Getting tough on Grafitti.. well sort of.
The cost of getting caught doing graffiti is going up next year.
Anyone convicted of vandalism for graffiti causing $400 or more in damage will have to clean up the property and keep it tidy for up to a year under a law that will go into effect in January.
The cleanup penalty must be imposed by judges under the new law, according to spokeswoman Rachel Cameron with Gov. Schwarzenegger’s office. Currently, the law leaves this aspect of a sentence to the judge’s discretion.
The new law is not perfect but it does give judges the ability to make the right calls, Riverside County Superior Court Judge Mark Cope said.
When the defendant is a minor, the parents can be ordered to clean up their child’s mess unless it would be too burdensome for the family because of child care or economic concerns, according to the law.
“In the right case, I think it’s great when young people are held accountable,” said Cope, who handles juvenile matters at the Southwest Justice Center in French Valley.
As for the provision that holds parents accountable for their children’s actions, he said, it would only be practical in cases where minors are vandalizing their own neighborhood.
“It allows them to have a sense of responsibility for their community,” Cope said.
Two county probation officials said they will work with the victims and the judges on a case-by-case basis when the cleanup provision is ordered.
“The judge would have to take into consideration the victim, because I don’t know how many people are going to want this kid and his parents on their property cleaning up graffiti,” said Bryce Hulstrom, assistant director of the Riverside County Probation Department’s juvenile services division
Hulstrom and Beth Stevens, director of Adult Probation Services, said they expect judges in Riverside County to impose the community service penalty, also provided under the new law, more often than the cleanup penalty.
Most graffiti crimes are committed by people with gang ties, and having someone clean up graffiti left by a rival gang member could have deadly consequences, said Stevens, whose agency will handle the bulk of these cases.
“We are already hesitant with having juveniles do graffiti cleanup because it can be dangerous,” she said. “They can be targeted by other gang members.”
It makes more sense to have someone trained in graffiti removal to immediately fix the damaged property instead of waiting more than a month for someone’s case to be resolved, Stevens said.
Hulstrom said if a judge orders a defendant to keep a wall clean for a year, the Probation Department will set up a monitoring program.
Some cities and county agencies have invested time and much money into removing those unsightly letters and words scribbled on bridges, walls and signs.
The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors has allocated $500,000 for a countywide graffiti-abatement program, said Randy Rogers, code enforcement chief for the county. The county has crews of contractors who daily search for graffiti. There are four graffiti teams and most of the time there are two people per team, he said.
Riverside has committed $1 million to fighting graffiti while the county has a mobile graffiti-eradication team of eight employees.
In 2007, Riverside received 21,200 calls complaining about graffiti while the Riverside Police Department made 270 arrests in connection with graffiti vandalism that year.
The Riverside County Economic Development Agency’s graffiti-removal program in 2007 got 6,611 calls in the unincorporated areas and cleaned almost 701,000 square-feet of defaced property, spokesman Tom Freeman said.
The Riverside County district attorney’s office filed 890 misdemeanor and felony vandalism charges in 2006, 1,231 in 2007 and 889 charges by August 2008, according to data provided by spokesman Ryan Hightower.
Graffiti’s grip on a community extends far beyond the immediate neighborhood.
“The reality is that it’s a blight,” Rogers, the San Bernardino County code enforcement chief, said. “It also lowers property values significantly. It’s the first thing you see when you drive into a neighborhood.”
Riverside County is trying to attract new homebuyers and businesses to the area and graffiti is a detractor, Freeman said. It gives the impression that the area has a high crime rate, he said.
This is step in the right direction, it is NOT as tough as I would have liked, but it’s moving the right way. The part that bothers me is this “We are already hesitant with having juveniles do graffiti cleanup because it can be dangerous,” she said. “They can be targeted by other gang members.”
IF a kid gets killed cleaning up graffiti because he did it, it will be the judges fault according to the lawyers. As always the blame will be deflected away from the truth, the truth is the graffiti perpetrator (AKA Idiot) is responsible and should be held as such. AND so are the parents of “REPEAT” offenders, by repeat I mean doing it more than once, not being caught more than once. If the “IDIOT” is found to have caused more than $400.00 dollars of damage, his tag most likely was found on more than one place.
I was involved in a lot of the discussions about ways to curtail this crime, and for those of you thinking it is a minor crime, a victimless crime, or not a crime at all. I ask you to think about the money spent cleaning it up, then look at where the money could be better spent? Like child care for mothers trying to get out of the poverty level, and MANY other community funded areas.
We are not going to stop fighting it, we are not going to allow it to continue, so while IDIOTS are painting things that don’t belong to them, they should know they are taking help away from their “Familia”
I do like that we are going to hold the parents responsible (At least on paper) I will be interested to see if it actually holds up. This article in the Press Enterprise is in very large print on the FRONT page of the local section. It is in Spanish on “la Opinion” and English in several local newspapers.
The word is getting out. Took long enough but FINALLY some teeth in a graffiti law.