Graffiti's organic and messy, loud and brash, naturally part of any urban setting. It means someone is out there, walking, climbing, breathing, doing something. Which in a way is comforting, even if it is just marking gang territory—at least people are invested in their community, their streets, their space, outside of just whatever plot of land they had the opportunity to invest in.
For all of December, the city spent almost $10,000 on pesky MySpace ads that pop up almost every time you're trying to lurk on a page belonging to any Las Vegan aged 14 to 24. The TAG (Targeting Area Graffiti) program encourages others to narc on graffiti writers by offering a cash reward of up to $500. We decided to check in with Russell Davis, Chair of the Southern Nevada Graffiti Coalition, to see how that worked out.
So why use MySpace?
Youth aged 14 to 24 is utilizing MySpace more than any other age group. They're into the computer aspect of communicating. We used to monitor graffiti vandals on websites.
Ever since MySpace came on, the sites have gone down, and vandals have been using MySpace as a way of communicating and showing their crime. We decided to target that audience of people with this campaign.
Whose idea was it?
I've been on MySpace. I thought, huh. Why can't we do that? People said that's innovative, that's unique, a great idea. I called MySpace and talked to their sales people and made it work.
In my opinion it's just something unique that the government got involved in to tackle this problem.
We're going on to their turf. We're taking the fight to taggers, making them look over their shoulders, make 'em a little paranoid. The whole point of what we want to do is make them stop committing this crime on other people's property.
Has the MySpace campaign been successful?
We got a report saying that the first six days that [our ads were up] that they popped up 353,000 times, had 1,100 click-throughs that linked back to the county's website to our TAG campaign page. We just got over a thousand profile views. Our video views are up to 1900.
How many arrests have you made because of it?
It's extremely difficult to tell. We have 60 bus-stop shelter billboards, several realtor billboard posters, 121 schools got posters, Nevada Power sent out TAG notices to 780,000 people with the bill. Community centers have posters up. There's a PSA on Channel 4. We're trying to cover all the bases.
How do you determine what is graffiti?
Basically it's about permission. If you have permission, then it's fine. If you don't have permission then it's a crime. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the graffiti in the community is criminal activity.
Many businesses, especially tattoo parlors, cater to that type of subculture. They have graffiti style signage on their buildings. Do we have a problem with that? Absolutely not ....
After 9/11 there was a huge, huge influx of: I'm going to paint the American flag on my wall. The Statue of Liberty, remember this and that.
Hey—the property owners painted their own walls. We're not worried about the message. It's about permission.
We do have murals that the city commissioned—100 murals, a project for the centennial. I worked on a portion of that. We call it the Zap Project, where we hired artists to paint over utility boxes.
My whole thing with art is: put it in people's faces. Let 'em see it. We're not the censor police. I'm very supportive of the arts.