Graffiti spread across wall of Independence/Kentucky house, picture courtesy of Jessica Foley.
A beloved home at the intersection of Independence Avenue SE and 13th Street/Kentucky Avenue SE has suffered the brunt of an extensive graffiti episode on a large swathe of its upper side wall, in full public display of a busy and well-tended intersection. The gold and yellow markings and juvenile scrawl degrade the property of a neighbor and carry on to sign posts and curbs in the nearby area. In yellow, similarly-styled letters, graffiti reads a block away: “All you see is crime in the city.”
That is not what we see when passing by our neighbors’ homes and watching them out in their yards–but we see it now. It’s not good in any way, shape or form.
"All you see is ...crime in the city" If you see things like this, call 311 to report. Photo by Jessica Foley
A ladder and a lower roof helped provide access to someone with bad intentions and cans of gold and black and yellow spray paint. That’s too bad — I had always admired the vista of the houses nestled together at the intersection and the pains the owners took to groom their little garden plots on such a busy street.
One resident noted on the MPD-1D police listserv that the graffiti seemed to be spreading up the streets and the street signs around Kentucky Avenue and 13th Street and South Carolina Avenue SE. “The graffiti looks like stylized letters. I find the escalating sequence two days in a row to be a curious pattern. I submitted another service request to clean up the new graffiti, but I thought it was worth a mention to MPD as well,” the resident noted.
“The police put me in contact with the DPW [Department of Public Works],” noted resident Jessica Foley. “They are going to document and clean up the public areas. They need a request from the homeowner to clean up the house,” Foley said, and informed the agency of the address although she doesn’t know the residents and it is unclear if they have notified authorities.
Graffiti can be gang-related and is taken seriously. The DPW gives this information and advice: Graffiti Removal and Not in Our DC. However, an MPD intelligence officer reviewed the graffiti here and declared they were not gang/crew taggings, but she will compare them to see if they are similar to other graffiti in D.C., according to an email sent to Foley, who snapped numerous photos and forwarded them to the police unit that reviews graffiti.
Recent signature tagging in Lincoln Park area, photo by Jessica Foley
MPD-1D Inspector Michael Reese said he had forwarded the graffiti marking information to the MPD’s Intelligence Branch. “This is MPD’s protocol that will track and make the determination if this is gang related or regular tagging. From the citizen standpoint – the timely notification is very important to MPD and I applaud the notification as this helps our overall effort,” Reese said in an email to THIH.
The phrase seemed familiar to me “All you see is crime in the city”. (I study Visual Culture and Media). It’s from a graffitti artist SKEME and quoted in some old hip hop songs. There is a film that references the phrase “Style Wars”. I think someone is trying to make a political statement about Capitol Hill.