into the city over the past year. i actually should have put the 2010 map, i don't know what i was thinking, but anyway, this gives you a sense of where the graffiti complaints are. so the first category i think is 0 to 40, 50 to 90, 100, et cetera, so we get a sense of what's going on in the city. so what we did, we had no idea specifically where the graffiti was happening. what we did we took all of the graffiti complaints from the start of the program, 2008 to 2010, we took all the graffiti notifications that went into our bylaw system, be they calls that went in or be they officer-initiated complaints and we mapped out what were the top 20 neighborhoods that had reported graffiti vandalism. based on that, we selected the top 20 neighborhoods and determined those would be the neighborhoods we would audit. let's go in and see if the neighborhoods reporting

graffiti are the ones where graffiti actually is. do you just have a more vocal community in that area, do you have an organization on a mission or do you have more graffiti. i won't go into too much information about the 5 neighborhoods, but every year we do a comparison map between our original data set and what we're seeing in each given year to determine if we're having fluctuations in reporting. we haven't done a lot with the information in terms of where the changes in reporting because the top 20 neighborhoods have remained almost consistent from year to year, but we did do an additional 5 neighborhoods in 2012 just to see if there was any change and we found very little difference. but basically how we've analyzed each neighborhood is that in those top 20 neighborhoods there's further analysis that was done that determined what are the hot spots within the neighborhood. you can't, a city the size of ours, like i said, it's a million people. it's not like we can audit and go through

every neighborhood to determine where the graffiti was. so within each neighborhood we selected a 4-block area that was a hot spot area and then a random area within that neighborhood where there wasn't necessarily that much graffiti. each 4 block area was -- sorry, i lost my traib of thought for a minute there -- it was about 4 city blocks or 30 hectares of land. >> 12 acres. >> 12 acres, thank you. in each location the auditors examined each street, alley, they went street by street, alley by alley, road way, driveway, anything they could do, and they recorded all the graffiti they found. at each location, each location where the graffiti was

found was given a graffiti location identification that included latitude and longitude. each location was mapped using a gps -- garmin gps so we were able to locate those locations for comparison purposes, photo was taken of each graffiti, site was characterized whether it was a hot location in the neighborhood, if it didn't have a street name the intersection of the location the graffiti was also determined. at each location, then, there could have been 10 pieces of graffiti, there could have been 5. each piece of graffiti was given a unique graffiti identification code, the target property, and i'll go through some definitions what these are, but the side, the tagger name, the crew name, the time of the photo, which categories it fit in, which descriptors, all that information was

recorded about each piece of graffiti at that location. so, for example, size. how do you categorize size. what we did was come up with predetermined classifications about what we could categorize as size and we looked at the types of graffiti that we were seeing in the city and what are the sort of the -- what are we trying to get? do i want to know if someone wrote his name or do i want to know if he did a big piece. so the sizes were arranged how you would classify or what you would see on an average piece of wall. so less than 1 square foot was extra small, small, medium, large, and we looked at those categories in that way. style of the graffiti. each piece of graffiti was given a characteristic or determination what you were seeing for the graffiti. again, you can't analyze each piece so we created categories that would identify each piece of graffiti so we could compare it from one location to the next. for

example, plain text, an artistic tag, bubble outlines, whether they had time to do just the outline, if they had time to do one color, two color, or whether it was a full throw up piece. we categorized the information that way. the descriptor of the graffiti, we catalyzed whether it was hate, whether it was a sentence sill, whether it was vulgar, a political motif, it whether it was racist, all those characteristics were recorded in a data base that were kept on a laptop as they went neighborhood through neighborhood. the target category was also determined. if they could determine if it was on city property or government or private, that information was logged so we could have a sense of where the taggers were targeting. who were they focusing in on?

509 thing that was interesting that was mark's idea was to track where they went next. the areas weren't exactly the same and they weren't uniform in size, so we wanted to have a way of measuring where or what the intensity of the graffiti was over a particular area of space. so what we did was -- or mark did -- was develop a graffiti index which takes the number of tags in a specific area and divides it by the hectares or acres of land in that area, giving you a unique value for that neighborhood in terms of how much graffiti was there. this allows us to be able to have comparisons not only between neighborhoods but also within the neighborhood between the hot spot and the random area. a unique factor --. >> i was wondering why 4

