I recently removed a picture gallery from IdahoFallz.com titled “Idaho Falls Dark Side” which mostly featured graffitti around Idaho Falls. I started it because I figured it would be limited anyways and maybe would spur those building owners to take care of their graffitti. Then I started really seeing how much graffitti there is around Idaho Falls, and it depressed me too much to keep photographing and displaying it.
Idaho Falls has let this problem go too long and now it is degrading our city’s beauty. Do we want tourists to say “Hey that Idaho Falls, nice greenbelt but they sure have big-city graffitti problems”?
I see the stupid ‘tags’ everywhere on public and private property. Idaho Falls should engage first in a spring cleanup effort to paint over (if not remove) ALL graffitti in our city. Afterwards we need to develop a vigilant program to discourage, report and apprehend vandals, and also to report and paint over graffitti.
I understand that removal is extremely expensive, so painting over is much cheaper. I understand the vandals should have to clean the graffitti and not the city or business owners. However, it is better for owners to take care of the mess than allow their properties to continue looking like the projects. Unfortunately, it reflects more poorly on property owners than the vandals to allow the graffitti to stay up.
The city needs to have all a spot on their website and a phone number to call to report graffitti on public property. After Idaho Falls’ current graffitti is gone, an aggressive program needs to be started to paint over new graffitti within 48 hours. The Vancouver Police Department says graffitti removed within 72 hours is less likely to reappear in the same location.
Private property owners (especially businesses) should get to painting over their graffitti immediately also. It would be nice if Home Depot, Lowe’s, Ace, Rocknack’s, and Sherwin-Williams (any other major paint places around town?) would band together for our community and donate white, grey, and black paint for business owners to use against graffitti.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Idaho Falls had a program where these fine stores donate these plain paint colors monthly to the city, anyone can report graffitti vandalism locations to the city, and our city workers can paint over graffitti on both city and private property (free of charge to the private property owners)?
– Later — After writing the above, I Googled around on the subject, and found the city of Vancouver has a perfect anti-graffitti model for Idaho Falls to adopt. It includes:
- City hotline for reporting graffitti occurrences
- Donated paint program for businesses to cover graffitti.
- City ordinance requiring private property owners to remove or cover graffitti within 10 days. Failure to comply would result in the city doing the work and billing the owner. (So go get the free paint and take care of it!)
- Increased fine of $500 for graffitti vandals. (I say $1,000 is a stronger deterrent)
- A mural program whereby building owners can donate their wall (or wall sections) to budding artists who want to paint a graffitti mural. (Sounds like a positive direction for kids.)
Wow! That’s what I was talking about. Do great minds think alike? Or were Vancouver residents as disgusted with graffitti in their city as I am in mine?
I GUARANTEE that if Idaho Falls fails to address our graffitti problem immediately, it will continue growing and we will hear about it from our visitors. Idaho Falls WILL have to take care of it eventually. Do we take care of this problem now while it is large but manageable, or wait three months for more buildings to get tagged, or six months, or … ?
Popularity: 15%
Related posts:
Gato got runned over by Marcus many moons ago. Be ye daft, 2486? 
Let's have a new poll, alright, Joe?
Loading ...
{ 1 trackback }
{ 98 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree grafitti is a bad problem in Idaho Falls. These are great solutions we need to adopt. Here’s the contacts page for the city council and mayor. Phone numbers and emails Call and write and find out what they are planning to do to fix our grafitti problem. http://www.ci.idaho-falls.id.us/main/ContactList.asp
Punishing the victim? Not good policy. Especially when the police know which tags belong to which groups of cretins, and the police also know the identities of many of those cretins. Instead of hassling the victims, hassle the taggers. If the taggers are minors, hassle their parents — give the taggers and/or their parents deadlines for cleaning up the mess.
I absolutely agree the taggers should be punished, and the penalties should be increased to a level that really deter graffitti.
Unfortunately we live in the real world where taggers often get away. So then what? We are left with property owners who refuse to take responsibility for their properties and the entire city image suffers. Ever hear of the ‘broken window’ syndrome?
It’s not like we’d be forcing them to rebuild their entire building, we’re just saying take care of any graffitti on your property. If the paint is donated, property owners only have to supply the labor. I bet enterprising local teenagers could make some money going around painting over graffitti for low cost.
So yes, unfortunately we have to appear to punish the victims in the case of graffitti. The ‘punishment’ though is minimal, and it’s a case of taking medicine to get better.
Police will punish the taggers if they actually know who they are but most often they don’t. Most taggers are in the wannabe gangs around here and they aren’t exactly talkative to police. Police can sometimes associate a certain tag with a certain gang but then knowing which gang member left the tag is another thing entirely. The wannabe’s won’t even admit to police most of the time they are in a gang and they certainly won’t admit to doing the tagging or telling who the others in their wannabe gang are. Plus you often get rival wannabe gangs using the same names which confuses things further. Southside, Westside, etc. Those names get recycled a lot. So even if the police can attach the tag to a specific gang, that gang is usually too disorganized and too untalkative to pin it on a specific person. Unless there are witnesses or the tagger brags about it there is really not much of a way to find out who did it.
Which means you have to take other approaches and I think the ones Joe outlined all sound very good. Someone go pass it on to Fuhriman.
My response to the “don’t know exactly who did it” argument is you know darn well it wasn’t the business owner. So, if an ordinance can be passed that will punish the completely innocent, then I don’t think it should be too difficult to pass an ordinance that will, at least, punish the aiders and abettors, i.e. the known gang members and the wanna-bees.
These lazy scumbags, I think, would find their tongues in a hurry if they were scrubbing down walls in 90-degree Eastern Idaho sunshine, or in 0-degree Eastern Idaho windstorms.
