EHJ May 2004, pages 134-137
Next month sees the launch of a government-backed campaign to crack down on graffiti. With one in three people recognising it as a significant problem in their area. Nick Warburton looks at the culture behind it and what is being done to reduce its impact

A stone's throw from the leafy surroundings of St James' Park, tucked away in a nondescript office, is one of the Home Office's latest weapons to tackle antisocial behaviour. Run by the Crime and Disorder Partnership, the national graffiti database was set up last year to help increase convictions for graffiti artists, seen by many as the worst perpetrators of antisocial behaviour.

Graffiti has been high on the government's agenda ever since it was thrust into the political spotlight last November when the antisocial behaviour bill received royal assent. New powers introduced in March now provide local authorities with plenty of ammunition to "get tough" on graffiti artists.

This "zero tolerance" approach will also be championed in a national graffiti campaign that is being launched next month by Encams. With backing from Defra, the charity that runs the Keep Britain Tidy campaign believes it is time to "smash the myth" that graffiti is art. It is currently drafting a charter that will require local authority signatories to treat all graffiti as criminal damage and act accordingly. One of the requirements of the charter could be a local authority commitment to enforce the banning of aerosol paints to under 16-year-olds.

Local authorities have good reason to see graffiti as a serious problem in their communities. Although there is little hard evidence to link it with violence, some members of the community do perceive its presence to be an indication that an area is unsafe, and consequently graffiti increases the fear of crime. Graffiti can also lead to a lack of investment in an area and closure of businesses, increasing the sense of dereliction.

"Within a regeneration context, graffiti can be viewed as adding to the negative perception of declining areas or neighbourhoods," says Asi Panditharatna, principal consultant for the regeneration and public policy consultancy, Colin Buchanan and Partners. "Perception or image of a place is often paramount to ensuring successful regeneration."

In the capital, Southwark LBC has long recognised graffiti's impact on the wider community and has encouraged a joined-up approach by bringing together all the relevant departments that deal with environmental crime. The council is encouraging its individual services to adopt a holistic approach in tackling antisocial behaviour.

"Environmental health may be just dealing with what is a noisy neighbour complaint, and we're concerned that they may not necessarily see the big picture," says Des Waters, former EHO and head of street scene and public protection. "That victim of a noisy neighbour may also be a victim to racist graffiti or hate crime, which is being picked up by another department. What we want to try and do is get that whole picture of how that individual might be affected by the antisocial behaviour in the area."

Graffiti doesn't just blight communities; the cost of removing it on the nation's purse is staggering. London Underground alone believes that it costs up to £10m a year to replace all the glass that is etched with graffiti and that's excluding the extra £2.5m needed every year to remove other types of graffiti. Nationally, the cost is estimated to be a whopping £1bn, although this is likely to be a conservative estimate.

"It's too early to measure what the impact of graffiti has been," says chief inspector Dickason, who heads the Crime and Disorder Partnership. Part of the problem, he believes, is that not all local authorities have been keeping a record of graffiti crimes and/or the cost of cleaning it up, making it virtually impossible to build a national picture of the extent of the problem.

Which is where the national database comes in. Its long-term aim is to encourage co-operation in counteracting graffiti. By registering, local authorities can access the database and input tag messages found in their area, thereby helping to form a national and international picture of graffiti activity. 

At the heart of any approach to tackle graffiti is the need to understand the different types of graffiti, the culture that drives it and the people perpetrating it. Graffiti comes in many different forms, for example, a tag on a housing estate wall, a colourful mural on a railway line and a racist message on a shop window. Each is likely to be written by different types of people with very different aspirations.

Nevertheless, as Sue Nelson, assistant chief executive for Encams, explains, most anecdotal evidence shows that graffiti artists are predominantly male and in their late teens and early twenties. She identifies two groups of graffiti writers - "kids that scrawl it for a bit of fun" and professional taggers. It is taggers that are responsible for the majority of the graffiti that blitzes Britain's neighbourhoods.

From her conversations with Network Rail and British Transport Police, Ms Nelson says that many taggers appear to do it as a dare. "The more dangerous and the more difficult it is to access, the more creditability they get. You'll find there are websites around where they offer prizes and financial incentives to get particular pieces of graffiti in really dangerous places."

The tag (a stylised scrawling of a name) is the simplest form of graffiti. As most experts will tell you, all graffiti artists start doing tags, learning how to use pens and spray paints before moving on to more elaborate "throwups" and "pieces". Even so, many will never progress beyond being a tagger and even those who have years of experience will put their tag up at times.

"One of the main aims of graffiti is 'fame', or getting your work seen by as many people, or your peers, as possible," explains Duncan Cumming, a street art photographer who runs his own website on graffiti. "To this end, tags are the simplest way for them to get their name on as many surfaces as possible."

Against this background, a variety of approaches have been adopted across the country to tackle its spread. During 2003, Southwark LBC pioneered a novel poster campaign called Shop a tagger. According to street care officer Martin Talbot, the decision to put up a £500 reward leading to a conviction was made following a particularly serious outbreak in part of the borough. When the department put an advert in the local newspaper and issued posters and leaflets around the borough, there was a dramatic reduction in the level of graffiti in that area.

"There's no point in putting a tag up if no one knows who it belongs to," says Mr Talbot. "There's got to be a certain knowledge that that's Fred's tag to get the kudos even if it's only inside their own group of taggers. Obviously, the more you do, the more people get to know by word of mouth and suddenly, the less people know you personally, they're more likely to shop you."

