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 w

is graffiti. our by law in vancouver states that even if you give an artist permission to put up graffiti on your wall, it has to go. they don't permit graffiti on your walls. whether that's in a mural or whether that's just a tag on your wall. so, even if it is done with permission, with consent, if somebody complains or if one of our by law officers come by, it has to go. and it's one of those very clear definitions of graffiti versus art and that's how vancouver has been doing it. i hope that helps a little bit. >> thank you. yeah, i think here in san francisco the difference between graffiti and art is the permission. i hope i appreciate our anonymously written questions. [laughter] >> all right. anybody else have an answer to that one? so, we'll move on to the next one. i'll take somebody from the audience and come back here. good, i'm seeing some hands go up. we'll go with you, if you want to stand up. >> my question is about liabilities. if you're doing something that the original tagger, t

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

try to make them aware of what's gang graffiti and what's tagger graffiti. either way it's going to be dangerous. there is a lot of violence in the taggers. they get into fist fights. i've arrested tagers with knives and brass knuckles. i've heard stories of guns being taken off tagers. it is a violent culture or has aspects of violent culture in it. you need to educate people on that. when you're going -- when you're painting over someone's graffiti, that could be seen as the ultimate disrespect. and you could be exposing yourself to a lot of danger. that's one of the reasons why we have officers going out with juveniles. now, the good thing about doing paint overs is it's not a signature. that's a blanket of paint covering graffiti. so, thor just going to know that i directed them to do that. and they can, they can address me if they have any problems with the fact that i told somebody to paint over them. you know, i'm not putting a tag there. it's city property. and as far as the type of paint we use, we don't use aerosol paint. we don't use solvents or t

graffiti. you don't have to use arrow zoll. it's expensive. it's anywhere from 8 to $14 a can wherever you get it. and you also have to then worry about protecting the eyes, the hands and the proper respirator which could be 35 to $50 apiece per youth. so, to me it's a really expensive way to engage that graffiti side of the artistic or creative behavior. at the same time, montana wants their name out there. so, if you can't montana and say i'm getting 15 kids together to do graffiti art, can you give me some stuff? i need like a basic color palate. i don't see why they wouldn't give it to you whether your message is condoning graffiti or permitting it or not, you don't have to tell montana. so, if it is something you want to work with, i think you could get -- i think you could actually be quite successful getting quite a bit of paint and supplies. sea >> [speaker not understood]. >> certainly. certainly, and i feel the same way about cigarettes. >> thank you. all right. gen, do you have anoth

>> great questions. >> well, i'm the graffiti guy, graffiti abatement guy. [laughter] (applause) >> as far as the guys i use on my paint overs, i have a group of 3 to 4 guys and i pick them -- they're hand picked by me. i tend to pick guys who are patient, good with kids, guys who are school resource officers. that's a big plus. you know, you've got to like kids, maybe have experience in teaching, coaching, working with kids. like i said in my presentation, you don't want the guy with the rack shock and smoke mirror glasses who looks like he's working on a chain gang. you want someone who can maybe not talk to them in their own vernacular, but who can see eye to eye with them, talk to them about kid things and most of all be patient. and who can document trouble and kind of see things on the horizon that might be issues coming up and who are familiar with the san francisco landscape. you know, i don't let just any cop come and do the overtime. very, very picky about who i get. and i get guys who are dependable and who are most of all good with kids. >> larry

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 their graffiti but

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 in

graffiti tracker, you take the pictures gps enabled. it sends it back to graffiti tracker. graffiti tracker puts it in a database for us. i have it on my phone. they give us these phones that have all of our apps on it for graffiti. graffiti tracker here on my phone. a sewer, like we were looking at earlier, say sewer painted. they take the gps enabled camera. they take a picture, that gets sent in here. i have a ton of things you can do on this thing where you can find out sewer hit at 37th street indian school road 52 times. and just like you were showing in the presentation how different areas are with the little graphs, they put the whole graph for you. it's all done for you so you don't have to do it. go ahead. >> so, they identify the tager so they can make sure [inaudible]? >> yeah, we don't. >> you can search it like i want sewer, put search sewer [speaker not understood]? >> i'll show you right after this. it's exactly right. they have people who are trained to read graffiti. how many people can read all this crap that you see? it's taken me a couple years to final

graffiti is just -- graffiti -- those guys aren't that bad. we're seeing a lot of -- in the state of -- in the city of phoenix, not the state of arizona, but the city of phoenix, we don't recognize tagging crews yet as gangses. they don't filth our criteria for dealing that. but if you look at it, they do. i can prove to you that it's the same stuff as when when you document a gang memorandum ben bernanketioner they're doing the same stuff. a lot these guys get jumped into a tagging crew. three ways to get into a tagging crew i know from speaking and interviewing all these guys. you either get jumped in, you get bombed in, which means they go around the city and bomb, or if you're a girl, you get sexed in. who does that, too? gangs. they do the same stuff. and we have a big syndicate that just went out. we just finished it up with a tagging crew. beer runs and cigarette runs from convenience stores and we have [speaker not understood] in phoenix. seems like every corner there's a 7-eleven. we call them circle k. they're doing that. it was all

