investing in graffiti instead of covering it up. It worked with the Georgetown graffiti wall, and Scratchmaster Joe says it’s worked other places around the city, such as the Monique Lofts on Capitol Hill. Residents from the condo building approached Handsome Murals to paint the side of their building nearly two years ago. “Our wall was tagged weekly,” says condo owner Luke Wilson. “We spent nearly every Saturday painting over it to avoid fines from the city. All we were doing was creating a blank canvas for new crappy tags. One day it occurred to me, ‘Fight art with art.'”
The condo board got funding from two city grants to pay for a giant, colorful, crystal-like mural—and since then, says Wilson, “I don’t think it’s been tagged. I can’t begin to calculate the hours and money we’ve saved by doing this. Hopefully, we’ve paved the way for other people to consider similar projects.” 
