Alan Erickson Fights Graffiti in Olympia

olympia graffiti clean up
Alan Erickson chooses to live in Olympia. He believes that it's everyone's responsibility to quickly clean up graffiti.
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By Gail Wood

rivers edgeAlan Erickson has the same reaction to the sight of graffiti everyone else does.

He thinks, “Isn’t that terrible?”

But Erickson goes beyond the emotional response. He takes action. He’ll get his paint remover, rags and ladder, if he needs to, and wipes off the spray-painted stop sign, or removes the tag from a side of a building.

“When I see it, I want to jump right on it,” Erickson said.

The other day while on a walk near his Cooper Point home in Olympia, he spotted black spray paint on a person’s mailbox. Later that day, he was scrubbing the graffiti off.

olympia graffiti clean up
You can frequently find Alan Erickson and his wife, Frances, cleaning up graffiti around Olympia.

“The quicker you get rid of it the better,” Erickson said. “It slows down the process. People doing it get tired of the risks involved in going out and doing it. They don’t want to get caught.”

Amy Stull, coordinator for City of Olympia Police Community Programs, said quick action in removing graffiti is the best deterrent.

The quick responses like Erickson’s is appreciated by the Olympia police. Last year, there were 1,400 reported incidents of graffiti in Olympia. In 2012, there were 1,800.

“It is a problem,” Stull said.

In Olympia’s graffiti removal program, the city relies on the community’s help to remove the spray painting from buildings and signs. Olympia also partners with watchdog groups and neighborhood associations with the graffiti reporting and removal.

And, of course, then there are people like Erickson, who do the cleanup on his own, without a prompt.

“If you can get rid of it within 24, 48 hours,” Erickson said. “That really frustrates the people who do this. It gives them no incentive to put it up there. Because they risk getting in trouble doing it.”

Recently, a shopping center on Cooper Point was tagged with a bulldog. Erickson took a picture of the graffiti and he’s thinking about offering a $500 reward for information about who did it.

“You know there are people who know who’s doing it,” Erickson said. “That will put an end to this guy doing it. Then maybe the shopping center will file a lawsuit against his parents. That will stop it.”

When Erickson was rubbing the spray paint off a mailbox not far from his home, people asked him what he was doing.  Erickson explained that he was a community member who wanted to remove the graffiti.

“They said thank you. I don’t live on this street. I just walk it. I take it for exercise. Anything I can do in my area, I will do it,” explained Erickson.

Erickson, who moved to Olympia two and a half  years ago with his wife from El Paso, Texas, has fallen in love with the city’s sights, from the Puget Sound to the Olympics to Mount Rainier. He’s hoping more people get involved with graffiti cleanup.

“If everyone said that within a mile radius of where they live they’d take care of that area, then we’d have a graffiti clean city,” Erickson said. “It’s taken us ten years to find a place where we want to retire. We just want to help keep it beautiful.”

olympia graffiti clean up
Alan Erickson chooses to live in Olympia. He believes that it’s everyone’s responsibility to quickly clean up graffiti.

He and his wife, Frances, are hoping their proactive defense against graffiti spreads. Frances has written the governor’s wife in hopes of starting a campaign and raising awareness of the fight against tagging.

“Whenever Alan sees graffiti he wants to do something about it,” Frances said. “We had trouble with it in El Paso. We’ve seen what happens when no one does anything about it.”

Under a new city ordinance in Olympia, someone convicted of graffiti can face as much as a year in jail and a maximum fine of $5,000. The offense is now considered a gross misdemeanor. Stull said the focus has been on reimbursement to the property owners for the cost of the cleanup.

“Also, taggers end up on a probation crew a lot,” Stull said.

That means doing community service, which often ends up cleaning up graffiti.

“I haven’t talked to a tagger, but it seems like it’s almost compulsive,” Stull said. “Like a kleptomaniac. It’s cultural and compulsive.”

Surprisingly, most of the convicted graffiti taggers in Olympia aren’t minors. They’re in their 20s.

“What we’ve seen here is that they’re typically male and I’d say 21 to to 30,” Stull said. “We arrested someone who was 55. I can only think of one juvenile who was arrested last year. The rest were adults.”

To report vandalism, call the graffiti hotline at 360-570-3737. Call 911 if you see the vandalism in progress. To file a police report, call 360-704-2740.

Again, Stull said the best defense against graffiti is quick cleanup. She said taggers are then robbed of the satisfaction of their vandalism. Stull reminds everyone that there are “more of us than them and the battle against graffiti is one that is winnable with the right effort.”

Erickson is obviously helping fight graffiti.

“We just all need to do our part,” Erickson said.

For more information and tips on cleanup, go to Olympia’s website at olympiawa.gov and type in “graffiti” in the search bar.

 

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