Further, if I happened to be an Idaho Falls business owner who got tagged and the city came after me to collect a bill for cleanup work, I’d have a law suit going against the city is short order.
But I guess that’s just hard-nosed me.
So I think we can all agree that graffitti vandals ought to be prosecuted more often and with harsher sentences, right? My wife suggested an additional punishment besides steep fines ought to be several hours of cleaning up graffitti (now that punishment fits the crime well).
However, I think it would “be too difficult to pass an ordinance that will, at least, punish the aiders and abettors”. Help me think of any other crime charged for being guilty by association?
So if a city road blows up and the perp isn’t caught, do we all sit around and say nobody can fix this problem except the one responsible? No, because the greater community suffers if the problem is not fixed.
As for armchair litigants, if Vancouver and several other cities have these kind of graffitti ordinances, they must have withstood legal challenges. I think it’s akin to the ‘eminent domain’ concept (forcing actions for the greater good), and besides the cost levied to clean up the property would not be so huge.
I’d rather be solutions-oriented than problems-oriented. The solutions-orientation of this idea is to first setup a hotline to report graffitti, so hopefully the vandals are caught, then arrange a paint-donation program so business owners wouldn’t be stuck with the full cost of taking care of the problem.
I bet most business owners would appreciate the value of this program and the financial help in cleaning up their properties.
Well, you have laws where some folks are mandated to report suspicion of abuse, not a particularly good “straight across” analogy, but then neither is your “public road” analogy.
And there are very specific laws prohibiting the aiding and abetting of criminals. That is about as straight-up as you can get.
Also, there are laws against being accomplices to crimes, before, during, and after the fact.
It appears that our difference of opinion stems from the fact that you view the graffiti as the problem. I view the vandals as the problem. You are content with covering up the problem (I’m not sure whether the pun is intended or not). I would like to hold accountable the causers of the problem.
I would imagine you are correct about the business owners appreciating financial assistance in cleaning up the mess when the only two options they are offered are “pay for it yourself” and “let some other innocent citizen help you pay for it.”
Further, I don’t have any problem with you idea as long as it is a voluntary option that a property owner or business owner can invoke. Try to get a service club like Lions, or the Junior Chamber of Commerce, etc., to sponsor such an effort. Possibly even team them up with Boy Scouts and/or DeMolay to get the work done.
Or another approach (one that would line up with your road analogy) is to petition the city government to place a line item in the city’s budget for graffiti remediation. This way, if graffiti is truly a community problem, then the entire community would be funding its removal.
But the last thing that a city government would want to do, imho, is to create a situation where the victim of vandalism will be victimized yet again by a city’s ordinance.
I appreciate your suggestions, but reporting suspicion of abuse is not at all like charging someone with a crime because of guilt by association. Aiding and abetting criminals is an overt act, again not guilt by association. Being an accomplice to a crime is also an overt act, not the passive guilt by association. I admit there may well be some criminal charges that are akin to guilt by association, but these are not it. Try harder, if there are any I’m definitely willing to admit I’m wrong.
You mentioned business owners suing the city from the proposed ordinance. I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine the more successful lawsuit would be someone charged for a guilt by association crime stemming from vandalism. No witnesses, no evidence, but the person charged happens to be friends with someone in a gang that may use those symbols?
No, I wholeheartedly agree the vandals are the primary problem, and again I think we can agree they should be punished hard and swiftly. No dispute there!
We seem to disagree that there are TWO problems from graffitti. You don’t seem to acknowledge that the graffitti remaining on our city walls and bridges are a problem also.
Of course it would be awesome to prosecute the taggers. But reality is most of the time they get away. To say nothing should be done because we are going to stay angry at the perpetrators is to play the victim forever.
Yeah, my road analogy was pretty weak, and here’s another weak analogy: suppose a property owner one morning finds toxic waste dumped all over his property, especially nearby a park. The dumper should be prosecuted, but if they got away, are we going to let the property owner just leave the toxic waste laying around, posing detrimental effects on the whole community because the owner was not the original instigator?
No, because the problem risks the whole community. It becomes everyone’s problem. Or take the instance of a house torn apart during a burglary. Do property owners sit in the mess waiting for the burglars to be brought back and forced to clean it up? It would be nice, but everyone just goes about fixing the problem. That’s being solutions-oriented.
Graffitti is not going to hurt our health, but it is going to hurt our economy when visitors see Idaho Falls becoming ‘that kind of city’. I’m glad we can discuss the finer points of this issue in a civilized manner here, these kind of discussions are part of why IdahoFallz.com was created.
In the big picture, most graffitti is only about ten square feet on a wall. The financial cost to paint over each instance is extremely small when spread out to individual property owners. However, they are not currently taking care of their properties, and the city will soon suffer in image and perhaps more crime (the broken window theory). Private business owners are not the only ones at fault here, either. Our city has neglected several graffitti zones, noteably the bridge in the area at 16th and south Emerson.
If the business owners will not take care of their graffitti on their own, then Idaho Falls needs a more aggressive program like I’ve suggested, like Vancouver has. The first step is to focus on the taggers themselves, but then the second is to ensure property owners clean up the graffitti if the taggers get away.
Why do you suppose that the vandals target who they target with their graffiti? Because they are easy targets!
Why do you suppose cities like Vancouver target who they target to pay for the clean up of graffiti? Because they are easy targets.
Sure, it may be more difficult to get the cretins who do the damage to correct their distruction. But so what? And it may take writing and passing some new laws. Remember, before the law was written and passed, reporting of abuse was not mandatory. And you think that the other gang member keeping quiet about who held the paint can is not overt?
