Did any one notice massive amounts of graffiti on buildings as they drove to work today? I didn't either, probably because San Jose has long made reducing graffiti a priority. Travel to any major city in the country and you will very likely recall tagging spread throughout the city where you were vacationing or on a business trip. Some large cities like San Francisco, LA and New York have even become destinations for traveling vandals. People traveling to San Jose can feel our community pride and have a sense of security knowing that a city this free from graffiti makes crime a priority. A business looking to relocate to San Jose surely will be influenced by tagging in the area of their prospective business. There has been a long standing partnership between city leaders, city services, community members, business, probation, courts and the police department to keep San Jose free from graffiti. Unfortunately, like many crimes in our city, graffiti vandalism has risen in recent years. Two San Jose Police Detectives in the METRO unit are responsible for investigating thousands of graffiti and vandalism cases a year.
Now the citizens of San Jose have a new weapon to help keep their streets clean. A little more than two weeks ago, the San Jose Police Department launched a new online graffiti reporting system. The new system is accessed on the department’s website, SJPD.org, under the Report a Crime/Graffiti tab. It allows citizens to take digital photographs of graffiti and upload the pictures directly into a police database. The reported graffiti does not even need to be on your property. Graffiti detectives track the distinctive tags and locate the suspects responsible for them. Having a database of tags allows for effective prosecution of vandals in our community. Once a suspect is associated to a distinctive tag, detectives can then charge the suspect with past tags logged in the database. Victims of the vandalism are reconnected and have an opportunity to recover the cost of the vandalism through the court’s restitution process. All police agencies in the county have signed on to the San Jose police-initiated system. Other cities in the state like San Francisco are joining the shared network as well. Citizens who are in need of a crime report for insurance proposes or who have suspect information can still call 3-1-1; or file an online report using SJPD.org.
If you locate graffiti on city property, you can report it for clean up to the city of San Jose Anti graffiti hotline at (408) 277-2758. Remember, by immediately addressing new graffiti, we send a strong, zero-tolerance message to the perpetrators. If you want to get directly involved in keeping your community graffiti- and crime-free, you can become a volunteer. The City of San Jose has a program to assist residents and businesses that need to remove graffiti from their property. Free paint and graffiti solvent is available through the San Jose Anti-Graffiti program at 501 Vine St. To pick up your free Anti-Graffiti Tool Kit or to volunteer to clean up graffiti, call (408) 277-3208. Working together we can protect San Jose from the blight and crime associated with graffiti.
Proudly serving you,
Your Beat Cop
Thursday, August 20, 2009
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The greatest part is when we actually help the police catch a tagger, ony so he can receive a "Citation" that gets him into some kid glove juvenile court process that requires no legitimate accountability. Just look at all the teen burglars that consistently reoffend. There is ZERO accountability for teen criminals. How do I know? Because I was a victim of a serial teen burglar. Multiple arrests, no remorse, no penalty. Great incentive not to reoffend!! Let your County Supervisors know. Teens need to be treated like the criminals they are if they don't follow through on their first break. Blanca Alvarado and the county supervisors screwed up the system badly and now we hard working citizens pay the price. Hold these teens accountable. If we start with actual punishment for things like graffiti, other crimes won't seem so attractive.
ReplyDeleteOMG the city is drowning in debt. We have very few officers and we are worried about taggers. Where is the phone line for litter bugs? We need to gear up for when all the inmates are going to be released by the idiot in the capitol.
ReplyDeleteBeat Cop,
ReplyDeleteOnce again you have hit the mark with an insightful and educational article.
Graffiti, like most crimes in San Jose, is minimal compared to bigger cities (San Jose is a big city with small town mentality people running it). In San Jose you do not see big pieces on every other corner in your downtown business district or on every tall building or overpass in the city. This is just another tribute to hard working officers, such as yourself, who have been accustomed to provide great results with limited resouces.
The average council person does not realize that graffiti vandalism decreases their citizen's home values,future business prospectives and increases a resident's insurance premiums and fear of crime. Future residents and business owners determine whether or not they will locate to a city based upon the amount of graffiti vandalism (this is because most people assume graffiti is linked to gang violence)
Beat Cop, keep up the good work. Someday, maybe, those responsible for managing San Jose will be humble enough to sit down with you so that they may be educated.
Be safe out there and God bless you
SeeingRed
I am writing in response to post from someone identifying themselves as “crimefighter”.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I will agree with your innuendo that we need more police officers as this is clearly the case.
I do, however, want to take you to task on attempting to minimize the importance of enforcing all of the laws that the people have enacted through our elected representatives.
Laws are generally enacted when the mainstream of citizens determine that an act is harmful to an individual or to society. I do not agree with 100% of our laws, but I respect the process that made them law and understand that I must abide by those laws whether or not I understand or agree with the logic behind them. In order to have anything resembling a civilized society, we must follow the law.
It is the job of law enforcement agencies to enforce ALL of the laws enacted by the people whether they are serious felonies like murder, rape, or child molestation, right down to the littering infractions you seem to feel should not be enforced.
Most of the time, knowing that something is against the law is enough to prevent most of us from violating the law. But, yes, I do live in the real world and I would certainly be tempted to speed more frequently if there were not law enforcement officers assigned to the enforcement of traffic laws. I might event be tempted to use your argument that the police should have other priorities, like catching child predators, if I was issued a citation for speeding. But I would just be kidding myself because if I stopped to think, I would recognize that if we all were allowed to drive as fast as we want, there would be chaos on the roadways and that the risks of injury when driving, walking near roads, or even living within the potential trajectory of an out of control vehicle would be too high to all but the mentally impaired and reckless daredevils to tolerate.
Graffiti is not a victimless crime. It creates physical damage that must be repaired at the expense of someone other than the so-called tagger. It also has the effect of creating fear or uncertainty of the safety in the areas where it is present. Would you like your elderly grandmother to find her fence had been vandalized with graffiti? She would likely feel violated and unsure of her safety, and then be forced to paint her whole fence since no color of paint will match the bear wood. Not an insignificant effort or expense for a 79 year old grandmother on Social Security. Then imagine how she would feel the next day when another graffiti vandal “tagged” her fence again. Oh, and by the way, if she wanted to sell her house to move to a gated retirement community where she would feel safe, she would be victimized yet again because buyers will avoid areas where graffiti vandalism is present. She will end up loosing money and possibly sell the house to a slum lord. The slum lord might very well rent the house to drug dealers. Now someone else’s grandmother across the street is forced to sell – at an even lower price to another slum lord. Don’t believe it, look at the west Oakland flatlands once occupied primarily by middle class folks and now run by drug gangs. Things there did not change overnight, it was a slow downward spiral.
Needless to say, I am grateful for the men and women in law enforcement who enforce all of our laws – even the ones I may violate in a hurry to get to work.
Douglas Owens