50th Precinct, volunteers make clean sweep of unsightly graffiti

Members of the community, auxiliary officers and police officers from the 50th Precinct joined other precincts around the city in a Sept. 24 initiative to remove graffiti from five locations in the neighborhood.

Participants covered graffiti vandalism with paint at 2717 Reservoir Ave., 2800 Sedgwick Ave., an area near West 231st Street and Arlington Avenue, a vandalized wall near Knolls Crescent and Kappock Street and a location on West 232nd Street and Irwin Avenue. 

The anti-graffiti initiative in the confines of the 50th Precinct included illegal street tagging on private and pubic property, which were created using markers and spray paints. The 50th Precinct’s cleanup effort takes place at least once a month, according to police.

Earlier this summer, officers of the 50th Precinct responded to reports of anti-Semitic graffiti at McLaughlin Playground and Seton Park in Riverdale. Although the NYPD and Hate Crime Unit handled the vandalism incidents, the NYPD has a Citywide Vandals Task Force that uses the 311 system to track graffiti complaints and enforce anti-graffiti policies across the five boroughs.

According to a New York Post report, graffiti vandalism spiked to by 5 percent this year.  The paper reported that 211 more complaints were filed this year than last year, pushing citywide complaints from 3,956 to 4,167.

An extension of Police Commissioner William Bratton’s “broken window” theory, police said graffiti vandalism despoils the city. In an interview earlier this spring with WNYC, Mr. Bratton told NPR host Leonard Lopate that combating graffiti was one of the issues that he planned to focus on as the head of the NYPD because it was “the first sign of urban decay.”