blocks by 4 blocks was selected. >> it was just determined as a managable space, given the budget we had and the time period we had to do it. it takes about two weeks in terms of field data collection. anything longer than that we're getting into it being over a period of time. this is really a snapshot look at what's going on in a neighborhood, so we had to do something that was managable. ideally we would have done the entire neighborhood but this was a way of giving us some comparison as well as making it feasible to do. one of the things that was added into the 2011 audit following the graffiti tags conference -- because we're all learning, right? we came up with a will he case intensity rating for each location. whereas with the other categories where i talked about size where we are actually recording the specific sizes, what these categories do, this is a visual inspection of the

graffiti at each side. we looked at 9 categories, size, color, complexity, artistic, access and recurrence of it. low score of 1 means, for example, size is small. we use the same for size we use the same categories. 5 was extra large. color, whether it's light in color, very vibrant or not. what this does is it allows us to actually have a rating for every piece of, every location where the graffiti is. so when we've done our graffiti audit and we'll show you maps of it, we're actually visible map and show where the graffiti is the most intense in the various neighborhoods. again, it helps us show where the graffiti taggers are moving around and how we're able to compare from year to year in terms of where their movements are and what type of graffiti is there. so what are our results? is

it going to be too dark if i turn off the other light? i just thought maybe -- this map -- is that better? so basically using the gps coordinates, this is mapping out all the graffiti in the city of edmonton that we found over the 3 years of our graffiti audit across the course of the map. they are mapped out by hot spot and by random area. so what did we find? we found that from 2010 to 2011 we had 15.9 percent reduction in the number of locations where graffiti was found, an additional 14.4 percent this year in the number of locations. so what that's telling us is the graffiti tagging is becoming centralized into some of those locations. it's not the blanket approach. so it

could affect and hopefully will inform us in terms of how our enforcement efforts are being done, as well as some of our clean up efforts if they are pushing into certain areas. so basically as far as the location where the graffiti is found, we've seen a 28 percent decrease. from 2010 to 2011 we had a huge drop in our graffiti, the amount of graffiti incidents that we were seeing, 42.7 percent reduction. what we did see this year was the amount of graffiti stagnated in terms of we may have had fewer locations of graffiti but we weren't seeing any less graffiti. so, again, the graffiti is becoming concentrated into those locations. it's important for us to be able to know that in terms of how we're addressing our graffiti enforcement and programming efforts. so this is a map, just mapping out the results. so we're seeing a trending down in terms of the location and so next year will be very important for us it note to see where we go.

are we continuing to trend down in locations? again, that would help us in terms of doing wipe outs and some of our maybe community murals in some of those high pockets areas or is the graffiti going to continue to stagnate in that area. in our graffiti index, just as i mentioned before so we are examining the observations providing a numerical observation of the number of hectares in each area. in our hot spot we are fieplding there is more graffiti in the hot spots compared to the random areas. so that tells us we can rely on the calls coming in -- i don't think i have any other maps so i can turn that up so we're not sitting in the dark. basically what we're finding then is it is making a difference looking at the hot

spots compared to the random sampling. so within a given year we should be able to look at trends coming in from our 311 system as well as officer-initiated xlaipblts to see if there are hot spots again right on the spot instead of retroactively -- we should be able to trust where the calls are coming in. now we have impeer cal proof that we can start looking at the calls as they are coming in. in the random sample area the graffiti index averaged 8.2 compared to 8.39. again, they are fairly consist kupb stepblt from year to year. the hot spot increased in terms of its area. what we found again, 9 out of 20 neighborhoods had lowered graffiti indexes than last year, which makes sense we only had a 1.5 decrease in the

amount of graffiti. it does tell us that the taggers are moving around from one neighborhood to the next, telling us how we should be managing or programs or which neighborhoods we should be looking at. this is a graphic analysis of the neighborhoods. i don't have a pointer, i'll get my head out of the way. downtown was one of our key problem areas that we started out with but we're seeing a steady decline in the downtown core. so basically we have been focusing a lot of our programming in the downtown area. we had a huge decrease in the gardineau neighborhood in the second year but something has happened in that neighborhood to pop it back up. so it's allowing us to look neighborhood by neighborhood to look at the community enforcement officers woork they are doing there so next year when we go to do a hire, our

bylaw officers are working with revitalization, i'll be sharing this information with them to say these are the key neighborhoods you need to be in touch with as well as the different constables and beat officers to say, look, this is a problem and this is what's trending in your neighborhood. so it's been very beneficial to us in terms of how we deploy our resources. five neighborhoods accounted for 46 percent of the graffiti vandalism observed in 2012. even though i showed you in that last slide that downtown is decreasing, it still is one of our most significant neighborhoods as far as graffiti. queen mary park. those 5 neighborhoods within the exception of one, have remained fairly consistent from the beginning of the program. although the percentage of how much graffiti they have has gone down. what we're finding, too, is

