Probation seems a little light for deliberate property damage.

Being a skilled craftsman for decades and having a life long despise of vandals who destroy what others make I volunteer to impose and carry out the sentence.
Nice, it will not be.

If only the court carries it out let's hope the scum bag gets at least SOME jail time and a year of hard labor cleaning up graffiti.

Work took me to New Mexico for a few years. While I was there Albuquerque passed a law making parents financially liable for graffiti then started going after those parents. Not suprisingly, the instances of tagging dropped dramatically. Portland should do the same.

That's the demographic. Most taggers are white males between 15 and thirty who are typically under-achievers from upper middle class families.

I'm talking about the ones that always write the same stuff, usually some pseudonym like "spore" or "dub" or "loser". They get a type of adrenaline high when they do it, which is rather like any other substance addiction. Attempts to provide "legal walls" for them to paint are largely ineffective, because it is doing it illegally that provides the rush.

I had occasion to study this carefully a decade ago when a friend's son was arrested for graffiti. The initial charge was criminal mischief in the 1st degree, a felony. A good attorney (and five thousand bucks) got it knocked down to a misdemeanor and the kid did 100 hours community service and probation. As far as I know, that cured him of his graffiti addiction.

If these creeps can be cured by community service, and probation, and a fine, it is way cheaper and more effective than putting them in jail.

Send him to Singapore for punishment. I bet that kid that made the news for tagging there several years back doesnt tag any more.

In Multnomah County, "probation" usually means "community corrections", which translates into calling into an electronic answering machine once a month. And if you fail to do so, it may take months for them to follow up in person.

That's right crime victims: under the remote chance they catch the perpetrator your property crime, and the D.A. has the audacity to prosecture, those found guilty suffer the indignity of dialing a robo-probation phone number to self-report.

Not only is it undiplomatic and perhaps even a bit politically incorrect to lump taggers in with the mentally ill, it's an insult to folks with mental illness: I can't imagine that anyone worth knowing, sane or not, would want to be associated with those idiots.

We once had a metal-sided west-facing house on an unshaded hill that had a lot of peeling paint. I got an idea to sponsor a graffiti competition, where 10 parties would be invited to spray my house consecutively, and the neighbors would vote on the best artist, who would get a cash prize. And my house would get 10 coats of spray paint and might not peel for a while.

To my surprise, neither my family nor any of the neighbors were interested in helping out on the project, except the dancer next door. The idea died.

I wonder if the graffitti control machine has ever contemplated a graffitti competition as a means to let people work out their obsessions meaningfully..

I would hope you would retract your use of "mentally ill" in this post. Those of us advocating for people with real illnesses would appreciate it.

I would hope you would retract your use of "mentally ill" in this post.

What else would you call someone who has little regard for the law, and routinely defaces property? "Outgoing"?

There is such a broad definition of mental issues any more, that criminal behavior surely falls into that category.

Aren't taggers another part of the creative class we're trying to attract here?

Sure, it may be unconventional and part of keeping Portland weird, but it's "art" and, thus, sacrosanct. Just have to make sure your spray cans are registered, right?

Gaye, I've watched similar situations. The idea is great, but usually anybody with the talent you're seeking doesn't have this sort of compulsion. The graffiti artists you're seeking know they have talent, and they're usually perfectly willing to ask permission to cover an entire wall. Hell, a lot of people are willing to pay them for the privilege: I once spent an afternoon watching an absolutely incredible artist turn an entire building into a traffic-stopper of an art display.

Sadly, if he's like the others I've known, this twerp has no discernable talent other than for turning water into urine. He's tagging "Glimpse" because marking locales like a tomcat isn't visible from the back seat of his mom's car. If he could pee paint, though, he probably would.