Tag on, tag off. An eye-opening look at graffiti war the city fights on Fresno streets

This patch of dirt and weeds in west central Fresno is familiar turf to Frank Martinez, especially the slatted chain-link fence at its edge. So when the address (3785 Marty) popped up on his city-issued cell phone open to the FresGO app, the 16-year veteran of the Graffiti Abatement Team drove straight over.

Martinez and his paint truck have been here before — as attested by several large brown spots on what was originally a green fence.

Martinez’s utility truck is outfitted with eight battery-powered airless sprayers. Seven contain different colors of paint (regular white, antique white, wesley gray, industrial gray, red, brown, beige) and the eighth is a heated pressure washer for use on unpainted surfaces like concrete. For smaller jobs requiring a different color, spray cans are used.

In this instance, the bubble letters on the slatted fence are nearly 3 feet tall. So Martinez employs one of his airless guns to cover them with the closest match he has: brown.

“By Saturday it’s probably going to be tagged again,” Martinez said on a recent Thursday morning after climbing back into the cab and checking off the address on his clipboard.

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Such is the constant battle of paint, spray cans vs. airless guns, being waged between Fresno taggers (those who write with their nickname or identifying mark) and the city’s Graffiti Abatement Team, which under Mayor Jerry Dyer has become a $1.68 million endeavor as a pillar of his Beautify Fresno initiative. Three new positions were added for the 2022 fiscal year as well as funding set aside to replace worn-out trucks and equipment.

“Graffiti exploded this past year in our neighborhoods, industrial areas, business districts and along our freeways,” Dyer wrote in his opening budget message.

“The three new crews will allow for more graffiti to be located and removed in a timely fashion. Every city of Fresno employee is being asked to be the eyes and ears for our crews and to report graffiti timely, whether they are bus drivers, sanitation workers, police officers or firefighters. Graffiti cannot be the norm in our city and it will not be during my administration.”

City leaders have made similar declarations since at least 1994 when then-Mayor Jim Patterson declared war on graffiti and described the problem as “out of control.” Patterson created a graffiti bureau, a Fresno Police Department unit that went undercover to investigate school vandalism and set up a database of local taggers and their potential ties to street gangs.

That unit became a budget cut casualty in 2011, but the abatement team operated under the police department’s umbrella through 2021. For the 2022 fiscal year, it shifted to the Department of Public Works.

Graffiti abatement trucks no longer have the Fresno PD badge painted on their doors. Longtime supervisor Jet Lim said the change came as a relief to some crew members who felt the law enforcement insignia made them targets for abuse from certain individuals. Drivers like Martinez are accustomed to disapproving car honks and profanities. But not since 2005 — when one was attacked by a baseball bat-wielding tagger — have any of those altercations been physical.

The shift from police to public works also means background checks and a lie detector test are no longer required for prospective employees, a change Lim said will make filling the three new graffiti tech positions considerably easier. (Incidentally, the abatement team has never had a woman member. All 12 current employees are men, and according to Lim so is the current list of applicants.)

Graffiti abatement in Fresno is a seven-day-per-week operation. Most crews are responsible for certain sections of the city; others fill in as needed. One of two lead workers, Martinez’s area includes everything between Olive and Herndon avenues (south to north) and West and Hayes avenues (east to west) — a 22-square mile area that straddles Highway 99. Although that doesn’t prevent him from painting outside those boundaries too, especially if he happens to be driving past.

FresGO app ‘wonderful for us’

These days, most calls for graffiti removal are reported (by either city employees or residents) via smartphone app. There were 28,132 FresnoGO tickets filed in 2021, according to the team’s annual report, and of those submitted by residents, 87 percent were addressed within 24 hours. In total, crew members painted over 76,454 pieces of graffiti encompassing 2,440,753 square feet.

“The FresGO app has been wonderful for us,” Lim said. “A lot of times something gets reported at 7 a.m. and by noon it’s gone.”

However, many of those victories are short-lived. Team members are resigned to the fact that their efforts, in many cases, only serve to provide a clean canvas for future taggers. Especially in high visibility locations.

One of these is a wall along Highway 41 near the Tulare Avenue exit. For years, taggers left these particular bricks untouched. However, since the citywide uptick in graffiti that Lim said began in the summer of 2020, taggers and the abatement unit have been locked into a twice- or three-times-per-week battle of wills.

“It’s a battle of wills and a battle of how much paint we have,” Lim said. “We’ll paint that wall every day, seven days a week, if we have to. As soon as new graffiti shows up, we paint over it.”

The abatement unit is now able to tackle graffiti along Fresno’s freeways — provided it can be accessed safely and without impacting traffic — thanks to a new agreement with Caltrans. Railroads, however, are a different matter.

Walls and buildings along the Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks are the most heavily tagged inside city limits and a constant source of resident complaints. However, city crews don’t have jurisdiction over these areas and can’t paint over graffiti without railroad company approval and coordination. That is “extremely difficult” to coordinate, Lim said.

As a result, abatement team members are limited to painting over graffiti on public property (including street signs, lamp posts, transformer boxes, curbs and sidewalks) as well as privately owned buildings and fences whose owners wish it removed. And not all of them do.

“In certain parts of town, people have become numb to everything,” Martinez said while painting over and power-washing several small tags on Parkside Avenue.

Could $1.6M be better spent?

As the city’s annual graffiti abatement bill reaches $1.6 million, some are asking whether some of that money could be better spent. Or at least redirected toward efforts that address the root cause.

One of those is Fresno muralist Omar “Super” Huerta, best known for his wall portraits of celebrities (including Derek Carr, Tom Flores and Jose Ramirez) as well as one honoring victims of violence that was recently painted over.

Like many street artists, the 43-year-old Huerta started out as a tagger. Before the age of 10 he was spray-painting alleys around Viking Elementary. Graffiti was so ingrained in the culture Huerta grew up in that he didn’t care about the property damage he caused.

“I didn’t see it as causing vandalism,” he said. “It was my way of being free in the world.”

If Fresno truly wants to reduce graffiti, Huerta suggested city leaders provide taggers with a downtown alley, a skate park or the inside of an abandoned warehouse and let them do their thing. It’s an idea that has been tried, and with some success, at Calwa Park.

“If you gave them a place to go, a place where they could take their time and paint whatever they wanted, maybe these kids would develop their talent and learn there’s more to life than the one they know,” Huerta said.

Meanwhile, more and more taxpayer money continues to be funneled into Fresno’s seemingly never-ending battle against graffiti. A conflict in which taggers will always have the upper hand.

“It’s easier for a kid to go buy a can of paint at Walmart and spray his name than it is for someone to clean it up,” Huerta said. “That’s the simple truth.”