Graffiti Hotline

For those of you live in or near Santa Monica and don’t like graffiti, I would like you to take a moment now to program the following phone number into your cell phone: (310) 458-2231.  That is the Santa Monica Graffiti Removal Hotline.  There you can leave a message requesting that graffiti in the city of Santa Monica be removed from public places.  If the graffiti is on your own house or apartment building, you’ll have to do it yourself.  But you should probably hop to it, because it seems like there is something to John Q. Wilson’s “Broken Window” theory (see http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198203/broken-windows ) in terms of keeping your neighborhood looking and feeling safe.

Here’s another phone number to jot down if you’re in the mood to do this kind of thing: (310) 458-8491.  That’s the Santa Monica Police Non-Emergency phone number.  They are incredibly good at their job and take responsible calls seriously.

I have been so impressed with the response by the graffiti removal team over the past few years.  I won’t go into the many times that there has been a response that amazes me, but I’ll just relay the most recent example.  During the Christmas holidays, we’ve been taking our kids to the park more often to play outdoors.  We go to Douglas Park, which is the one on Wilshire and 25th Street that has the duck pond.  Last weekend we were upset to find that vandals had sprayed graffiti all around the bathrooms, the tennis court, the concrete pit where kids ride tricycles and scooters, and a few other spots around the playground.  I’m sure I wasn’t the only person to call the graffiti hotline and describe the problem.  But nevertheless, it seemed likely that, given the holidays, we were going to have to live with the scrawls for a few weeks, until city employees were back at work.  Two days later, on Monday of this week, we returned to find no trace of the graffiti.  What could be painted over, including concrete, had been.  And what could not be easily fixed, like the signs at the tennis courts (advertising city-sponsored, inexpensive tennis lessons), had been removed.  It was a breath of fresh air at a moment when so many other things – the economy for instance – seem to be maddeningly out of control and depressing.  People who don’t frequent the park may not be able to appreciate the restoration of this aspect of public space.  For those of us who live in our mostly indoor world of condominiums and have young children or dogs (or both), it’s fantastic.  Just imagine waking up every morning with a fresh pile of dog poop on your lawn and having to either close the curtains and pretend it’s not there, clean it up yourself, or move to a place (if one exists) where no one would dream of leaving a dump on your lawn.

It was a great new years gift to feel like my tax dollars amount to something tangible for my family as well as my neighbors.