It just seems odd to me that anyone would encourage the city to partner with the vandals to inflict even more financial damage to innocent citizens. Obviously, you don’t look at it this way.
A little thing called the Constitution would get in the way of punishing the other gang members because they may know who did it but aren’t telling. Theoretically, you can’t be convicted of a crime unless it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt you did it. And your going to run into the same problems again in proving who knows and who doesn’t.
To attack this problem you have to come up with realistic solutions, not solutions that are impossible. And the ones Joe came up with are quite good ones. What happens when you don’t cover up graffiti is that soon another tagger comes along and put their tags over it or next to it. And then again and again. If you keep covering it up it takes away that incentive. Which is why you need to force people to cover it up.
Excuse me, I made a mistake when I said the bridge at 16th and s. Emerson had lots of bad graffitti. I drove by it again and it’s actually at 15th and Higbee.
But after driving along the canals that go through the numbered streets, nearly ALL Idaho Falls bridges have graffitti on them.
Yes, it’s an overgrown problem Idaho Falls needs to take care of. Someone ought to email this article to city council members.
IF taggers are idiots. In California taggers and gangs often use their phone number area code
as part of their graffiti to let you know what area or city they are from. This is because the population of California is so huge that many cities have their own unique area code. Well I have seen some graffiti around IF that using the 208 area code. The entire state is 208 so using it as part of your tag is pretty stupid. Idiot kids think they are California gangsters. What morons.
The end zone poles on the soccer field at substation/sugar mill park have graffitti also. The poles are wooden, so a powered sander would remove the greffitti quickly.
Idaho Falls’ graffitti is like the boiled frog syndrome. Throw a live frog into boiling water and it’ll jump out immediately. Place a live frog in normal water and bring it to a boil, and the frog will not notice the changes and will boil to death.
Our graffitti has developed over a long time so we have not noticed or failed to realize the problem’s extent. Imagine waking up one morning from never having any graffitti and suddenly seeing our town covered in the graffitti we now have. If it happened overnight the public would be outraged and action would be taken immediately.
Salt Lake City has a graffiti hotline for ‘free removal’ http://www.ci.slc.ut.us/PublicServices/Parks/graffiti.htm
News 3 reported the recent increase of graffitti, and that Mayor Fuhriman is planning to buy a $5,000 removal machine.
I think that is great news, it’s too bad we waited so long and the graffitti won’t be removed before our 4th of july visitors see it.
I once knew a guy who worked commercially doing graffitti removal, and it was extremely expensive work.
If the city can buy the machine themselves and have city workers do the work, it could be a very wise investment.
Me personally i used to tagg a lot recently quit because of getting in trouble too much by the cops…when i used to tag i didnt go out with the intention of vandalizing somthing or making somthing look bad….and your right most of the graffiti in idaho falls does look like crap because its mostly gang graffiti …when i tagged somthing i made sure that no one was going to be offended by anything I tagged I never used profanity and/or anything like that …it was a artistic outlet and is still somthing that i love …I think that the city should have a certain place or wall that is legal to graffiti on or several places….All you see is crime in the city
I agree with Joe’s statements. However, I believe harsher and more unusual punishment for “gang members” along with “taggers” Make it illegal to belong to a gang in the first place. The wording on the ban ordinance might be a touch tricky, so as not to realistically impede anyones right to assembly or simmiliar rights and freedoms. But if a group of indivuduals are up to no good civically, then they should face punishment. Said punishment being dressed in a set of bright pink shorts… say midthigh lengnth and a bright pink button up shirt with the words “CRIMINAL and DEGENERATE” emblazoned on the back in big black letters. Place these indivuduals in prominent locations around the city where they WILL BE SEEN, doing menial and yet useful tasks such as cleaning the buildings they “tagged” brightening and cleaning our city sidewalks…. with wire toothbrushes. Make these people do everyday city beautification tasks, but in a way that makes it difficult and hard. Also make it a mandatory $1000.00 fine 1000 hours of community service/embarassment for a first offense the fines and community service/ embarassment double for each offense committed thereafter. With a 3 strikes and your off to prison clause should defeat repeat offenders.
Now of course most of these kids may not be able to fork over $1000-$3000 so we can have them work off their debt to society and the city at large say at .50 cents an hour… Too harsh you say? I can guarantee if you make the punishment a real punishment and make it embarassing as hell they will think twice before doing it again.
Kudos to the Steve’s Radiator/Auto Body shop on w. 19th street for finally painting grey paint over their graffitti. They had huge balloon letters on the front of their building for the last year or two, and the last month has seen an escalating graffitti war taking place in the same spot, with more and more tags appearing. Finally it appears the owner painted over the whole thing, vastly improving the area. Hopefully they keep up with it quickly if more graffitti appears.
Unfortunately I see the overpass on Memorial has been hit hard with “420″ type of tags. The tags are so numerous and huge it is mind boggling to think of how much time the vandals must have spent doing it.
Again I ask, whatever happened to the city’s plan to buy a graffitti-cleaning machine clear back in August?
We need a reward fund. Or freedom from prosecution if we catch them and chop their hands off.
I saw this weekend the overpass on Memorial was hit with yet more graffitti.
Where is that cleaning machine the city said they were getting back in August?
Ross Hill cemetery, the big one next to Tautphaus Park, got hit with graffiti this past Thanksgiving weekend.
Yet again, what happened to that cleaning machine the city said they were getting back in August?
I see more and more graffiti around town every day.
I have heard the graffiti cleaning machine will likely be ordered when the weather gets warmer, and cleanup efforts should commence shortly thereafter.
