Waging a Crusade Against the Writing on the Wall

Photo: Bobby Ciafardini/Bronx Times Reporter. Don't say "cheeeez": Cleaning offending graffiti from a supermarket in Throgs Neck.

I am a big fan of the Washington Post. Sure I think they could do more local coverage and have more of their reporters do some Neiman Fellowships in sociology and urban planning, yes I wish they had a daily zoned editorial page (for each DC, Maryland, Virginia) on page 2 of the Metro Section just like the Philadelphia Inquirer, yes I wish they would do more special features-reports like the Philadelphia Daily News' "Rethinking Philadelphia" coverage, but all-in-all, I am a fan...

But sometimes I do wonder about the data-reports listed in the District Extra section. How about more coverage of quality-of-life incidents, and a column like the Toronto Star's "Fixer" or the San Francisco Chronicle's "ChronicleWatch" or the "Urban Warrior" at the Philadelphia Daily News.

This article is from the City section of the New York Times, which is equivalent to our DC Extra. From the article:

SEVEN or eight low-ceilinged rooms, on the upper floor of a brick building shared with a mozzarella distributor and a building contractor, house The Bronx Times Reporter, the weekly newspaper of record for the East Bronx. The newspaper, which has about 45,000 readers, reports on the placid homeowner communities lying between the Bronx Zoo and Eastchester Bay, places where violent crime is rare and people worry about nuisances like noise and illegal construction. But most of all, the paper's readers seem to worry about graffiti.

"People live here to avoid things like graffiti," said Bret Nolan Collazzi, a slightly tired-looking 22-year-old reporter sitting in the garage-size newsroom.

When a local 19-year-old covered a Throgs Neck supermarket with a 300-foot-long version of the word "cheeeez" in October 2004, The Times Reporter ran at least four articles on his pursuit and prosecution.

So perhaps no one should have been surprised last month when the paper printed a list of everyone 16 and older who was arrested and accused of scribbling graffiti last year in the 45th Police Precinct. The list, supplied by the Police Department, named 33 people, about half under 18.

As Peters and Waterman said in the book, In Search of Excellence, "what gets measured gets done."

But then, I think that graffiti offenders should be sentenced in part to do graffiti removal and other street cleaning services in our neighborhood commercial districts. AND, I think that this activity should be broadcast on the City Government Cable Television Channel.

Index Keywords: quality-of-life-advocacy; media