STOP GRAFFITI!

Graffiti is not a form of art.
It has no redeeming value.
It is the secret message system of gangs. Violent gangs, who commit crimes, threaten merchants, entice youngsters to join and force girls as young as 10 into lives of prostitution.
Graffiti is a blight on this city. It has made our neighborhoods ugly! It destroys private property. It marks commercial property as being in a “rundown” area.
We declare war on graffiti and those vandals who practice it.
We want your help. We want you to look around your neighborhoods, take photographs of the graffiti and send them in to us.
We will publish the worst in our “Hall of Shame,” on these pages. We will also send your photos out to local precincts so that the New York Police Department (NYPD) can use the centralized intelligence graffiti database to try to identify known graffiti vandals by their tags.
The NYPD has reinvigorated its reward program funded by the Police Foundation. Rewards of up to $500 will be given out to anyone providing information leading to the arrest and conviction of graffiti vandals.
The mayor’s office works closely with a team of city agencies to implement Graffiti Free NYC, a citywide effort to combat graffiti in our communities. The city offers free graffiti removal services to communities across the five boroughs.
Property owners or representatives may submit a waiver to the city to allow authorized personnel to clean graffiti from first- or second-story facades. Call 3-1-1 for the waiver forms or go to https://www.nyc.gov/html/cau/html/qol/anti_graffiti.shtml to download and fill them out online.
If the precinct or a community group cleans up a “Hall of Shame” location, we will publish a fresh - graffiti free - photo of the location in these pages in our “Hall of Fame.”
We will continue to push for civilian patrols and neighborhood crime watchers - if you will - who will watch commercial areas in the middle of the night. Their goal will be to catch the punks in the act. Call upon the authorities to arrest the vandals.
Our legal system has laws on the books to deal with these despicable criminals, fine them, and jail them. District Attorney Richard A. Brown will prosecute this scum to the full extent of the law.
Call 3-1-1 and report fresh graffiti attacks.
Call 9-1-1 if you see a vandal or vandals in the act. Remember if they are caught in the act, they will be punished. No more slaps on the wrist. No more turned backs.
If your property, private or commercial, has been victimized, call 3-1-1 and request a graffiti cleanup. All you have to do is fill out a waiver form and ask for it.
We believe that you can help clean up our borough - one block at a time - wall-by-wall, storefront by storefront.