'Broken windows' policing doesn’t bring down felonies, study says

New York's police department believes that enforcing laws against petty crime helps with felony deterrence, but many departments are shifting away from this model.

By Deepti Hajela, Associated Press JUNE 23, 2016
Read the NY OIG report (PDF)

NEW YORK — A data analysis found no link between enforcement of low-level quality-of-life crimes and the felony crime rate, the office charged with overseeing New York City's police department said Wednesday.

The report took pains to make clear it was not commenting on the New York Police Department's overall "broken windows" policing approach, but critics of the policy said the findings were proof that going after low-level crimes as a way of deterring larger ones doesn't work. The NYPD called the report flawed.

The inspector general for the police, which is part of the city's Department of Investigation and independent of the NYPD, looked at data for offenses like public urination and public drinking from 2010 to 2015, as well as felony arrest data. In that period, the number of summonses and misdemeanor arrests issued for those acts decreased, but there was no increase in felony crime.

Graffiti artist banned from 20% of US after Reddit users' investigation

Casey Nocket banned from all US national parks and sentenced to 200 hours of community service after users on Reddit tracked her down through social media

The Guardian UK
Tuesday 21 June 2016 18.03 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 22 June 2016 17.00 EDT

A graffiti artist has been banned from all national parks and other federally administered land – that’s more than 20% of the US – for vandalism after Reddit users tracked her down on social media.

Casey Nocket was also sentenced to 200 hours of community service and a fine for drawing faces in acrylic paint in at least six national parks: Death Valley, Colorado National Monument, Canyonlands, Zion and Crater Lake.

Under each picture she left her tag “Creepytings”, which was also the name of her Tumblr blog and Instagram account.

After Nocket wrote in an Instagram post that she had used acrylic paint – which is very difficult to clean off – another user questioned her about it and she responded: “I know, I’m a bad person.”

Nocket’s devil-may-care attitude came back to haunt her, however, when outraged Reddit users tracked her down and reported her to the National Parks Service.

Nocket, a New York-based graffiti artist, first came to the attention of Reddit’s climbing and hiking community when a backpacker posted a picture of one of her works that they had found on a trail in Yosemite. Users quickly began talking about the “National Park Vandal”.

For almost 20 years, I have wandered down the Mission District's Clarion Alley (Clarion Alley Mural Project's (CAMP) new website), snapping photos of any stencils that I haven't snapped already. Back in the 1990s, Scott Williams's amazing mural of Californian animals was the main stencil presence in the one-block alley.  Other stencils never really showed up there, and Williams's panel was the defining style in the City. Back then, Clarion Alley didn't have much in the way of art, tags, etc. that surrounded the amazing murals. The pavement wasn't painted either. It was a clean-looking street that happened to have large panels of art. I still walked down all the time, staying on the hunt for new stencils.

As the 2000s began, public art developed into new forms, ideas, styles, and attitudes. This was before Banksy blew up, before the terms "street art" and "Mission School" were used. Murals weren't being documented by digital cameras and put on social media sites for the world to see. Social media wasn't a term, and barely a platform that could support photographs. Before the Internet blew up, CAMP kept painting walls in the Mission, even outside their namesake street. They had been since 1992, and, as the world connected on the Internet, the world began to discover CAMP.

Anthropologist Follows Los Angeles Trail of Century-Old Hobo Graffiti
By John Rogers
AP LINK

Anthropologist Susan Phillips walks along the Los Angeles River while searching for graffiti by hobos in Los Angeles, May 16, 2016. Phillips had spent a career examining the graffiti that covers urban walls, bridges and freeway overpasses. But when she came across a heretofore unrecognizable collection made not of spray paint but substances like grease pencil and apparently left there for a century, she was stunned.

Anthropologist Susan Phillips had spent a career examining the graffiti that covers urban walls, bridges and freeway overpasses.

But when she came across an unrecognizable collection made not of spray paint but substances like grease pencil and apparently left there for a century, she was stunned.

Phillips had uncovered a peculiar, almost extinct form of American hieroglyphics known as hobo graffiti, the treasure trove discovered under a nondescript, 103-year-old bridge spanning the Los Angeles River. At the time, she was researching her book, "Wallbangin': Graffiti and Gangs in LA."

Graffiti Cannot be Copyright Protected, Claims Moschino, Jeremy Scott
(originally posted on The Fashion Law)
 

The latest update in the Rime vs. Jeremy Scott and Moschino graffiti copying case: The creative director and the Italian design house filed to have the Brooklyn-based graffiti artist’s case dismissed, arguing that he does not have standing to bring claims of copyright infringement because the work was an act of vandalism and should not be protected by law.

In a motion for summary judgment filed on Monday, Moschino and Jeremy Scott asked the court to dismiss the case because the artist, whose name is Joseph Tierney, is an "unabashed felon." According to Moschino and Scott, Tierney did not obtain permission from the building owner in Detroit, Michigan before creating his mural, known as "Vandal Eyes." According to their motion, "As a matter of public policy and basic logic, it would make no sense to grant legal protection to work that is created entirely illegally.”

