New graffiti-abatement painting program already having
impact
Graffiti hotline: 636-4050
It was supposed to be punishment, but for 15-year-old Hector the
penance of painting over graffiti was something else.
Somewhere between an alley behind San Benito Street and a
warehouse in central Hollister, the young man who calls Juvenile
Hall home experienced an awakening. A day spent repairing the
damage caused by someone else’s crime made him feel, well, good
about himself.
For the first time in a long time, he said.
New graffiti-abatement painting program already having impact
Graffiti hotline: 636-4050
It was supposed to be punishment, but for 15-year-old Hector the penance of painting over graffiti was something else.
Somewhere between an alley behind San Benito Street and a warehouse in central Hollister, the young man who calls Juvenile Hall home experienced an awakening. A day spent repairing the damage caused by someone else’s crime made him feel, well, good about himself.
For the first time in a long time, he said.
“It’s some payback to society. I feel good,” he said, and smiled the way someone might when they’ve accomplished something important. “It’s my way to give back.”
And that’s exactly what officials with the San Benito County Probation Department were hoping for, though maybe not quite so fast. Last Friday, the day Hector painted, was the third day of Juvenile Hall’s new graffiti abatement program in which incarcerated youngsters paint over graffiti the day it’s reported.
Probation Director Deborah Botts wanted the painting exercise to coincide with lessons about respecting the property of others, but Hector managed to figure it out on his own.
“I just wanted to give back for the damage I caused,” he said.
Standing a little over 5-feet, dressed in a white painter’s outfit, Hector spent Friday in the company of two probation officials armed with a list of graffiti reports. It’s part community service, part public stockade because painting over graffiti in public means the public often will see.
As Hector used a roller to cover a red signature on a utility box near a busy road, motorists slowed to watch. A red light caused two Latino teenagers in a cheap sports car to stop in traffic a few feet from the utility box. They looked at Hector curiously, then at each other incredulously, before turning up the car stereo’s volume.
Hector stiffened, but he never looked in the car’s direction as he walked to an industrial warehouse covered with graffiti about 20 feet away. There, he held the paint roller with a steady hand and rolled neat little gray rectangles. When he finished, he hadn’t spilled a single drop of paint on his hands or clothes.
The calm hour of painting seemed a sharp contrast from the way he described the unnerving experience of crime and punishment.
“Getting busted?” he said. “It was scary the first time I was arrested.”
Botts hopes that having to repair the damage of vandalism done to innocent property owners – and being seen doing it – builds some sort of societal empathy in Hector and the other teens in the program. Botts wants Hector to realize that there’s still hope for him to turn things around.
It’s how he became one of a score of kids who are busily painting over the graffiti that is becoming common across San Benito County.
After reading in The Pinnacle about community outrage over a perceived increase in the amount of graffiti – and the tagging of the newspaper’s building in retaliation – probation and law enforcement officials re-tooled an existing graffiti abatement program to send out teams of Hectors to clean up the town.
Responsibility for a graffiti abatement hotline was moved from the Hollister Police Department to Juvenile Hall (636-4050). Botts said the standing promise would be to respond to any graffiti complaints within 24 hours.
“This is our attempt at making it more cohesive,” she said. “If they were taggers themselves then it’s especially important to get them out there to atone for their actions.”
On weekends low-level offenders performing community service will be assigned to paint over old graffiti in alleys, on dumpsters and anywhere else they can find it.
Officials hope the solitude of painting, the monotony of rolling paint onto a wall, will give the teens time to reflect on the actions that got them to this place.
As he talked, Hector rarely took his eyes off the neat little boxes he created. When he did it was to gaze into a nearby fruit orchard, a far cry from his cinderblock home for the past three months, as if daydreaming.
Sometimes he shifted his eyes to the ground.
“Maybe I’ll just stop hanging out after dark,” he said a little uncertainly as a remedy to avoiding trouble once he’s released.
At 12 he began hanging out past the city’s curfew, which is 11 p.m. on weekends. He soon graduated to vandalism and police arrested him at age 13 near the tomato cannery for spraying graffiti and being drunk. He said he is now serving a 120-day sentence for auto burglary – which means plenty of time to think about the actions and friends who helped get him there.
“I’m going to try to stay away from them,” he said. “I know if I stay out here I’m not going to change. It’s going to be hard, but I’m going to try.”
The culture of his neighborhood values machismo, he said. The 19- and 20-year-olds with strange tattoos get respect for the hard time they’ve done in prison, or the drug dealers, or the hustler types.
“Everybody looks up to the guy with the girls, the money, everything,” he said. “I need friends, that’s what I need. I need people to tell me to do things in a positive way.”
Watching Hector paint was the owner of the vandalized building. He doesn’t want his name or the name of his business mentioned because he doesn’t want to lure more graffiti.
It’s partly a liability issue, he said, as he pointed to the scars of graffiti past – the square splotches of slightly mismatched paint that adorn so many Hollister businesses. These were 30 feet off the ground just above a rusting canopy. The only way to get onto the canopy is to climb up a steep metal stairwell.
“That’s been over the course of a good number of years,” he said. “It really started in the late 1980s.”
The business owner believes cleaning up the graffiti right away is the key, otherwise it’s like telling the vandals that it’s OK to mar his building, he said. And though he doesn’t notice any more or less graffiti this year than others, it bothers him to take his own kids to play sports at a place like Rancho San Justo Middle School, where he said the bathrooms are occasionally covered with graffiti.
“It’s like seeing a bunch of trash on the side of the road that nobody’s going to pick up,” he said. “It make it that less pleasant.”
He wants penalties for vandals.
Their families should be forced to pay $5,000 for clean-up costs, he said. The reason is parents need a kick in the pants sometimes to instill values in their kids. If they were forced to pay the clean-up costs there would be a lot less graffiti, he reasoned.
“As parents we’re all responsible for what our children do,” he said.
