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 thwere 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 happen and we're running it as a project and we want to find out because you could vea community that's saying, fine and great, you are getting rid of the graffiti and in 6 months it's completely different. >> you are going to monitor the area for two years? >> yes, for two years, then we'll do post-audit. i'm hoping to be able to do two audits on this area as opposed to one year. how are we doing for time? any other questions? >> i might have missed this in the beginning, but i was curious, how do you guys get funded for this program. >> capital city clean up is a city of edmonton program. it started in 2005 as a litter reduction program and when our bylaw changed in 2008 our city

council was very thoughtful in determining they needed to put their mouths were. basically they were going to require the property owners clean their graffiti, then they neededto put some effort into cleaning their own graffiti as well as supporting property owners in those efforts. >> so you have steady funding? >> yes, i have steady funding for the audit and the clean up program. >> how often do you share your data with other departments? >> always. mark and i just finished finalizing it last week, but we will be holding a press conference basically when i get back, so we will be sharing the information with all the city departments as well as the city in general and going through that. we're very

open about the results. the only information that we don't publish is we don't publish the tagger names. if you were in our other presentation, we're very careful about not giving them air time. we don't want brute knowing he's the most prolific tagger in the city. that's not to my benefit, only to his. but we will say, for example, of the top 10 taggers one has been arrested. we will make that information known in a generic way during our press conferences. >> what type of material are you using for the panels. >> the panels? >> yeah. >> we haven't determined yet what we're going to use for the panels. it will really depend what structure we end up looking it on. we're looking at 4 locations for the free wall at this time. again, everything that i've seen shows that they don't work. we're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place on this in

that the public art plan was approved by city council that includes the creation of free walls so we figure better to control it as opposed to fight it because we weren't going to win the fight. again, by taking this approach we think we'll have some really good empirical data at the end of it to say, look, this is how much graffiti in that neighborhood increased over the last two years. this is how much additional graffiti was on each of those streets. this is how angry the property owners are now compared to what they were then and these are the physical changes. we'll be looking at, again, safety and security issues as well as we go through that project. any other questions? >> i just have one more. i was curious if you guys take into account any other sort of statistics, say, like the neighborhood of which area is

getting tagged, do you take into account the demographics in the sense of ethnicity or their economy of, you know, which type of --. >> we haven't to date, but we haven't really done that type of analysis. i think that's something we'd like to look at in the future in terms of getting down into the types of tagging. the graffiti i think it would be fair to say that the neighborhoods that have the highest incidents of graffiti tend to follow along where those business revitalization loans are or in areas of lower economic income, but we haven't done anything about ethnicity -- what you said. but we are actually looking at it. my director who just started with our branch last year is doing her master's in the area actually so that's something she wants to look at in the

next few years. >> just wondering how long does it take to do an audit for a 4 by 4 block radius. >> it depends on how much graffiti they find, but the audit generally takes about 10 days. >> 20 to 25 neighborhoods, we can do about 2 1/2 neighborhoods a day. >> say that again? >> two neighborhoods, 2 1/2 neighborhoods a day. you are literally 4 blocks by 4 blocks doesn't sound very big. you are doing every alleyway, behind every house, so if there's a lot of graffiti there it's pretty slow going. >> other questions? >> you have a lot of different components to your program. my

question would be what are your performance measures? >> this is one of our performance measures, the results of the audit. we also do a survey on an annual basis of every property owner who does a, receives a notification to remove graffiti off of their property. so we do independent survey with them. we have about a 10 percent compliance rate on our survey, which is quite good statistically, given the number of surveys we send out, so we are able to analyze the response by the community. we also do an omnibus survey, we tag on to another existing survey to determine what the community response is how they feel edmonton is doing, we've seen really positive results to that in terms of people feeling that the amount of graffiti is going down within edmonton. i have individual program surveys that i do with all our

programs. for example, the professional cleaning program, all of those people are contacted individually to determine how they felt the program worked. i'm a data junkie so any opportunity i have, we're really looking at that. we've done focus groups with the edmonton police service, the arts community, with school groups, various community service agencies to see what their responses to our programs, to see what other avenues we could pursue. so we have a lot of measures in place to evaluate each program area. >> as far as the city factor, do you track the square footage of graffiti removed and is that even beneficial? >> we have an estimate. we've been basing how much graffiti we've seen on thest estimates from the graffiti audit. we've

take every operational department and again efts estimate it. that way we track all the graffiti in our individual program areas. i could tell you exactly how much graffiti was cleaned in a wipe out, in a professional cleaning program and then take the number of notifications that come in. this year we cleaned about 50,000 square feet of graffiti. >> last question, i'm not trying to hog everything. you already ask eds your question, i see you over there. now i forget what i was going to ask because i was so engrossed and trying to hurry up and squeeze it in. after the audit do you go out there and actually clean up the graffiti? >> yes. well, we don't go out and specifically clean it, but because of the bylaw officers the company, the auditor out there, they create notifications that go out to the property owners. because we do the audit at the end of

the season when it's too cold to start cleaning, so notifications are sent out to them in the spring to remove butwhat we do ensure is inthe top 20 neighborhoods where we have the graffiti, we send out a poster, a blilts to those neighborhoods letting them know that they can contact us for assistance for clean up. we send an application and a notification to every property owner so they can access our program as well. it sounds bad that we're sending them a notification, but we ensure every time a property owner is contacted they have information on our programs so they can access them. >> okay, thank you. >> when you indicated it took 10 working days to do the audit, i'm just wondering how many people would be involved, one, three, 7 people? >> it includes mark. >> two auditors and one (inaudible).