They continued on to note: "Brazen and willful violations of the law cannot, and, indeed, should not result in the award of copyright privileges," they said. [Note: Rime has previously alleged that he was invited to create the mural at issue on a building in Detroit in 2012].

I promise you all, I'll do my best to answer your questions and quench your curiosities. Meanwhile, a teaser of a slide that may just say it all... or be as thing as the paint pigment upon a cinder block wall. - Russell

STREET ART
APR. 23: BANKSY DOES NEW YORK + HOWZE's STENCIL NATION +
Possibly the world's leading expert on sidewalk stencils, street art, and the Artist Known As Banksy, Russell Howze returns to SF from an international tour behind his Manic D Press publication Stencil Nation, to throw up/down a crucial visual lesson on the illegal public art of Banksy. Focusing on the Greatest Hits from his SF blitz some years back, Howze’s obsessed slide-show spills the beans on the local battle between “vandalism” and the Art world, and so sets up Chris Moukarbel’s hour doc on Banksy’s more recent, uh, “residency” in NYC. ALSO: Pussy Riot’s new music video Refugees In, shot at Banksy’s Dismaland site, and funky chunks of our own Mission School art-crimes, including clips of Twist, Margaret Kilgallen, and Bill (Bozo Texino) Daniel, whose signed(!) 847 photozine is again available, a collab with local graf-art periodical Hamburger Eyes.

Other Cinema shows films every Saturday at ATA Gallery, 992 Valencia (@ 21st). Showtime 8:30pm, admission* $7.

 Mural of rare yellow-billed cuckoos is a mix of social commentary and environmental conservation

Louis SahagunContact Reporter (LA Times)
<< Photo by Tani Ikeda

The rare yellow-billed cuckoo is a shy, slender, long-tailed bird that migrates from Central America in spring to breed in streamside forests that once thrived throughout Southern California.

And that got some female high school students and two art instructors at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex’s Academic Learning Community in downtown Los Angeles thinking about developing a mural about federally threatened species and people who come from as far away as Central America in search of a better life.

What they produced over the next year and a half with research, photographs, stencils, spray paint and house paint on a huge wall overlooking the school’s basketball courts is a mix of female empowerment, social commentary and environmental conservation.

VELVETEEN ANGEL
the movie, the soundtrack, the comic book
A compilation of single-panel dramas by Victor Gastelum
1991-2007

_____________________

PREORDER NOW from END FWY...
This item will ship April 30th.

Product Details

Genre: Single-panel Dramas
Publication date: April 24, 2015
Publisher: END FWY Press
Edition & Language: First Edition, English
Format: Comic Book
Pages: 36
Product dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 in

_____________________

Some of these pieces first appeared in:
CRUMP COMICS (Upland, CA)
THE PUNCHLINE (San Pedro, CA)
THE RISE AND THE FALL (San Pedro, CA)
STOOL (Long Beach, CA)

As well as on LP & CD cover art for bands such as:
RIG (San Pedro, CA)
NOTHING PAINTED BLUE (Claremont, CA)
CALEXICO (Tucson, AZ)

Some of the pieces dated 1991-1999 were compiled as
DAFT (the incomplete compilation of single-panel dramas by Victor Gastelum)
Compiled here as VELVETEEN ANGEL 1991-2007

_____________________

Victor Gastelum has been creating his spray paint stencil multiples since 1988, and showing them since 1992. The multiples are usually limited to 10 pieces, and because of the spray paint technique, no two prints are alike. Most of the stencils are sprayed on aluminum, heavy drawing paper or heavy holographic card stock. Gastelum’s art has been published in numerous books and magazines including F*cked Up + Photocopied, Ciudad Hibrida/Hybrid City and The New York Times Magazine. Victor Gastelum has also collaborated with his long-time friends, Tucson-based band Calexico, creating art for many of their albums. In addition Victor has collaborated with other artists such as Chaz Bojorquez, Raymond Pettibon and Rolo. He has been published by Hamilton Press (Venice, CA) in the form of a collaborative lithograph and an art book cover and by Self-Help Graphics (Los Angeles, CA) in the forms of serigraphs as well as monoprints of their albums. Victor Gastelum is a native Californian and lives with his wife Ivy and kids Ariana and Adrian in Long Beach, California.

Sometimes stencil-maker and alltimes artist/activist David Solnit talks us through a great how-to on making awesome, hand-made protest banners. Though there are no stencils being made in this video (There are stencils available for May 2016 Keep It In The Ground campaign by Cesar Maxit), David's belief that ANYONE can do what he's doing is one reason Stencil Archive is alive and still sharing stencil art with the world. It's a fun, grass roots, personal thing that you all can easily do. And it is creative!

Art Tips for Activists from Ralph King, Hawkview Pictures on Vimeo.

Spraying a wall in 1987 on the Ru Pare School in Amsterdam with spraycans and stencils by Hugo Kaagman, the film is made by Alex Vinkenoog, son of the legendary Hippie King Simon Vinkenoog