that while the reduction in the graffiti over all was very minimal this year, we saw huge swings in the amount of graffiti vandalism by neighborhood. so the gardineau neighborhood in 2011 had a 77 percent decrease, we saw a 200 percent increase in the neighborhood. that is telling me these are the priority neighborhoods through this year where i have to find out what's going on in those neighborhoods in terms of what we can be doing to address the programming needs of those communities. 7 neighborhoods accounted for 59 percent of the graffiti, this is visually showing you how most of the graffiti continues for us to be concentrated in 7 specific neighborhoods. i'm going to have to turn the

light off again. so this map is a sample of one of the maps that was created. so the original dots reflect where the graffiti was and the intensity of the graffiti that occurred in 2011. so the larger the dot, the more intensity the graffiti was at that particular location. the blue dots indicate how much graffiti or what the graffiti was at each location in terms of the incidents for 2012. so you can see from here, it's not -- i was hoping for a better visual, but in here in the hot spot neighborhood, this is one example where the hot spot neighborhood isn't as significant as the random area. the random area is showing more graffiti vandalism than the hot spot neighborhood, but the intensity is pretty clear. if we're going to tackle a neighborhood we need to be

looking here, we need to be looking in here. so it's been very beneficial in terms of where we should be looking in terms of our programming. this is another example of another neighborhood where it was the complete opposite, it was very clear that the random area isn't as much of an issue as the hot spot area in that neighborhood and there's hardly any tagging done in the random area in 2012. so the larger dot means more intensity of graffiti. the highest rating that you can get for location intensity rating is 45. in the old strat conan rating the highest intensity we found was 35, so a fairly intense rating and the lowest was 12 in west mount and that fits with the trends of what's happening in those neighborhoods. so taggers is a very important

part of the graffiti audit. when we first started the audit mark went on his observe and he was new to graffiti so him and his assistant did their best to log the tags. what we wanted to do was try and see if we could increase the percentage of tags that were identified. so two bylaw officers accompanied them throughout the audit and they assist with identification of taggers. our rate for identifying taggers has gone up to 70 percent through the audit so the information we are able to gather in terms of intell is critical in terms of enforcement efforts. last year's audit, 2011, ome and iran were two of the taggers arrested and focused on by the edmonton police service based on what's going on through an every day basis, brute and chrome, which are two

of the most prolific taggers we have right now, that is the focus the edmonton are going after and there's warrants being written out for his arrest. ome was arrested last year and when the officers saw, because he thinks he's been arrested, when he saw that he was arrested because all of the locations that the graffiti auditors and the bylaw officers find during the audit, they are put in the notification system. so we have those tags documented against him so they are going to levy more charges against him. so it's been clearly helpful in terms of our enforcement efforts but it is clearly seen if you can get out those top 10taggers it's going to make a huge difference. they accounted for 40 percent of the activity seen this year in the audit. most graffiti we found is

small, 88 percent of the observed graffiti was smalled or extra small. so basically we're not looking at big tags. the argument that we keep getting that they are beautiful pieces of art just isn't holding because they are very small pieces of graffiti. that's just the same visually. again, most graffiti is text. 90 percent of the text, with all those categories that we have where we're trying to depict what graffiti is out there, we can now go to the arts council or anybody else who wants to argue with us and say 90 percent of the observed graffiti we have in edmonton is text only. given all those options, that's what we're finding. so the other avenue that's important for us in terms of how i run my program is when i'm trying to promote a mural program or i'm trying to promote community support programs, it's really important for me to basically say that

you can't cut the community portion of my program because 71 percent of the observed graffiti is on private property. only 10 percent of our graffiti in those neighborhoods was observed, was on city infrastructure. other government considered 19 percent and of that 97 percent was on canada post boxes like they are the drop boxes that the mail carriers use for picking up their mail to deliver. they are being phased out, though, so again within the next year or so, those boxes are going to be phased out in edmonton so we'll see if it makes a change in graffiti results. but it also assists us in terms of how we approach them. so we take this information to canada post and basically say, get rid of the gray boxes. so, conclusions. edmonton's method for auditing graffiti

