Tag Search Result: Graffiti

The Collective Eye offers this tutorial on how to understand gang graffiti symbols, handshakes and codes, using as an example the distinction between People versus Folks in the Chicago-area gang lexicon. Excerpted from The Heart Broken in Half, an anthropological documentary about a Chicago street gang, the Latin Kings.

Ride around the streets of Salisbury, N.C., and you'll see graffiti that looks out of place. Gangs in this Southern city have splattered once-pristine walls with messages pledging allegiance to gangs in Los Angeles and New York City.

In a Broken Windows crime model, graffiti is one of those foothold crimes that leads to a neighborhood's decay.

While such acts are rarely reported in the media, one in three schools has reported acts of vandalism each year. In 1990 more than $600 million in damage to school property was caused by vandals. By understanding the nuances of vandalistic acts, patrol officers can develop specialized responses to help minimize future attacks.

Gangs exist everywhere in this country. Although we might like to think we are immune, no community should give in to this belief.

Gangs can develop from seemingly harmless groups of friends into hardened criminals who may not be obvious as gangbangers.

Further exploration of graffiti shows that this language of the street, which can rack up a small fortune in damages, can also tell observant police officers a lot.

Unfortunately, assaults by gangsters on police officers continue to be on the rise, especially in the larger cities. This trend does not make smaller cities or rural towns immune from this problem.

Obviously, not all graffiti is gang graf­fiti. But once you are able to decipher their source and secret mes­sages, graffiti becomes a useful source of information.