One of Milwaukee’s south side alleys was dotted Wednesday with young men wearing bright green t-shirts. The men were painting over graffiti that had been drawn on garages. The clean-up is part of a new city project that forces vandals to pay-back neighborhoods that have been damaged. WUWM’s Marge Pitrof has more.
John Smith stood in the alley and watched, as two young men brushed white paint over the black graffiti that covered his garage door. Smith has lived in the neighborhood 38 years.
“I just put this garage door up about a year and a half ago. It’s like a billboard", Smith says.
The last three times vandals tagged the door, Smith had to clean it himself. This time, the men in bright green t-shirts are doing the job for him. Police say the two belonged to a group that bragged of causing $50-thousand in graffiti and other damage to the neighborhood. The young men repainting Smith’s garage don’t have a lot to say, except to insist they didn’t tag it. They say they only sprayed railroad cars.
“It’s not gang related, it was more art", one of the young men says.
But the two say, because they were arrested, they prefer painting over graffiti and picking-up litter rather than going to jail. Alderman Bob Donovan says he hopes it’s a learning experience.
“Well, I’m hoping they learn the impact that graffiti has had on the community. It is probably the most visible sign of disorder in any neighborhood. We’re going to expand this project and make sure that individuals assigned community service pay back to the community," Donovan says.
In fact that’s what the program is called: “Operation Payback”. And there’s another component, in addition to cleaning-up neighborhoods. Aaron Edwards works for Safe and Sound Community Partners. It helped develop the program. Edwards says it also connects offenders with information about how to complete a GED and find employment.
“I think sometimes it’s just a maturity thing. Some people learn it quicker than others, and some just linger until they get in a situation like this where they have to wake up and I say, hey, I’m 20-some years old and I have a family coming on the way, I need to really get my life going. So I probably should take heed of some of this resource information that’s been given to me,” Edwards says.
According to Edwards, two of the people cleaning graffiti in the alley have already followed those leads. Resident John Smith says he hopes the taggers make something of themselves and eventually empathize with the people they’ve been victimizing.
“Do they have a grandpa and grandma our age, 66, 67 years old? I had open heart surgery, my wife had two strokes. Would they do that to their grandpa and grandma’s garage or would they like that done to their grandpa and grandma’s garage? I don’t think so. So why are they out doing it to ours or our neighborhoods? If one kid gets this message across and looks at their grandpa and grandma and they think, maybe we’ll get them off of this", Smith says.
Smith has another message for vandals: he’s in the neighborhood to stay.
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