I also heard it may involve a project with Boy Scouts and some kids on probation, so there could be some nice outcomes to this terrible local problem.
I agree that the graffiti problem needs to be adressed, but nobody mentioned all the graffiti on the railroad cars. Almost every railroad car I’ve seen come through this town has one or more tags of graffiti on it. The railroad companies obviously don’t care because I’ve been all over the country and it’s the same everywhere. Whats the solution to this one? Sure you get the city cleaned up eventually, but then you’ve got the trains that come through each day that have the majority of the grafitti. It’s a tough issue to crack, but I think you’re all on the right track. And that’s no smack!
I agree, I hate to see those also.
However I think we should try to take care of what we can in our own community before trying to tackle a problem that originated in other communities.
I also think our tourists know the difference between graffiti on a passing rail car and the graffiti in all over the Taylor Crossing pedestrian bridge area.
That’s true Joe. I remember quite a few years back, South Florida started using a graffiti resistant paint on many of their public buildings, overpasses, and those big walls on the side of the interstate (sound barriers). This stuff works great! It easily wipes off or can be sprayed off with a light duty pressure cleaner.
but as long as theres a can of spray paint lying around a couple of bored teenagers, I think the problem will always exist. But…. if we impose the strict fines and community service that alot of you suggested, I believe the problem can be cut back dramatically.
I’ve noticed some graffiti around Idaho Falls has been painted over the last few months, especially on the overpass east of John’s Hole Bridge.
Hopefully the city and private businesses continue painting over the graffiti. I cringe when I see a business with a single tag on their building, and they don’t quickly take care of it. Not painting over it quickly tells other juveniles that the owner doesn’t care, and more graffiti does not take long to appear.
I hate to tell you kids but juveniles are not the only ones marking up our city with graffiti.
Graffitti that I have seen painted over in the last two months, has recently been “tagged” again. Unbeliveable!
That’s why we’ve got to be vigilant, quickly paint it over again.
Taggers are as lazy as anyone and won’t keep vandalizing where their efforts get covered quickly.
On the flip side, taggers that see a neglected wall get painted finally can figure the owner won’t take care of it again anytime soon, so they have a fresh canvas that will likely last a long time.
I hope the places you’ve seen get tagged recently quickly paint over it again.
I noticed over the weekend many graffiti tags appeared on the back wall of a residence, so the tags are unavoidable when driving down Grandview. It looks like it took the vandal a few minutes to get it all out there.
It’s a simple white brick wall, and will be interesting to see how long the owner leaves it up or how fast they paint over it.
Idaho Falls has covered up some graffiti, but I’ve seen more coming back all over the city. I think we need to get more aggressive.
Again, I propose the following graffiti ordinance:
What do you think?
And what do you know, this morning the new graffiti was already painted over (almost completely)! Kudos to that homeowner!
I still think we should adopt some of the proposals, though.
As we near the annual major tourist migration called “Melaleuca Freedom Celebration” (previously known as the Idaho Falls Fourth of July fireworks), this morning’s PR featured a photo of Idaho State department of transportation workers cleaning graffiti off John’s Hole Bridge.
That’s awesome, if only once per year.
Where else around Idaho Falls should the most visible graffiti be cleaned before our big tourist event?
It’s not on the parade route but the Old Earl’s Market on First Street (that is now Union Market…that caters primarily to Hispanics…I know, I went in there and got the distinct impression I was not welcome and left)…..has tons of graffiti on the building. It is an eyesore. The taggers are also hitting the fences behind the property too. They should also clean up the graffiti on the underpass near first street as well.
In Tautphaus Park, in the sunken baseball diamond field, there is graffiti on the bullpen concrete wall where kids play.
It would be nice if the city or parks department removed that graffiti.
5 gals. KILLZ Primer. about $25.
Rollers/extensions:Dollar Store
Gals. of mistints $5.
If you are about to type a response,use the energy to fix it.
And I know you don’t want to come off negatively by posting the dark side pics but maybe you could add a section for fixed wall pics, too.
Good luck all in fighting this problem. Get hands on.
Kudos to the Performance something business on south Memorial (south of the library), they had graffiti on their wall for a few years but recently painted over it. It was a real eyesore and now it looks a lot better.
Noticed that Broadway Ford got tagged with “Bones” on a side of one building facing the freeway exit.
Hey – this may sound crazy, but remember graffiti back in the 70’s and 80’s? Pretty vulgar, swearing, references to body parts, sex, etc. We saw it and knew exactly what it meant. Nowadays (and boy I feel old admitting this) – I don’t know what most of it says or means. Yeah, it’s gang graffiti most of the time, but at least it’s more artistic and colorful than anything our peers could do 20 years ago.
Yeah, it’s all got to go, just putting another twist on the subject. I say, catch the kids doing it, offer them jail time OR the chance to clean it up, and repaint a really nice mural representing some kind of theme or city pride picture. Put their art skills to work and tell them it’s their job to protect it from other “taggers”.
I just wiped out about 800 sq. feet of graffiti yesterday in 1 hr from home to home.
If you get a 5 gal. bucket and one of those wire racks that goes down in for your roller, you are portable. A good sized tag takes about 10 seconds. Start at your house and work outward, just like the gangstas and the kids. This takes no time, people. And we don’t have to sneak around in the dark to do it. If it is on a building, ask the owners if you are nervous about it at first. But believe me, cover it.
Artists: If you don’t want us to hit it hide it. OR’ for god’s sake make some art that doesn’t look like the bubble letters off of a 7th grade girl’s notebook. Or here’s an idea:If you want to paint something for real to stay, try asking.
