sit-down until the manager comes back. when you do meet the manager, and then your application. now, maybe, you will get an interview. you never would have if you left the application. you have to make a personal, you have to make it one on one. they have to learn how to talk about themselves in order to get a job. >> that is a person by person case. i hope that we are moving in the direction of whether or not people have their criminal record public.

>> i want to thank all of the panelists for taking time out of their busy schedule. thank you very much. >> thank you very much. we hope that the summit raise issues that you normally don't see on your broadcast television. i think that we sent out to accomplish three things. the first question as it is

presented to and for trade both on the news as well as in hollywood movies. secondly, we should be honest about where the system is failing. at one time, our office was a public defender's office. we have made huge steps to make it just this mean for and create outcomes that are just.

we are spending more money in california on prisons than we are on education. we have too many people in prisons to our liking people out of city college. what is happening is more than an outrage. the systethis is something thate take immediate steps to protect. we have seen that this falls on deaf ears.

unless the people make their voices heard, we will not see change. we know this is a recipe for failure. going forward, we must become involved in the justice system. this is not someone else's problem. we will sit and wonder why the crime rates have gone up.

>> when you think about the cost to our society and every person that lives in our society. it becomes very clear that we have no option but to act and act now. i am hoping that you will be motivated to get involved in non ordinary justice. we have yet to live up to that promise. i look forward to working with all of you call ever to pla.

we invite you to stay with us. we look forward to continuing this dialogue in the future. thank you very much.

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>> by asking my colleagues to stand and acknowledge the work that they have done in bringing this conference together. please board members, stand.

[applause] >> you may sit. the board consists of 25 members of representing businesses, neighborhoods, and each of the 11 districts. and today, a lot of the information you will hear and see is work that the board has put together for this conference. before i go into the actual presentations and introducing everybody who's up here, a few housekeeping things and a few things that you should be aware of. the restrooms are located directly outside the ballroom to the left. the hilton has provided us water and refreshments in the back of the room. please feel free at any time you feel like getting a drink to get up and help yourself. as you look around the room, you

will see various information boards that represent each district. you will also see boards that represent the citywide districts. those boards contain quite a bit of information. please look at them. they represent the various parts of the city and represent a lot of information that has been collected specifically for our conference today. also, all the information on the boards and all information about graffiti watch and several programs in your folder that you received, there is a c.d. in there. all that information is in your folder. so you will -- you do have this information. included in your folder, you will also find a sticky note pad, and a sticky note pad is a technique i learned recently, and at any time during the conference or during the discussion that you feel you need to express yourself or you want to make a comment or you have a special moment that you want to share with someone,

please fell free to write down whatever the comment is, or whatever you feel and take it to back of the room and stick it on the wall on the back there. we have some plain paper on the back there. please stick it on there and when we take a break or after the conference, we can share with you the -- or you can see what people are asking or things that people would like to see. today our conference is a two-hour session with allotted times for questions and comments after each session. in attendance at the conference today, there are several people who are here who i should acknowledge before we go into speaking. rose from the chinese chamber of commerce has been a very big supporter and has contributed to making this conference pofpble peter lee from the portsmouth square garage. the president of the cung chow

association. he's present with us. the director of the san francisco arts commission and cultural affairs is here with us. our city administrator, ed lee, who is a major sponsor of the event and will be speaking today about a program he will be launching in chinatown. gina grant from the clean city coalition. she's with us today. lieutenant ford, who is from the mission statement representing the captain is here with us. tom carter from the san francisco fort is also here with us. please forgive me if i forgot to mention others. i know there's quite a number of you in the room. our panelists here, the officer who is in charge of the graffiti for city. he will be here to answer any questions during the question and answer times. i'm sure a lot of you do have quite a few questions for the police department. my boss, director of public

works, who you will hear from soon. and larry stringer from the bureau of sfrirmente tall -- environmental services, the branch that is spanl for abatement and coordinating many of the activities in our city. please welcome them to the conference. [applause] i'm not sure i should introduce myself. i always do this -- but i wouldn't wait for my director this time. i am the chair of the advisory board and i also serve as the deputy director for directions at the department of works. [applause] nine years ago when i began my career with the department of public works, graffiti was very manageable. residents received free paint, free cleanup one time a year. however, over the past years, what we are beginning to see is a significant increase in the amount of tagging on both public

