-Hello, everyone. Today we are here to announce
that the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office
has filed 34 felony counts against 17 individuals
for their significant acts of graffiti vandalism.
We are seeking clear accountability
for their illegal behavior.
These cases are the result of a months-long collaborative effort
among the Seattle Police Department,
the King County Sheriff's Office, Washington State Patrol,
the Seattle City Attorney's Office,
and the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office.
Graffiti has been a scourge in our community.
It has caused millions of dollars of damage
in King County.
Just in the city of Seattle alone,
it costs taxpayers more than $6 million a year
for graffiti removal.
And across our state,
the Washington Department of Transportation
has spent $1.4 million over the past two years
to remove graffiti.
Business owners spend hundreds of thousands of dollars
to remove graffiti from storefronts.
Many small business owners simply lack the funds necessary
to remove graffiti,
especially when their storefronts are damaged
over and over again.
Today, we are bringing necessary accountability
to address some of this harm in our community.
I have heard some ask
how to distinguish graffiti from urban art.
There is a clear distinction between art
and the type of graffiti that we are talking about today.
There are appropriate outlets for talented artists
and appropriate places for them to display public art.
The damage allegedly caused
by these 17 individuals is different.
Their acts of graffiti are illegal vandalism.
Dangling above freeway lanes to tag a traffic sign is not art.
It puts drivers at risk
and causes significant damage to public property.
Destroying a mural in Kent with a tag is not art.
It defaces and vandalizes public art.
Tagging Metro buses and Sound Transit cars is not art.
It disrupts public transportation
when buses and cars are removed
so that graffiti can be addressed.
To those who claim that this is a victimless crime, it is not.
No one would feel good to think of their car,
their neighborhood,
their business being targeted and damaged.
These 17 charged individuals are accused of engaging
in felony level behavior.
Their acts of vandalism
have caused significant damage to buildings,
buses, light rail, traffic signs, and the I-5 corridor.
Their acts of vandalism
have harmed businesses and property owners.
The combined total of the damage estimated in today's 34 cases
totals nearly $100,000.
There must be clear accountability
for the significant amount of damage and harm
caused by prolific taggers and vandals.
The King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office intends
to seek restitution for the significant damage
we believe these defendants caused.
In most of the 34 filed cases, these acts of vandalism
amount to thousands of dollars in damage.
We want business owners and taxpayers
who have been hurt by this type of vandalism
to know that we hear that you have been harmed
and that we are taking action.
When you read the court documents,
you will see that these cases took months of work,
and today we are showing how our hard work has paid off.
I want to thank a team of people
who've spent many, many hours investigating
and developing these cases.
Thank you to Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorneys
Gary Ernsdorff, Jullian Haley, and TinaMarie Masters,
who were essential in collaborating
with our law enforcement partners
to deliver the strengths of the cases we have today.
Thank you to the Seattle Police Department,
the King County Sheriff's Office,
and Washington State Patrol for their hard work
and for the months of thoughtful and detailed investigation
that led to the identification of these 17 suspects.
Thank you to City Attorney Ann Davison
for providing resources.
I am grateful for Ann's leadership and partnership,
and I am grateful for her team's
valuable contributions to these efforts.
And last but never least,
I am grateful for Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell,
who has supported these efforts for months.
As leaders, we want people to feel safe in their communities.
We want businesses, large and small to remain
and thrive in Seattle and all parts of King County.
We want residents to know that our laws are being respected
and enforced,
and we want our communities and neighborhoods
across King County and the City of Seattle
to see the results of our collaboration,
and to be assured that we will continue to work together
to address damaging and impactful criminal behavior.
And as the King County Prosecuting Attorney,
I want clear and appropriate accountability
for harmful and damaging felony level criminal behavior.
I will now turn things over to Mayor Harrell
so that he may share his thoughts.
-Thank you, Prosecuting Attorney Manion.
I approve of that message.
Just hoping to get a little more laughter than that.
So okay, I want to reiterate some things first
and say some such remarks.
Again, I want to thank our Seattle Police Department
for the incredible investigative work
to be able to accomplish this.
And again, our King County prosecuting attorney
and her office
and the City Attorney's office again,
who I'll introduce after me,
for the coordination and collaboration
that the prosecuting attorney mentioned.
Now turning to our strategy in Seattle,
we've experienced an uptick in harmful graffiti and tagging
since COVID-19, since the pandemic.
Since 2019, incidents of graffiti reported by the public
have grown over 50%,
including nearly 28,000 reports in 2024 to date.
Last year,
our graffiti removal teams did abatement work at 23,117.