i don't have an issue with the graffiti. my property is graffiti free currently. my issue is with dpw. i have recently gotten two bills from dpw, one was $263, the original bill in september 2011. i purchased the property in january 2012. i'm expected to pay the final bill of $4339 and i have no idea where that is coming from. so, thank you. >> next speaker? >> my name is mary. the property address is pacific avenue. i have been a tenant for the past 15 years. i'm speaking today because we have had in 16 years in this location we had the first 12 without any graffiti, but in the past almost 5 years we've been tagged quite a few times and we've never received a clear message from the department that supervises this. we were originally contacted by someone from the graffiti unit that told us that our location was a high tag area even though we are on a really quiet one way street. he suggested that a stake out was going to be made that we were in a location where the city would -- he was going to see to it that the city was going to find a way to stake out this area

so, it's not just graffiti. b feet i'm telling you, please don't believe that. * what else did i want to tell you guys? there's something. just be careful with some of these guys, especially when you deal with them out on the street. there's a couple incidences where we caught people in the act, arrest them, get their hands behind them, sure as crap they have a gun right there. so, either they have guns or they have pellet guns that look like guns. same thing as i'm going home to the family. they pull that on you. you know what you need to do. it's a getting worse. and we're doing a study -- you might be interested in talking to you about it. they're doing all the crimes that are linked to these guys that are taggers to the crimes that they're doing beside. i'm sure you're doing a lot with us. i love the stuff you're doing. i applaud you for that. just remember that it's not just graffiti. anybody have any questions? this is one of my favorites. i saw a female doing graffiti in phoenix on the street and she was

out here to fight graffiti, why do we want to go to a graffiti site. a lot of these guys when they have dedicated graffiti sites like art (inaudible) you can read all kinds of articles written by taggers for taggers trying to train other people to be better vandals. so don't ignore the fact there's stuff out there for the graffiti vandal because that can be of huge use to you. meetings, we hold a monthly task force meeting and our task force meeting pretty much covers everything from santa barbara down to san diego is our main group we have a task force meeting with. we share ideas, it's evolved over the years, become more formal. now each time we have a meeting we try to do some new training or talk about the technology available, i will talk about the technology in my class this afternoon. it's really good because we document it because when you go to court, you can show training on a monthly basis. conferences, i can't tell you how excited i am these are happening. only in the last two or three years have these major conferences come about. the one

often time graffiti remains up without being an abated and that creates more graffiti. think that's the case with some of these properties. when somebody is granted hardship, the department will help them get control back of their property, help them -- an abate regularly and they should look into other options for keeping their property clean. we recommend looking into different lightings and motion sensors, possibly putting up cameras looking into anti-graffiti codeings. we are working with property owners but we really recommend very quick abatement. >> thank you. >> thank you, any other questions to dpw? okay, colleagues for item 26 i understand there is an amended report. madam clerk do we need to adopt that or simply acknowledge that? >> mr. president, we don't need a motion to adopt this report but you can without objection accept this report? >> okay, colleagues if also no objection i would like to accept the amended report and with that unless there is any additional discuss let's take a roll call vote on the resolution. >> supervisor cohen, aye, ferrel aye --

force for we have to remember we are not painters we abate graffiti. we are abaters not painters. get that out of the way and keep moving. >> how many of these do you do a day? how many poles we do a day? >> yeah. >> depends on the location. may be 20. >> do you like working with the team? >> yes because i'm a people person. i like being outside and interacting with the public and i like the response we get especially from the good job we do in the community. >> goodbye. >> special. >> good morning today is wednesday may 15, 2013 this is the regular meeting of the building inspection commission. the first item is roll call (calling names) we have a quorum >> thank you all for coming here this morning. the commission has congratulations for the senior clerk who is retiring after 29 years. and acting director paid tribute to her and good luck shirley with argue retirement and your you invaluable service to the d b i p the commission thanks the building inspector neil who was thanked publicly in a letter to the san francisco chronicle on may of the building inspectors nothing but hel

. >>> we are live where graffiti artists have a sign which could be dangerous to drivers, ktvu channel 2 morning news starts right now. >>> this is ktvu channel 2 morning news ktvu channel 2 morning news. >> good morning, thank you for joining us, i am pam cook. >> i heard you say it earlier, steve nailed it. >> you will not see what we had on the weekend, i mean -- seriously decades. it was a 50-degree spread. it was ridiculous and we have changed that. >> this is the upper low and low clouds and cooler when do we drop, and we will look at numerous lightning strikes, here is sal. >>> we have a big-rig crash which has been cleared and let's just remove that thank you very much. let's move along at the toll plaza which is light, 5:01 let's go back to the desk. >>> and covering parts of the north bay and the mt. diablo range and the real focus is in the air. thunderstorms and lightning are making firefighters very nervous. several lightning strikes in the east bay and here is one to show you, this photo was taken north of vacaville by a viewer and one fire burned for three hours on pleas

we are not showing a lot of graffiti on the house that was talked yesterday afternoon.but it includes a homophobic slur and the phrase stop snitching. police investigators are on that case. fire investigators are also on the case because at 12:45 this morning at the same home a small fire broke out. firefighters tell ktvu it appears that it started from the outside and damaged a portion of the back porch. what is adding more to the suspicious nature is the fact nobody was home at the time which if they were it might suggest it might have been an accident. we understand a spray can't can was found in bushes nearby. crews had to board up the doors because it wouldn't secure. we continue to make pope calls to investigators this morning. so far we have not heard back. as soon as we do we'll pass that along. we are live here in oakland, i'm brian flores ktvu channel 2 news. >>> 6:33, a $5000 reward is being offered by an east bay family who want to catch the man who shot and killed their son an hour before his 23rd birthday. wednesday night there was a fender bender in north