and private property. it's costing the city millions and millions of dollars. the problem as we see it only continues to grow, and as a community, we have to address the issue more collectively. and i say this very seriously because as you go around the city, we start seeing various parts of our community, and i call the phenomenon community disintegration. the community is being flooded with you are ban -- starting to look abandoned. and i think with your starting to pull together concepts and pull together a way that we can bring everybody together and make the city more livable. just the other day, and i told the story to myself quite a few times because i'm still very upset about it, i noticed on my way home a tag across the

freeway. and i can't tell you how frustrated i was when i saw the tag. the tag was a tag that when you saw it, the extent of the tag itself, if you consider the flight of the tag -- is it up there? oh, sorry. yeah. the tag made me very, very angry. not only because of the graffiti, but it made me angry to the extent of what some people will go to destroy someone else's property. it looked as if -- and you can see it -- that several people had committed this act in unison, which leads me to the premise that a lot of the taggings that we are seeing are done by organized groups going around and defacing people's property. i must tell you that i'm seeing

more and more of this type of behavior, and frankly, it is unacceptable as a resident of the city or as one that works in cleaning of graffiti, we should not allow people to take our city over in the way with this type of behavior. not only are they tagging and destroying property, but they could cause an accident resulting in harm or injury to others. someone could have experienced a fall that could have resulted in a fatality or some bodily injury. what scares me is the amount of risk that these vandals are willing to take to destroy property. i immediately called the responsible property who owns this sign and they immediately came and cleaned it. but the reason why i'm telling you this question is in my mind, i keep on asking myself this question, and i'm trying to

figure out what the answer will be. and i hope today that as we talk and as we discuss graffiti, what is the appropriate punishment for someone who does such an act? so i wanted you to think about this question, because it is an act that not only defaces someone's property, but also is abact of vandalism, is an act that the person who -- or the number of people -- it looks like it was about seven to nine people who climbed up on this at one time. and you can see what could have happened if one of them would have fallen. i'm telling you this because the question in my mind is again what is appropriate? please think about this. i want everybody to leave this room today at the end of this conference saying this guy

should do 500 hours of service, spend a week in jail, or -- you know, i would like to hear from you what you believe is the appropriate. our city is known for its arts. it's known for its appreciation of creativity. it's a home to the most beautiful parks, structures, monuments, and views, and we must do everything we can to protect all the assets that our city has. those who refer to themselves as graffiti vandals known to us -- graffiti artists who are known to us as vandals, intruding upon the lives of the residents who work hard to build their businesses here, raise their families, and care for their communities. we deserve clean and safe place to live, and enjoy the beauty of our city. today, as we investigate the best ways to prevent graffiti,

we face the challenge of determining the profile of a tagger. many have stereotyped graffiti vandalism of youth who are at risk and in need of attention. but our research and the rest of statistics point out that graffiti vandals are not just kids. in fact, from the data we have looked at, vandals are mostly adults who come from other cities and have made this a behavior or a way of life. most vandals have been arrested more than once. so i want you to think about that. financially, i also know that this graffiti hurts all of us. it causes our properties' values to be lower. graffiti and etching devalues many of our vibrant corridors, shopping corridors, and it costs

a small business owner sometimes as much as a month's rent to clean the graffiti up. graffiti is costing us millions of dollars. money that we could otherwise use to help our city, educate our children, or even use for other critical services that we desperately need. you have heard the number -- we are spending in excess of over $20 million a yeerk every year, and the number is growing. and these vandals are also growing. so we have our work ahead of us. as we face many of these challenges toward becoming a zero graffiti city, i must say that i'm also proud to say that i am proud of all my police in other city agencies, law enforcement, the non-profits, and everyone that's going and

collaborating in this fight. today the goal of this conference is for us to recruit new leadership and to join hands and defeat the vandalism and build upon the strategies that we currently have. at this time, it is my pleasure to introduce to you someone who has built communities, someone who is very familiar with the problem, and now the president of our board of supervisors, david chu. please welcome him to make a few remarks. [applause] >> good afternoon. i first want to thank momed for your -- muhammad for your leadership on this incredible issue. i hope at some point the mayor will debuetize you as our graffiti czar. i want to comment as i look out