Why don’t we spend a little discussion on places that need to be covered? When we get a list going, let’s start checking them off.
And please Joe Vandal open up a pics forum for this subject.
15 mins and a paintbrush will change your world.
More tips: Put a 5 gal on a dolly roller, bungie up and away you go!
Use a Thick mat roller like 1/2 inch for easy thick coverage.
Dollar store rubber dishwash gloves or disposable latex and a small cloth provide splatter coverage.
Use acrylic exteriors for easy cleanup. Take off the roller with a paper bag, toss it or wash it, spray off your metal grate, put the lid on and you are done.
Good luck and post those hotspots.
Graffitigraffitist: you are my hero. Awesome.
Union Market, the old Earl’s on First Street and Higbee has terrible graffiti on it’s backside. You can see it from the street.
Business Idea:
Tag all the walls I can and then knock on doors offering my graffiti clean up services.
I like your thinking. Perhaps when you grow up you can become a doctor who runs over people and then heals them. More money there, kid. You have to think big.
Somebody painted over all the graffiti at Union Market on First Street. It looks so much better. The city needs to repaint their dumpster yellow and get rid of all the crap spray painted on it at the same location though!
To whomever painted over the graffiti—kudos to you!
Kudos to you, if you think you can do it, too. This city could look pretty nice if a few more people would get off their butts.
Think of tagz like little fires- if you saw one on the building next to you, I hope you would do something. At least call and report it. If the officers hear about it enough see it enough they will do something about it, eventually. If you do not do something, it will spread. If you do, word will spread amongst the IF crewz.
If you are too lazy to do it yourself hire some kid like Teenager there to do it for you for an hour. Consider it a donation to the city. 5 bucks and some paint. Just make sure they don’t have spraypaint on their fingers.
Ya know how the Scouts used to go around painting numbers? Perhaps they could go around painting over graffiti. Maybe a Hurculean effort to wipe it out would make a good Eagle Scout project. Yeah, call out the Scouts!
Here’s a good link:
http://www.graffitihurts.org/learn_more/prevtips.cfm
On the corner of Grandview and Skyline, the bus stop bench in front of the fire station has been vandalized. It is one of those ReMax real estate benches, with the agent Kittie Sieh’s picture vandalized with black marker. It looks like it could either be cleaned with whatever cleans magic marker, or the plastic overlay could be replaced.
Esquire Acres Park on Grandview has had graffiti along a brick wall for at least three years.
Now the playground slide has graffiti sprayed on it, including the word “boobs” at the kids’ eye level. I cannot take my kids there again until that is removed.
C’mon Joe….you can’t be serious! Your kids are going to see & hear much worse than that in Kindergarten and School. My daughter is only in preschool but goes to daycare 4 days a week and she comes home saying much worse than “boob”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to tell anyone how to raise their children, but it’s better to not shelter them from the outside world so much, but to confront issues such as this head on and actually explain things to them. Walk them up to the wall and the slide and show it to them. Explain why its bad to write on walls and public property and explain to them about bad words. After that they won’t think twice about it and will only go to the park to play and have fun. But keep it from them and their more likely to be more curious. Kids are alot smarter than we like to think.
Or I can take my kids to another park until this gets cleaned. I am serious. No it is not the worst thing ever, but it doesn’t mean I need to lead them in front of it and have them sound it out. Of course I have shown him other graffiti and talked about how bad it is to do.
By your logic I should tour them through a crackhouse and show them R movies because they are just going to hear it elsewhere anyways?
If you allow your preschool daughter to say things worse than that then I do not imagine I will be taking your parenting advice.
Obviously you misunderstood me. I don’t ALLOW my daughter to say these things. But she’s come home from preschool and has said them and we’ve had to sit her down and explain to her why we don’t talk like that. She hasn’t said it since.
All I’m saying is, you’re sheltering your children and keeping them from having fun at a park, when the word “boob” isn’t the worst word their going to hear or see. And there’s a HUGE differnce between seeing the word on a wall or park bench and taking them to a movie theatre to watch and R rated movie. And a crackhouse….c’mon!?! [edited by site admin]
I mean c’mon Joe….it’s BOOB! Everybody’s got them! Get over it.
I just can’t imagine you getting all worked up over a word this harmless.
I can also say I’ll be talking to my kids about drugs by the time their 5. Believe it or not, but kids as young as 7 are experiencing drugs these days.
But to each his own right?
I understand where you’re coming from Slim. Too many parents these days try so hard to shelter their children from the outside world when their actually better off confronting issue such as this when they arise.
I for one, didn’t take your logic the way Joe did. Taking your kids to a crackhouse and R rated movie is something different altogether, and for him to assume thats what you do with your kids is just ridiculous.
My kids also learned some bad language from the other kids at school and we had a nice discussion with them about it as well. They know better now that it’s not ok to run around talking like that and that was all it took to take care of the issue. I agree…kids are alot smarter than we like to think they are.
That could be a good topic of discussion. Ways that parents on this board deal with certain issues in regards to their children. What works for one parent may not work for another, etc. Someone might think about posting a topic like that. It may help other parents get some good tips on talking to and/or disciplining their children.
Good discussion.
Yeah I went off on a tangent. I meant the ‘by your logic’ part but didn’t think about the rest.
However I don’t think it’s sheltering my kids if I don’t walk them up to it and show it. I can just go to another park until it gets cleaned.
I think we did have another discussion going on tips for dealing with kids, but positively-oriented discussions like those don’t seem to get many comments.
The other graffiti has been there for three years now, so hopefully it does not take so long to clean this up.
regarding Joe’s comment: “but positively-oriented discussions like those don’t seem to get many comments”.