vandalism is unbiased and effective as far as we've been able to determine. we use the results to work with the edmonton police service to determine our other services. the graffiti index and intensity index allow for specific locations within the neighborhood. we found we had significant results over the first year, in terms of the decrease 42.7 percent and while we have leveled off this year, we are confident that by analyzing the neighborhood data we will be able to make strong changes to our programs to be able to effectively decrease that number again. five neighborhoods accounted for 46 percent of the graffiti vandalism, compared to 60, 2011, 10 taggers responsible for 40 percent of the graffiti, 88 percent of the graffiti was small or extra small and 90 percent of it is text only. 71 percent was on private property. so that's basically the graffiti audit in a nutshell. but i always like to show this

slide because nothing speaks better than a picture whether you are doing, how you are actually doing. and this is a tag that was created out of our logo. our logo is capital city clean up, wiping out graffiti. and the taggers are so angry with how we're doing, they've taken our logo and changed it to taking out creativity and they are stenciling it all over the city. i'm happy they know who we are and we are annoying them. this is just our sponsors, capital city clean up is fortunate to have a vast array of corporate sponsors, especially media partner. any questions? >> you said that 19 percent of the incidents were on post boxes. do you guys make them

pay for that? >> make the --. >> canadian --. >> canada post clean it up? we have a special relationship with canada post. it was a funny way how we got that relationship. they were arguing they couldn't keep up with cleaning them, so bylaw officers started sending notifications to the owner of the canada post boxes, who happens to be the post master general in ottawa. they take them over a week period and canada post has a contractor go out. we have two kinds of mailboxes in canada. one are the drop boxes that the mail carriers use, those are the gray ones that are mostly getting tagged: other ones red letter boxes where you are dropping off your mail. those have been wrapped now and we found very little graffiti on

the wrapped boxes. we are quite excited that canada post is going to be changes their policies with respect to the gray boxes and they are actually eliminating them. >> that's what we're seeing in arizona, utility companies, whether it's gas, cable, water, their boxes are being tagged. the utility companies making millions of dollars in profit don't want to pay for the clean up because they consider themselves the victim. >> we started serving tickets on them. >> interesting too as far as the boxes, the can canadian postal service has come up with a very busy deco design that is really, it looks very, very nice but if you put a tag on it you can't see the tag. that's

been extremely effective. those boxes get tagged i would say 1 in 10 compared to the older ones that have a nice gray surface. so that's been a very effective program and edmonton serves notice on the postal service to clean those boxes up and the telephone companies and the utility companies and they clean them up. >> question in the back? >> hi, you indicated that while conducting one of your surveys you found 90 percent of the graffiti was text only. >> yes. >> approximately how many pieces of graffiti was that 90 percent? i mean was it 50 --. >> in the 2012 audit, the graffiti that was found over that two-week period, 1,116 pieces of graffiti that were found. so 90 percent of that was text only. >> is that the same trend the other two years as well?

>> that's a nice number, thanks. i had a second question. earlier in your presentation you mentioned, you made a comment about free walls but you really didn't give as much detail. am i to believe you are not an advocate of free walls? >> i am not an advocate of free walls. i can honestly say that, although the city is looking at putting up one but we are looking at doing it as a pilot project with the arts council. what we've done, i wouldn't say we've set them up for failure but what we are doing is we're taking the same approach with the free wall as we do with all of our other projects. as you can see, i'm really interested in having a solid foundation for the programs that we offer and that's part of why we do the graffiti audit. so we have the arts council in agreement that when we coordinate putting up our free wall, we will be doing -- haven't talked to mark yet -- but we will be doing an audit of the location in

concentric circles of the naibltd around where the graffiti is or where the free wall is supposed to be. that's one of the criteria. the second criteria is that in order to put up the free wall, a crime prevention through environmental design study has to be done of the area so if there are any factors that need to be changed to the physical structure of the area will have to be made and made by the arts council prior to any endorsement by the city putting it up. the other factor we're looking at is that on-going community consultation into the project is going to have to be a priority and the city community recreation department have to sign off on any public consultation. so we're looking at it being an audit process before, during, during the pilot and it's only going to be run as a two-year pilot project. so we're running all of these analysis will happen before the project's initiated as well and then so that we

don't have any trouble with them claiming after the fact if it has to be taken down, it's art, you can't destroy it now, any area we determine to be a free wall is going to be put on panels that are movable so we won't have any issues with that and we're going to be looking at ensuring there are guidelines posted and looking at what type of monitoring of the area can be determined, as well as who is going to be responsible for spillover so we're going to try to make the arts council, they are going to have to be responsible for maintaining the property as well as an area outside the property as well in terms of clean up on civic structures. so we're taking that sort of scientific approach in terms of the analysis that's going to happen and we're running it as a project and we want to find out because you could have a