into this room, this is an amazing turnout. and thank you all so much for coming out and huddling on this important issue. when i think. all the motivations that bring us here to this room to fight graffiti, i think the sentiment is probably best captured by the comments one of my neighbors made a couple nights ago. he said, i'm mad as hell and i'm not gonna take it anymore. i think many of us in this room who want our city to be beautiful, who want our city to be safe understands the theory of the broken window applies here, which means that when there are things in our neighborhoods like broken windows, or graffiti or trash that these are all indicators to some degree of a community that is not taking care of itself, that is not policing itself, that is not protecting ourselves, and again, i thank you for being part of an effort to do all of those things.

i also know as someone who has worked on this issue of graffiti for much of the last 10 years that it takes a village to deal with this problem. and i want to thank everyone who is here, starting first with d.p.w., and our private owners who actually have to clean up the mess once they're made. to our members of law enforcement who have been struggling in recent years to really tackle this problem. i was a prosecutor actually with paul henderson 10 years ago in the d.a.'s office. at that time, it was often very difficult to excite police officers to investigate graffiti incidents. it was difficult to want to work up these cases. it was difficult to convince judges that these are serious crimes. and frankly, it was difficult to convince juries that folks who committed crimes of graffiti ought to spend some time. i think all that has changed in recent years, as you will soon

hear about, and i want to thank our law enforcement friends for doing that. i also know that part of the solution to this problem lies at the board of supervisors, and i want to suggest that if any of you have creative ideas, that you let your elected officials know, and i hope some of those ideas will come out today. i actually am in the process of drafting legislation to require owners of vacant buildings to do more to ensure that graffiti is cleaned up. but i know that is just one small piece of the many solutions of this problem. but at the end of the day, we know that as it takes a village, the most important actor in solving graffiti is all of you. there are 10,000 calls a year made to 311 related to graffiti. but more importantly, let me tell you a little anecdote of something that happened in the neighborhood that i live in. a couple of years ago, a couple of my neighbors decided again that they were mad as hell and weren't going to take it anymore. and they formed a neighborhood

association, happened to be the middle polk neighborhood association. and once a month on the third saturday of every month at 9:30 at a coffee shop at polk and washington, about 15, 16, 20 of my neighbors get together and they get paint from the department of public works and they go around the neighborhood and they paint over graffiti. and because of that, graffiti in my little corner of our great city has gone down. and i know many of you are thinking about these efforts or have thought about these efforts, but the thing that all of us ask with you is that you work with us to take your small steps, or your large steps, because again, it takes a village to confront any problem that we have, and i know that together we can do that. so thank you all for being here. [applause] >> thank you, david. it's now my pleasure to introduce my boss, our director,

ed risken, who during these hard times has worked very closely with us to make sure that at least the graffiti budget is protected and has encouraged us to form more coalitions to continue to fight these vandals. ed, director. >> thanks, mohammed. i want to acknowledge two panelists who have joined us. bevan dufty who is supervisor for district eight. [applause] and paul henderson who is the chief of administration for the san francisco district attorney's office. i want to thank both of them for joining. [applause] i do want to -- at the risk of redundancy, i want to echo a couple of things that the president said. one is, this is a phenomenal turnout. and i can't express how happy i am, how blown away i am that so many of you have taken time away from whatever you're supposed to be doing right now to come here, to help us figure out how to get ahead of this issue that you'll

hear from others and you know better than anyone, it's so vexing to our chunety. so i'm so incredibly apreshtive that you're taking this time. we really need creativity. there are some things that we're doing that are working well and we need to do more of. but we need to start thinking outside the box. what are different ways to attack this problem. how can we kind of move further upstream to figure out, what's the source of this problem, how do we get it at the front end so we're not cleaning it up at the back end. i think that would be a good kind of challenge for us for the day. the other thing that the president mentioned that i want to echo is acknowledging the hard work of mohammed. he is in fact at least i think de facto in everybody's mind, he is the graffiti czar of this city. there's nobody who's worked harder over the last decade to rid this city of graffiti. he put forward a personal monumental effort to get this event together today. there are a lot of