>> so about 4 people working 10 days. >> the bylaw officers, they start together so they get the same rhythm of identifying the tags then they alternate but the two crew from mark's company, himself and his assistant. >> 32 to 35. >> thank you. >> any other questions? if not, i'd like it thank you very much for listening to me and i hope you found the information helpful. (applause). >> thank you. i have business cards here if anybody is interested in following up, i can just leave those there..

>> this is true, none of the people here, next we will hear from our mayor. when we had some violence in the bayview two or three years ago between asians and blacks mayor lee met with me on a weekly basis so i know he wants to do, i saw first hand up close and personal, something else he does to end the violence. >> thank you, joe. thank you very much, congressman pelosi for being here, and harrison thompson to help me take such swift action to have a national dialogue. congresswoman spear for your personal experience and what you are doing now, we're really grateful.

i'm just one of many mayors. i want you to know that being part of the u.s. conference of mayors i had a lot of discussions with other mayors who are faced with tremendous challenges in their cities and if i have learned anything in the last couple years being both interim mayor and the new mayor and many of you know i'm not a lifelong politician, so i learned the politics of this job somewhat on the job. but one of the things i do know at heart is that we all struggle with this and we know it can never be an answer only that the police can solve or law enforcement in general, that we quickly learn that mental health, that preventing ammunition and guns from getting on the street, that education, job training, paying attention to housing, poverty, isolation, all of those

elements lead to the uptick in violence. that's actually quite a strong lesson for all of us mayors to learn as we ask each other for help in solving this. and i want to thank all of you in this audience from adult probation, juvie probation, inter98 (inaudible) for helping me carve what we can do in this city. many of you know i've been a champion for jobs and i truly believe job creation and better economics is going to be a big answer. but it isn't the only answer because i quickly realized, i can't give a dead kid a job in this city. there's no answer for that. we've got to find better answers for people who are confronted with decisions they have to make to not take the violent road for that decision. and it starts early and many

of you reminded me, start now, mayor, start investing in education. start investing in community based ways in which we can reduce the attitude that violence can resolve something. and then make sure we work with our health departments and our medical experts to get to the things that people can't control among themselves. these are all things that i'm learning quickly and i asked for help and i'm getting it and that no mayor of any city should ever faced with these kinds of gun violence and so forth should stop asking for help because the answers will come forward with everybody participates and everybody contributing in all these aspects. many of you know that i struggled with the uptick in gun violence this past summer. the chief and i were on the telephone and on the teg

every morning finding out which of our children died the previous night. and it isn't a good thing. it isn't good to wake up to this. you know that, many of you who work in this community know that that is not what you want to either wake up to or go into the night on. and so i always try to picture who that youth was and what he or she may have been had they had a chance to get past this and that then i have to go over in my head, have i done everything that i could as a mayor? and this is something where i think the national dialogue has to take us. it's not about so much politics, although there's been a heavy dose of that. all of us in addition to what happened at sandy hook, what happens every single day we're reminded about, have to take this personally. we have to

personalize this for ourselves if it means even picturing our own kids walking down third street or tennessee street or in chinatown or in the mission, what can they be confronted with? how can we improve conditions for this not to happen. so all of us have to make sure that when it comes to the national and the regional and the local discussion about guns and about ammunition that we've got to make this personal to ourselves. we've got to really talk to everybody about this so that we can keep pushing for the reforms, getting these automatic weapons and munitions off our streets. there's no place for that. there is no place for these kinds of weapons to be on our streets. at the same time recommitting ourselves to the things that we do have control over that we must do. the local gun buy backs and joe, again, thank you for you and omega boys club working with police and all the other law enforcements to get

the gun buy backs we have are in planning now an additional 4 events for gun buy back events to try to take them out of our public housing, out of our communities, our streets, doing the best we can to prevent this from happening. and as a mayor i'm going to continue speaking out with representative pelosi and congresswoman spear and senator feinstein to create that national policy, but guess what? whatever we do locally, whether i work with livia cohen as we are making illegal the possession of hollow point munition that has no place in our society here, we know that if the next county over doesn't do the same thing or the next region, it will come in very easily. we have to work locally, regionally and nationally. and so as we do these things i'm going to continue to talk about our need to support

senator feinstein's national effort for the assault weapons ban that she had in the 90's and that expired in 2004. it's going to be a lot more comprehensive and we need to have that. it's going to be an uphill fight, as president obama has reminded us, but we have it keep talking about it. we have to keep it in the forefrupt. we have to keep the pictures of our youth in front of us in everything that we do. this is what i am willing to do and again continue asking everybody for help in the city because the more i do that, the more of the graciousness of our community comes out because this is not something that just law enforcement can do, it's got to be our whole society acting together. thank you. (applause).