Whats happening in NYC

An article that ran in the New York Times. You can find the full thing here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/nyregion/05graffiti.html?8hpib

Cat-and-Mouse Game, With Spray Paint

By SHADI RAHIMI
Published: August 5, 2005

Ray looks like a police officer. But he's a graffiti writer, with a trim goatee and graying at the temples, who wears a stolen orange New York City Transit vest when sneaking into subway tunnels. He has a stolen set of keys that he says unlock subway cars, and he boasts that he has left his graffiti tag name, PRIZ, on subway cars at least 2,000 times in the past 20 years.

At 40, he says he has no plans to quit.

But if Lt. Steve Mona and the 75 other police officers who make up New York City's new antigraffiti unit have their way, Ray and other self-described "graffiti writers" will have no choice but to stop.

If Ray resembles a police officer, Lieutenant Mona, 45, looks like a biker. A hulking man with arms covered in colorful tattoos, he commands the 10-month-old unit, the Citywide Vandals Task Force, whose sole duty is to hunt down and arrest the thousands of people like Ray who illegally scribble, scratch, spray-paint or, using acid, burn writing onto public and private property.

Unlike Ray, who finds beauty in his work, Lieutenant Mona, an 18-year veteran of the transit police whose best friend as a teenager was a graffiti writer, has an uncompromising view: "I'm not an art critic, I'm a cop. I know what a crime is."

The debate over how to best eradicate graffiti has gone on for more than three decades. In January, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced a sweeping plan to combat graffiti by merging the antivandalism unit of the Police Department with that of the transit police. Graffiti, the mayor said in his State of the City address, is "an invitation to criminal behavior."

The new squad is equipped with infrared and digital cameras, a database with thousands of tags and profiles of those arrested, and a book that contains the 100 or so "worst of the worst" repeat offenders. The police, Lieutenant Mona said, are intensifying their efforts.

But so is Ray. And so are others like him who are adapting to the crackdown. A dozen graffiti writers, who spoke on the condition that their full names not appear because what they do is a crime, said that tagging has become more about strategy than ever before.

They map out targets and plot escape routes. Many go out exclusively at night, favoring rooftops and boarded-up buildings that aren't likely to be painted over quickly, if at all. They trade tips online, and snap photographs of, or videotape, their work, rather than returning to admire it.

But they also admit to a new sense of paranoia. Because each side in the graffiti war keeps tabs on the other, writers are painfully aware that plainclothes officers are patrolling streets and subways, taking pictures of the hardest-hit sites, surfing graffiti Web sites, and dropping in on gatherings of writers and fans.

"When the 'goon squad' first started cracking down, a lot of people went out there with the attitude, 'We're going to get over tonight,' " Ray said. "So of course, they got caught."

Graffiti arrests are up 88.9 percent citywide since January, compared with the same period last year, according to police statistics, an increase that Lieutenant Mona attributes to his unit.

Despite the increased risk of arrest, for many graffiti writers the Citywide Vandals Task Force is not a deterrent so much as a "call to arms," said Eric Felisbret, 42, the editor of the graffiti Web site @149th Street. "It's a challenge," he said. "Most of these guys wouldn't be caught dead painting in a legal context. You get more charged up, and more prestige, this way."

For a younger graffiti writer like Harley, an East Village resident whose tag name is IMUNE, the new unit means nothing more than a shift in approach - better planning and riskier escapes that include jumping across rooftops while being chased by the police, which he brags about doing eight times.

Harley, 19, is a baby-faced skateboarder with sand-colored hair who began tagging six years ago. He said he had been arrested six times in three years - including twice this year. The longest he has spent in jail is 43 hours, he said, and he has been fined $200 twice. But he and his friends keep tagging illegally.

"A lot of my friends don't really care about the squad," said Harley. "But things definitely haven't been like they used to be."
Since his last arrest, Harley has begun painting legal murals more often, on the sides of trucks. Other graffiti writers are asking business owners for permission to paint their gates or building walls.

On a recent Saturday afternoon in South Brooklyn, Ray and his writing partner, a soft-spoken 42-year-old known as Stan1, are legally spray-painting a mural on the side of a brick building owned by a city marshal when a burly officer from the antigraffiti unit stops and asks to see proof that they have received permission to paint there. He inspects a letter from the marshal, and drives off.

Poised on a metal ladder, a can of orange Krylon spray paint in hand, Ray shakes his head. "People are used to seeing graffiti as an eyesore," he said. "But a lot of the people doing murals today are artists."

Ray, in fact, is a city employee, with a degree in fine arts. For him, graffiti is an "itch" that, he says, he will abandon only "when the passion is gone." He is mocked by taggers half his age; a few call him a "dinosaur." And as graffiti moves more into the mainstream, more of his peers are displaying their work in galleries or in advertising. Some even discourage illegal tagging.

Lee Quinones, 45, for instance, is now a legal graffiti muralist. Still idolized by fans for painting 10 cars one night in 1977 with his graffiti crew, the Fabulous 5ive, Mr. Quinones said that despite taunts of "sellout" from writers who shun the commercial market, he encourages teenagers to seize any opportunity to "go legitimate."

"It's time to move on, to move forward," he said.

Lieutenant Mona has never liked graffiti, even though one of his best friends tagged. "I was always kind of disturbed by it," he said. "It did make you feel unsafe. The theory was the best you could hope for with a graffiti-covered subway car was that people would feel like nobody was in control. At worst, they felt that the criminals were."

A mock street sign that reads "Graffiti Free Blvd." hangs in his office, inside the Citywide Vandals Task Force headquarters, a brick building in a Brooklyn trainyard, where the silence is interrupted often by the roar of the F train, which runs through the nearby Avenue X subway station. Plainclothes officers from the unit go out on patrol on foot, on bikes and in cars, and document subway tunnels and neighborhoods.

The unit is among the most expansive antigraffiti efforts in the country, says Lieutenant Mona. Police lieutenants from each of the city's precincts, housing projects and transit districts are now assigned to report their monthly progress in combating graffiti.

Lieutenant Mona's goal is for the streets of the city to be scrubbed nearly as clean as its subway trains - and, he hopes, to stay that way. "Success would be just that people can say, 'I remember when,' about the streets, like they do now with the subways," he said.

Pulling graffiti-soaked trains from service until they are cleaned is a practice that began in 1989, under Mayor Edward I. Koch. Cleaning the trains was made even easier with the introduction of stainless steel models. Frustrated by the temporary nature of their canvas, more graffiti writers moved aboveground - where the antigraffiti squad now awaits.

"The risk is greater; it's more sketchy now," said Stan1, who paints illegally on trains and in the streets. "But to me, it's about the challenge. I'm competitive, so I'm going to keep doing what I do. And, I guess, they will too."