>> 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 other folks who supported him in this. but he really works night and day to keep this city clean. and i know abating graffiti is a passion, if not an obsession of his. so i just want to acknowledge the great work. [applause] that mohammed does for the city day if in and day out. so i do want to -- i'll just share one little anecdote as well before i talk about a few specific things. this morning, i had the opportunity to hear i guess directly from a self-described spray can ar cyst, spray paint artist, i think he called himself, that paul and i had the pleasure of somewhat conversing with. and he made a statement that it's been troubling me all day

long. and part of the discussion was graffiti art, is it vandalism? is it ok? is it not? he made a statement to the effect that, well, a lot of what i did was i just looked for out of the way places to do it. and he named a few places and one of the places he named was hunter's point off of third avenue, off of third street. and, i mean, think about what kind of statement that's making. people live in hunter's point. it's a neighborhood. it's a community. there are kids. there are older people. there are younger people. and the mentality that it's ok to do my vandalism in this other place if it's not a real place where people are. it was just mind boggling to me. and that really represents the challenge of that level of arrogance and disrespect and disregard for fellow residents and human beings in the name of free expression or whatever euphemism you want to use there.

that's our challenge here today. so it's been bothering me. i think it will continue to bother me. but i think you all know better than i even about the problem, and rather than being all doom and gloom about this, mohammed gave me the assignment of talking to you about some of the things that are working, or will be working, because all is not -- all is not gloom and doom in the world of graffiti here. as the president mentioned, there have been some changes in the last 10 years and some of them are positive. one legislative change is the last october -- last november, the board of supervisors with support of bevan dufty and the entire order passed an ordinance, and it's something that many city ace cross the country and acrs california have, but san francisco never did have. captured within the umbrella the definition of blight is graffiti, and one specific element that was a big driver of

this ordinance came from the graffiti advisory board and it was a request that the time to abate on private property be shorter, and it's a recognition of the fact that everybody knows that the longer you leave graffiti up there the more likely it is to attract yet more graffiti or other undesirable activity like garbage and dumping. it's the broken windows theory. we see it all over the city every day. but also the quicker you get it off, the less likely it is to recur. in the blight ordinance passed by the board that we should be implementing starting next month, that 30 days is now 15 days. and that same ordinance also combives us the ability, a much stronger ability that we have now to go and abate it ourselves if the private property owners don't. most private property owners do abate the graffiti, and that's a good thing. you know, we don't really want to be penalizing property owners who themselves are victims of graffiti. my private property was

vandalized and i certainly felt like a victim. but we do recognize that it's important to clean it up as fast as possible. you know, having a tool like the blight ordinance will be very helpful to us. so thanks to the graffiti advisory board for the idea. thanks to the board of supervisors for making it real. the board has been -- [applause] yeah, i think that's worth some applause. the board and the mayor have been working with some of our state legislators to strengthen what's called the civil compromise process whereby those who are prosecuted for graffiti, maybe make somebody whole in terms of paying the cost of abatement, but they're not necessarily making the broader community whole. and so what this effort is is to have a stronger requirement for community service. so not only do you have to undo what you did in effect, but you have to go and undo graffiti all over town or do some other sort

of cleanup, which we think will be a much stronger deterrent and good kind of -- a good linkage in the theory of restorative justice, that the penalty really fits with what you did. if you're going to mar the community, you're going to have to more so clean up the community. we have had a lot better public reporting of graffiti. not just when it's on the building, but when it's on the building, and in progress. the police department has doubled the number of the arrests that they've made in the past year. so that's something that was very positive. some of the departments of the city that are affected that own a lot of public property and are victims of the graffiti, public works, the m.t.a. and the p.u.c., we joined together and formed a dedicated clerk in paul's office that helps funnel all of the graffiti work in one place and helps the prosecution process flow better.

paul can probably speak to what he has done at the d.a.'s office to establish the process to make -- to keep these cases from falling through the cracks. and finally, the community corridor partnership where we have focused some of our resources in the commercial quarter across the city. we've been working in some cases with property owners to enter into an agreement whereby we have a contractor go and abate the graffiti immediately, or as immediately as possible so that in these most visible corridors that are part of the economic life blood of our city, that that graffiti doesn't stay there very long. so there are things that are happening that are good. so i don't want anyone to -- i don't want to start off the conference with everybody kind of down about how we're being overrun here, but there are some good things in the works. but we really need your thoughts and your partnership to really help us really breakthrough to the next level. so i want to thank you for coming here. before the next speaker --

because sometimes speech can be a little dry. you're going to be treated to an effort made by a couple of film makers from the academy of art university. i think i met one of them this past weekend, a short little video that i think helps paint the picture of what we're up against. so thank you very much.