Thats too bad. I’d really like to see more positive and family related issues discussed on this board. I really liked the marriage posting that Joe put up the other day. Unfortunately I’m a widow and I got a little too emotional when I went to reply to that post. Perhaps I’ll try again another time.
Its just ashame that too many posters want confrontation instead of good wholesome discussion regarding everyday issues that effect us each day.
Somebody mentioned coming up with a post regarding movies and/or movie reviews last week and I thought that would be a great topic to discuss. Start out with movies that you’ve seen lately, and it could be a good post to check back each week and read peoples “movie reviews” on the latest movies to hit the big screen. Or even ones that have recently come out on video.
I just realized we have not returned in a few months now to that nearby park where the slide got spray painted.
A home on the corner of Singletree and Grandview got hit bad sometime this week. They have a long white brick wall along their backyard, and it had graffiti on it for the longest time. They painted white over it several weeks ago, and this week nearly the whole wall was defaced with graffiti again. Hopefully it gets painted over quickly this time.
Kudos to Melissa Smith and the crew that are battling the graffiti around Idaho Falls. We are seeing some improvements.
I’m sure most of you saw the awesome front page PR story today, Claire E. Gale junior high school art students painting murals over a graffiti-tagged fence. It dovetailed as an art project for students, and they got paint donated by local suppliers Sherwin-Williams and Columbia Paint.
They did an awesome job they should be proud of, but I hope they do not think their job is over. I hope they keep close watch on the mural, and get out there to paint over new graffiti the morning it appears again.
Letting new graffiti stand out for a few days or weeks is demoralizing to everyone and lets the bad guys get a laugh. Painting over new graffiti in the first couple hours must be an active strategy.
Good luck to Gale students, and kudos to them for improving our community!
I forgot to mention, the home I said was tagged on Singletree and Grandview, they were out repainting it white the very next day after I wrote that.
This is exactly how we need to combat local graffiti, paint it immediately not weeks or months later. Sure it’s work for the owner, but think about the work you are wasting for the vandals when you do it. Keep on top of it and the vandals will quit trying to hit that spot.
I was just thinking about a month ago how nice our city has looked over the winter, I had not seen any graffiti for awhile. Now I am seeing it all over the place again.
Esquire park on the west side still has a kid’s slide covered in graffiti from last fall. The park has a restroom building which features three walls covered in graffiti. I looked closely at one wall and it appears taggers visited at least a few different times. City workers drive past this building every day, I thought they were reporting this to a task force for cleanup?
A fence on the main thoroughfare Buckboard has been hit with a big gang sign, the fence was unpainted before and it is very long, so the homeowner will probably have to paint the entire fence now to fix it.
There are several buildings on north Utah where the backs have graffiti. You see it when you drive on the freeway through Idaho Falls, or sitting on the exit ramp. Those businesses may think the problem is hidden from view, but it is not, it reflects poorly on our city to everyone from the freeway point of view.
LocalNews8 reports a rash of gang sign graffiti throughout Ammon, and folks are starting to wonder if it is related to or has led up to that kid getting stabbed at the bus stop:
http://www.localnews8.com/Global/story.asp?S=8139166
Ahhhh, graffiti season in Idaho Falls is just starting up. What are we going to do about it this year?
At a department store in a town in Arizona, I saw signs by the spray paint and the cattle markers that said cameras are recording customers and the store was turning over the tapes to the police who were cracking down on the vandals.
Oh! Cool idea! Those vandals have to get the spray paint from somewhere!
I also remember the prohibition to sell to anyone under 21. That probably only helped a little, but it was something.
Excellent, I am going to contact Karen Cornwall at the IF City Council and ask her to pass the Paint Protection Act….it will prohibit sale of spray paint to persons under age 21. Additionally, it will require all sales to be recorded in a ledger (with the color and make of the paint) and kept for one year from the point of sale to allow us to track down dirtbags who buy paint and deface property. I will also ask her to fund a Crime Scene Investigation lab for Idaho Falls so that paint can be analyzed and traced back to the criminal element. I will also ask her to fund a TV show called, “Graffiti Busters”. I am sure Cornwall will go for this because I will put it in terms of protecting kids from the evils of Graffiti. It should only cost a couple of million dollars. Or better yet, let’s get a school program going where the public schools educate our youth on the evils of graffiti. LOL ……I am having way too much fun on this one!!!!
Hey, tell her other states do it, and it’s sure to be a hit!
***blown out of proportion alert on post #60****
Yer darn tootin it was a BOPA!
The church on Grandview was also hit by graffiti the last couple days.
It’s graffiti season again in Idaho Falls. I hope cops are doing extra patrols this Friday and Saturday evening, everyone should be on the lookout those late evenings and I bet we will catch some of these taggers.
When the taggers get caught will they be charged with felonies like the people who painted “war” on the stop signs?!
Angela,
It depends on the amount it would have cost to fix the damage done. Over $1000 then the charge is a felony. Under $1000 then the charge is a misdemeanor. Those are the guidelines by Idaho Code 18-7001(1) Misdemeanor and 18-7001(2) Felony Malicious Injury to Property.
The other guideline by Idaho Code 18-7001(2) is if there is multiple violations, which together would exceed $1000, would constitute a felony.
By the Idaho Code this was the reason why the people who painted “war” on the stop signs were origanlly charged with a felony.
Local News 8 had a good story about our graffiti problem. The BCSO is publishing a pamphlet to give to graffiti victims with information like how and where to get graffiti paint removed. That sounds helpful, kudos to whoever in the BCSO had that idea.
