Thank God Gilroy’s Graffiti Is Now Safe From Bandits!
I headed over to the Gilroy Review newspaper’s website to read more about their banner headline from Friday on Gilroy Gardens possibly being turned into a water park, but got distracted by the following article: “16-year-old graffiti bandit captured“. As a fan of graffiti (art, not tagging) I was pleased to learn that the police had finally done something to earn that massive fortress they call the new police station – they had put a stop to whomever was stealing all of the graffiti around town. Huzzah!
Of course, it turns out, that this was not, in fact, a case of the government standing up for “the people’s art”, but rather a case of the Gilroy Dispatch’s headline a writer not understanding English very well. The article starts-
Police arrested a 16-year-old whose graffiti spree left the city, school district and business owners with a $10,000 bill.
Police have linked the juvenile to more than 250 separate acts of graffiti, with at least 10 of the acts classified as felonies, resulting in more than $400 in damage each. The juvenile’s vandalism has claimed about 30 victims, police said. This is the juvenile’s fifth arrest.
This is the fourth article on graffiti that has appeared in the Dispatch in the last six weeks. Prior to that the word hadn’t been mentioned in its pages in almost 6 years!
You’d think the public spaces of Gilroy had suddenly started to look like the picture to the right. But the fact of the matter is (other than under certain bridges and other ‘out of sight” areas), they aren’t even close. Returning to the article for a moment-
”It’s frustrating because it’s a redirection of resources that need to go to the classroom,” said Enrique Palacios, deputy superintendent of business services for the school district.
Buying a can of paint to cover a school wall marred by graffiti uses up money that is supposed to be going toward day to day repairs, he said.
“When a pipe breaks or a toilet is backed up, that’s a health and safety problem,” he said. “I’ve got to fix that. Excessive graffiti eats into that budget and diverts money from the classroom.”
The school district devotes $100,000 worth of resources to clean up graffiti, annually, he said.
No, it’s frustrating, because the cash-strapped school district is choosing to waste money on things like this instead of educating our kids. I asked my daughter Z (also a budding graffiti fan) how much graffiti was on her school campus. Her response – “outside the bathroom stalls and the bleachers, almost none. And the bathroom stalls are painted over every week.” Every week?!? No wonder they’re spending a hundred grand a year. What’s the point of painting bathroom stalls every week? And don’t give me that “gang” crap, because even the Gilroy Police Department acknowledges that less than 15% of Gilroy graffiti is gang related. And the kid in the article above isn’t in a gang.
The problem in Gilroy isn’t the graffiti, it’s bureaucrats trying to justify bigger budgets by screwing up their priorities.
Tags: Gilroy, gilroy dispatch, gilroy gardens, Gilroy Police Department, graffiti, graffiti art, newspaper, Police, public spaces, vandalism
[...] September I wrote an article titled Thank God Gilroy’s Graffiti Is Now Safe From Bandits! It turned out the Gilroy Dispatch headline was misleading and they’d actually arrested a [...]