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At 7:00 a.m., you roll into the parking lot ready to get your day started only to find the building covered in spray-painted graffiti. It happens everywhere--from small-town parks in cities like Delhi, Ohio, to large metropolitan areas like Philadelphia. Mix together young people with idle time, toss in a dash of absent supervision, add a pinch of peer-pressure, access to spray paint and a blank wall, and you have all the ingredients for a graffiti problem.
To solve this, chip away at the root cause by eliminating the bragging rights. In the early 1990s, Philadelphia was plagued with graffiti, or tagging. Painting over the constant assault of spray paint proved futile for some business owners because the freshly painted wall simply provided a crisp canvas rather than a deterrent to vandalism.
Graffiti On, Graffiti Off
Early one morning, Sandy Monahan, director of the Delhi Parks and Recreation Department, discovered that the newly developed skatepark had been tagged, so she began to follow the strict policy of graffiti-on, graffiti-off cleanup when she was stopped by several youth. “The skatepark kids approached me, and were upset about the graffiti,” says Monahan. “They didn’t want it on their plaza, and about a dozen kids volunteered and scrubbed off the paint that same day.”