Picked up nationally by the Home Office as the Name that tag poster campaign, the initiative was run in London, Liverpool and Manchester between November and February with considerable success. Name that tag forms part of the Home Office's Operation Scrub-It and was launched to coincide with the Antisocial Behaviour Act. The act introduced new powers for local authorities to issue penalty notices for graffiti and flyposting, and to remove graffiti from street furniture.

Southampton Council is one of 12 local authorities that are currently piloting the new antisocial behaviour powers over the next year for the Home Office. The council has developed an integrated approach to combating environmental crime, which has seen two dedicated teams set up to tackle graffiti and flyposting on buildings, street furniture and bus shelters. Local residents have also been provided with their own anti-graffiti kits to help keep their neighbourhoods clean.

Working with the police, Southampton Council has built up a three-staged strategy to increase convictions for graffiti. This has entailed identifying the problem areas, targeting policing to these points and gathering sufficient evidence to convince a magistrate of the seriousness of the crime.

The council started by building up maps of regular taggers' work. A digital camera linked to a GPS (ground positioning system) was used to take photos of serious graffiti crimes, which were then logged into a computer with a record of details of the crime, eg the area of damage, date and time of offence and any recognisable features of the tag. Over time, the information gathered helped create detailed maps of problem areas and enabled the council to build a historical record of individual taggers' crimes. By providing the police with record sheets of taggers' work, surveillance officers have been able to make informed decisions about whether to arrest or simply caution an offender based on previous offences.

Sheffield MDC has taken a similar approach by videoing and photographing every tag in the city. According to Chris Spafford, area manager, Sheffield's street force, all tags are monitored when they arrive and when they are removed by the council's "grime busters" team. He says that acting quickly is key to deterring graffiti artists: "As soon as it goes up, we try and get it off and they've lost all their energy and kudos".

The graffiti teams also work closely with the police to try and catch prolific taggers. However, as Mr Spafford explains, "they're very clever these people. They come at four o'clock in the morning dressed like SAS people, all in black, and it's very difficult getting them on to a CCTV camera."

Three years ago, Sheffield MDC set up a graffiti charter in a drive to bring the business community on board. "The biggest problem we had was trying to get the private and business sector to clean up their shops, pubs, clubs and hotels," explains Mr Spafford. "They didn't want to spend the money. A lot of shops are rented or leased and it's difficult to find out who owns them." By signing the charter, local businesses must agree to keep their buildings free of graffiti. In return, the council offers discounts for removing graffiti or for applying protective coating.

Last month, the council hosted the UK's first national graffiti conference on behalf of the Anti-Graffiti Association. The event brought together local authorities, the police, heritage groups and companies that sell graffiti products in a bid to manage graffiti more effectively. "The whole idea is to pull it together nationally and come up with strategies and safe systems of work on how to deal with this vandalism that plagues the country," says Mr Spafford.

The UK is not alone in dealing with graffiti. Many artists enter international competitions and travel abroad to spray graffiti. Chief inspector Dickason illustrates the scale of the problem by highlighting the arrest of four Australians on a European graffiti tour.

On the other side of the Atlantic, some US cities have adopted novel approaches to combat it. For instance, in Philadelphia, the city government has been operating a unique programme to channel graffiti artists' talents. The project began in 1984 when the city's mayor decided to combine graffiti removal with working with kids writing on walls. Jane Golden, a muralist from New Jersey and a member of the Anti-Graffiti Association was hired to run the city's art programme and promptly turned its focus towards murals. During the programme's first six years, she worked exclusively with graffiti writers and, through the programme's efforts, has help bring a considerable reduction in the level of graffiti across the city.

However, as Ms Golden explains, the programme's success was largely dependent on a generous budget that covered the costs of employing the kids. "We had two very strong things going for us," she says. "The graffiti writers loved art and we were able to offer them jobs. They could do art and get paid, and they loved painting murals."

As part of the programme, kids were also taken to museums and met professionals in the arts. At the same time, the graffiti artists took part in clean ups, with an emphasis on zero tolerance. This involved designating areas of the city where graffiti would be removed immediately after it had appeared. From her experience, Ms Golden does not believe that simply removing graffiti will work: "It is a wise investment to think seriously about a jobs programme," she says.

In the UK, Southampton Council has taken a similar approach through its work with the charity, Beyond Graffiti, which commissions art sites on certain public buildings. The local authority directs talented graffiti artists to sites to paint murals. As well as training local artists, Beyond Graffiti uses education to reinforce the message that non-commissioned work is criminal damage.

"They all know each other, they're all connected and if you get one that is directed into a good source, he can bring his friends along and they're more than happy to have them," says Chris Watters, cleansing enforcement officer at Southampton Council.  

Mr Cumming however, is not convinced that all graffiti artists can be so easily won round. He says that for some, tagging is a rites of passage, in the same way that a lot of graffiti artists only appreciate illegal graffiti.

For those artists that are intent on causing criminal damage, reward schemes leading to prosecutions and community service appear to have had some success as a deterrent. But as Mr Spafford explains the task of combating graffiti remains an uphill battle as long as people continue to sell solvents and aerosols to underage kids and graffiti artists can purchase materials on the internet. There's still some way to go before offenders will see the writing on the wall.

To register with the Home Office national database, contact the Crime and Disorder Partnership on 020 7027 8181.

Further information on the Philadelphia mural programme can be found at:www.muralarts.org