Local News 8 also reported on several street lights that were unlit in the Ammon neighborhood, and notified Rocky Mountain Power, who said they would get out today to fix them. These seem like good steps.
http://www.localnews8.com/Global/story.asp?S=8145222
If there is a street light out in your neighborhood, notify the city to fix it. If the weather is good this weekend, I bet the “artists” will be out and about. Keep an eye out and let’s try to catch them this weekend.
Kudos to local Idaho Falls / Bonneville County youth who spent Monday cleaning up some of the graffiti around Idaho Falls, and kudos to Melissa Smith who organizes these volunteer efforts for our city:
http://www.kidk.com/news/local/17691564.html
The gentleman who’s fence received graffiti in my neighborhood has painted that section in beige. It looks kind of funny because the remaining fence length is untreated wood, but it is certainly better than the graffiti paint.
Have you noticed any graffiti around Idaho Falls that has not been taken care of yet?
The city recently passed an ordinance requiring property owners to cover up graffiti within in a certain time limit so why is it that the city isn’t obeying their own law? If you’ve driven by Tauphus park in the last few weeks you would have noticed that the fountain is now blue and covered in gang graffiti. Yet the city has done nothing to get rid of it. And now that they’ve waited so long the inclement weather has hit which will probably delay it even longer.
Park bump for the graffiti that the city still hasn’t cleaned up off the fountain.
I hate the graffitti, I wish we had vigilante groups watching at night, then when the punks were caught, they would be taken to their homes. Thier homes would be spray painted, their cars, their cothes, everything they owned. Give then a taste of thier own medicine.
Good old fashioned vigilante justice huh? I like it!
I spent a week in Coeur d’Alene last summer and didn’t spot one speck of graffiti anywhere in the area. None. I come back to Idaho Falls and it looked like little Tijuana.
Idaho Falls needs to step up its efforts. I like the idea of property owners or the city installing discreet cameras in problem areas. There are a few major hot spots in town that are targeted repeatedly. It should be fairly easy to nail some of the punks responsible.
Sadly, I think it is only going to get worse. I see Idaho Falls looking like downtown Nampa in the next few years. Drivebys, graffitti, property crime, and full on ghetto areas. Just take a drive through Moble Home Estates for verification.
You mean to say that we’re actually going to break out of our ’80s mold and walk into the ’90s? Never thought it possible…
But she’s still preccupied with 19…with 19… with1985…
Anyway…There has been a drastic increase in gang activity in the area (real gangs…brought to us from a variety of places) and if Idaho Falls doesn’t wake up and do something about it, as a *community* then yes, it will only get worse. I wish it were just punk kids, but it’s also punk kids who are looking to be part of something none of us want them to be a part of. Punk kids doing punk things is one thing…punk kids trying to become members of gangs (regardless of from where) is a step up, and a dangerous one at that.
Of course, it would be nice if Idaho Falls woke up and realized it has a serious drug problem, too…We’re finally coming out of our stupor on that one…Probably largely because of the increase in graffitti..hee hee.
like Ice Cube says in his new Single, “gansta rap made me do it”.
whatever
We don’t have “gangs”, we have bored kids. You can thank the high population of LDS living in a fantasy world of safety and seclusion for that one.
As for the drug problem, see above. Drugs wouldn’t be a problem if our kids didn’t have a reason to use them. This town goes on lockdown after 8:00pm Monday through Saturday, and practically all day Sunday (granted, it’s gotten better in the last few years). Even during the day there really isn’t much for our kids to do here outside of hitting a retail store or a movie…both of which are outside the average teenager’s budget.
You expect them to go hang out at the park or the mall without having some sort of mind altering substance to make walking the same old beat a little bit more interesting? The LDS pop in the area has pretty much strangled every opportunity for our kids to get out and about and be constructive with their time without being in some hokey youth group. Instead they’re stuck in the basement playing video games, or out and about making the daily beat a bit more interesting.
Our kids are bored, and most of the parents here have no idea what their children are doing because they’re lost in their world of safety and seclusion. It’s not like these “gangs” migrated in from East L.A., they’re being raised here thanks to delusional parents that don’t have a clue.
Actually gangs are migrating from LA, im not sure of their extent in idaho falls, but you better believe it. Sur 13 exists here. I’m not a mormon, so im not here to defend them in their ivory towers, but maybe you need to wake up too, and realise it’s not bored kids causing a little havoc.
I think you’re both right. Bored kids will be much easier to suck into the gang mentality.
We definitely need more for kids to do around here. That’s the same problem we had when we were kids so, so many years ago, and it hasn’t changed much.
I’m with Alice – bored kids are not exactly difficult targets for real gang presence.
I’d recommend opening your eyes Gangs…This isn’t the same Idaho Falls it was 10 years ago.
And by no means am I in an ivory tower on that issue.
Being here as a kid 10 years ago, I have to call you out on inaccuracies Joon. This same stuff was going on then. Things didn’t magically change.
As a former (what some of you guys would call) “gang member” (formally associated with common “gangs”), I have to lol at this! Spray painting over some other stupid group of kids poor excuse for art is not gang related. This goes back to the lack of things to do….directly….going back to the parents. Going out late at night and spraying over someone’s mark was so much fun…and still is. lmao To think that this is gang related is just stupidity on your part. It’s all about messing with another group of kids who also have nothing to do. Usually parents are too wrapped up in what they are doing to give their children a positive place to express themselves MINUS THE LECTURES. Pathetic.
