PORTLAND, Ore. (KPTV) – Along the highway, covering the sides of buildings, on the walls of tunnels, Portland has been bathed in a sea of paint.
“It’s graffiti is really when it comes down to it, kind of no laws, no rules. Everything’s a fair game,” said “John,” a graffiti artist in Portland who agreed to talk to FOX 12 if we didn’t use his real name.
During the pandemic, with people stuck at home, the scene exploded with some veteran taggers coming out of retirement and rookies testing their skills with a spray can.
“I just think a lot of the new people started off just doing all these things, and just seeing stuff on Instagram and going out and trying to copy what they saw online. Bottom line, a lot of the new writers aren’t doing their homework.”
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That means that some of them have had to learn their lessons the hard way.
“Getting caught for graffiti, ain’t no joke. It messes your life up. Especially if you catch felonies and stuff. So you’re out there and you’re putting out these risks. There’s some people that are dedicated like this is their life, like it means a lot to them,” said “John.”
But those who are most dedicated, are also on the radar of Portland Police Officer Kirby-Glatkowski.
“This is tagger-based graffiti. This is fame-based, notoriety-based graffiti. This is a bunch of humans with huge egos putting their name up so that everyone has to look at it,” said Officer Kirby-Glatkowski.
Officer Kirby-Glatkowski and Officer Amelia Flohr are on the Central Precinct’s Neighborhood Response Team and head up the efforts to combat graffiti.
“We have graffiti vandals in the city who go out five nights a week, and they do graffiti for hours on end, and then they go home and they fill up notebook books with iterations of their names thousands of times,” said Officer Kirby-Glatkowski.
Portland had a dedicated unit within the police department focused on graffiti until it was disbanded in 2015. Now there are only two officers who are tasked with tackling the most prolific taggers, while still responsible for patrol duties.
Officer Flohr says she wasn’t aware how complex the graffiti culture was.
“I didn’t know very much about graffiti at all. Or even to recognize it when I saw it before. Everything from the difference between throws to, like, burners to crews. Basically all of that was learning on the job,” she said.
Officer Kirby-Glatkowski says the graffiti culture is deep.
“What we’re seeing up here is a pretty sophisticated amount of communication. There are a lot of etiquette rules about who can tag where and how you can tag, and what you can put over top of other types of tags,” he said.
Meanwhile, the agencies responsible for cleaning up the graffiti are struggling to keep up. Earlier this year, the state legislature allocated $4 million to ODOT for graffiti cleanup. But the cleanup work was delayed for weeks, waiting for a signature from Governor Kotek.
Companies that were contracted by ODOT for the work and hired employees were in a holding pattern until the bill was signed. That work is now underway.
“They’ve shown pretty conclusively that the more frequent a wall is cleaned, the less likely people are going to go back on the tagging place. This culture wants notoriety. They want visibility. They want to be up in as many places as they can for as long as they can. So if the wall is cleaned once a year or once every other year, or once every six months. That’s a great opportunity to go right back and put your tag back up, because it’s going to be there for a long time. If a wall is cleaned every week, then you are wasting a lot of your time to not have your tag up for very long,” said Officer Kirby-Glatkowski.
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And graffiti artists know it’s a game.
“It’s always the same story, you know, like us versus the buff. The people that clean up graffiti all day. It’s just basically a game of cat and mouse and then you’ve seen like they’ve laxed on all the buffing and graffiti is going to keep going,” said “John.”
He says that the community is huge, his best estimate… well over a thousand artists.
And they aren’t all local. Portland’s location on the I-5 corridor means that transient taggers often stop off to leave their mark. It’s an underground culture of dedicated wall writers leaving their mark on a city, that’s eager to buff it out.
The Portland Police Bureau says that given the current budget constraints and staffing shortages, they aren’t able to add more officers to the detail, though they would if they had the resources to do it.
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