Migrating gangs…VERY common here…but not a huge problem…yet. I have been there…
Sur 13..rolf….wow…we really are blind here.
maybe i wasnt on topic talking about sur 13, i was merely correcting gangs, who said we dont have gangs. and what does rolf mean? a mispelt acronym possibly?
mispelt = misspelled
rolling on the laughing floor? (that’s a new one)
Sur 13, Norteno, Familia Nostralia, Westside, Eastside, they all start the same way and progress into violence theft and drugs. Do we have them? Yes, all of them! They have and still are being documented in the Idaho Falls area. The denial of their existence is what allows them to flourish. What is a gang? “A gang is a group of people who through the organization, formation, and establishment of an assemblage share a common identity” We don’t have the problem that California has but I grew up there and I am getting that déjà vu feeling.
You forgot the straight edgers…must just want the Mexicans out. White person gangs don’t count, mmkay.
Sorry about that Marcus…I wasn’t sure how far back to take it. I opted for 10 because I know things were going on, but I don’t *think* (I could be wrong…I was a naive teen at the time…despite where I lived) they were on the level they are now.
Sorry about that!
Well, I knew a lot of the wrong crowd, and they were in the wrong crowd because they were bored. I have to say, a lot of this is due to parents not being involved enough in their kids lives and trying to keep them under their thumb constantly. You have to give your kids some freedom, and you have to gain their trust, or they’re likely to choose the path that you don’t want them to take. If you push them away with scorn and discipline constantly (don’t drop discipline, and don’t constantly go overboard), they’ll never feel like they belong in their own family. That’s what gets the kids involved in illegal group activities.
I don’t know about gang migration, I can’t say that I’ve been effected by gangs at all, and I live in a “slummy” part of town. Seems to me that the worst that happens for the most part is tagging the older buildings in the older parts of town that need paint anyway (I’m sure there are exceptions). I have heard of two or three drive-bys in the last year or two, but there’s no evidence of any real substance that that’s gang related either.
Idaho Falls is relatively untouched by real gang activity, at least from where I’m sitting. I’ll let you know that I’m wrong when I start hearing about gang activity on my police scanner. Hell, from listening to the cops, it seems like we have more drunks and junkies than anything else, and if you’re doing the junkie shuffle you could care less about spray paint, brawls, bullets and vandalism.
Maybe you should define what you consider gang activity other than the presence of tags on the walls. When I was a kid, other kids dug the hell out of spraying paint on stuff that they shouldn’t be spraying paint on, and they had some limited knowledge of big gangs (Sur13 & such). These kids would spray Sur13 and Westside randomly throughout town, even though they had no gang affiliation, because they were stupid kids (I’m talking 13 year olds) that didn’t feel comfortable in their own homes. As far as I knew, tagging was the only thing they ever did other than getting stoned occasionally.
I don’t consider tags a sign of gangs. Bullet holes & blood, those are gang signs to me, and those aren’t even accurate unless you have witnessed the situation. Give me some real proof of gang activity effecting our lives…tags don’t cut it.
http://treasurevalleypartners.org/currentprojects/44-sausa-project/70-street-gang-activity-idaho.html
http://www.kpvi.com/Global/story.asp?s=9260179
Neener neener neener! *sticks tongue out at naysayers the way grade schoolers do*
All right, all right…No more juvenille behaviour from me.
I did have something else to say, but I don’t recall what it was now.
Oh, right: Due to a job I had until really recently, and for the last 6 years, wherein I had access to client files – I seems to me that gang related activity has increased, whether it appears on police scanners or not (which I suspect it wouldn’t more often than not), and that I think I might actually stand by my initial estimate of 10 years, now that I think about it.
Because our media is lazy and incompetent at sniffing out stories not handed to them by the authorities people around here don’t hear about many of the gang related activities in this town.
Most probably aren’t aware that there were around TEN drive by shootings last year, almost half of which centered around a gang members house near the temple.
Most probably aren’t aware of the skinhead gang that beat up some minority kids for playing basketball on the skinhead’s court.
Most probably aren’t aware of the numerous aggravated batteries that occurred last year from gang fights where bats, crowbars, and other deadly weapons were used sending numerous people to the hospital.
Most probably aren’t aware of these things because as I said the media is utterly devoid of any ability to sniff out stories unless the police tells them and the IFPD is very close lipped about such things for whatever reasons.
Its also funny reading posts from people here who think they know about the gang problems but can’t even name the right gangs. BWC, BP, 18th street, those are are some of the actual gangs around here.
gangs schmangs! you people have no clue what a real gang is. You see some stupid letters like BWC spray painted on a wall and you’re all freaking out that gangs are taking over out city. It’s quite laughable actually.
Hey Anonymous, you better stay home and keep your family locked inside and dont come out. Them there gang members may get ya!
No, gangs aren’t taking over our city. But if you ignore the gangs that are here they might very well take over.
Last year I recall hearing several incidents on my scanner that I would classify as gang related. There were many large brawls that were never mentioned in the media for some reason. One hot spot seems to be the Senior Citizens Center on Rollandet which is used for various events. I heard quite a few at that location. Most seemed to involve rival Hispanic gangs bashing the hell out of each other with baseball bats, knives, chains, etc. When you hear the “all available units” call from the dispatcher you know it’s serious. That particular location had incidents at least three or four weekends in a row and I don’t recall a single mention in the media about it.
“gangs schmangs! you people have no clue what a real gang is. You see some stupid letters like BWC spray painted on a wall and you’re all freaking out that gangs are taking over out city”
This would be the case…you know…if it were the case.
See, but it’s not. At least two of us have (or until recently, had) occupations that allow(ed) us access to the “stories” and in some cases access to the people involved – both the “victims” and the “gang member”s, when not different.
That, I’d say, is a little more than observing graffiti.
As Wendyjo put it, no, we’re not being over-run by gangs, but if we ignore their presence, it will indeed increase (to paraphrase).