That's 23,117 locations covering over 27,000 assets.
These are signs. These are light poles.
These are retaining walls.
In 2021, the cost of graffiti on public property --
It cost the city approximately $5.8 million.
And currently we still hover around that amount
around $6 million.
And so, as the Prosecuting Attorney said,
these are not victimless crimes.
So what did we do?
We launched our One Seattle graffiti plan
to take a very coordinated approach to this issue
that impacts every neighborhood within the city of Seattle.
Now, this plan strikes a balance between increasing enforcement,
that we're talking about today, our abatement efforts
that we're spending a lot of money on,
and offering assistance to private property owners
that are impacted.
And the softer side are engaging with artists,
talking to artists, employing artists,
asking how we can better activate empty spaces
with new art,
a holistic approach to how we approach graffiti.
But we make it clear that the kind of tagging
that we see is not what we call art.
As, again, the Prosecuting Attorney
made it very clear.
This kind of tagging
hurts small businesses and neighborhoods,
and there needs to be accountability for the offenders
who are repeatedly defacing public property
and private businesses,
costing them thousands of dollars in damage,
particularly in the environment coming out of COVID,
where many of the small businesses
are clawing their way back to solvency.
They don't need this.
So we must be clear that this behavior is unacceptable.
We are very proud of the work of our officers
and the detectives and all of those involved,
and certainly the city attorney's office.
And with that, I'll turn it over
to our City Attorney, Ann Davison.
-Thank you.
-Thank you, Mayor Harrell.
And thank you, Prosecutor Manion.
Many of the things I support, everything that they said.
Uh, property damage is not a victimless crime.
As we've heard, it costs all of us together as a society,
millions of dollars to address the damage that it's caused.
Today, what we have is felony level activity.
I have cases referred to my office
from Seattle Police Department
of many of the people,
the same individuals at the misdemeanor level.
But what I want to say. importantly,
which is I'm really proud to stand here with these,
with Mayor Harrell and Prosecutor Manion,
is that when we have this organized level
of adult criminal activity for property damage,
we have to have a similar,
if not more strong, coordinated,
organized response for accountability and restitution.
We need to say that this is
costing us all a lot of tax dollars.
It causes a lot of damage when we are doing the cleanup,
and it is not what we want as a society.
We are here to enforce our laws.
We are here to say that this matters.
And property damage, again, is not victimless.
It costs all of us in some form.
I'll hand it over now to John Scholes
from the Downtown Seattle Association.
-Thank you, City Attorney Davison.
Thank you, Mayor Harrell.
Thank you to our County Prosecutor, Leesa Manion,
for their coordination, their action today.
And thank you to SPD for their great investigative work.
I'm John Scholes,
President/CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association,
here on behalf of 1300 property owners downtown
and about 700 companies and organizations
that have been paying way too much to deal with graffiti
in our downtown over the last several years.
We employ a team of 165 full time ambassadors.
Each and every year they're taking about
50,000 graffiti tags, as well as stickers
off of public and private property --
newspaper boxes, mailboxes, street signs,
the walls of an alley,
the front door of small business windows, et cetera.
If it can be tagged, it's been tagged and we've dealt with it
and we've spent a lot of money to deal with it,
and we're grateful
that we're bringing back accountability
for these types of actions in our community,
this type of anti-social behavior
that doesn't have a place in Seattle.
We'd like to be spending those dollars
on other things in downtown, on events,
in music and things to draw people back.
Not on removing somebody's tag on property that isn't theirs.
I think we all learned that lesson as kids,
that we respect each other's property,
and we ought to be doing that in our city,
and we ought to be holding people accountable that don't.
So I'm grateful for the actions today,
thankful to our team
who continues to deal with the graffiti we have today.
And we hope with the action that we're seeing today,
we have less of it in our city,
and there's less stickers and tags and other things
for our team to deal with.
So, thank you to our public sector leaders
today for their coordination and action.
And I'm going to introduce Erin Goodman,
the Executive director of the SODO BIA.
-Thank you.
Good afternoon. Thank you, John.
As you said, I'm Erin Goodman,
executive director of the SODO Business Improvement Area,
and I'm so pleased to be here today to express my support
for this coordinated effort to bring accountability
to the prolific taggers who have wreaked havoc in SODO
and across the city.
And while graffiti might seem like a minor nuisance
to some folks,
for the business and property owners in SODO,
it is a rapidly growing and extremely frustrating
and expensive problem.
As everyone else has said before me,
it is important to note that it is not a victimless crime.
In the SODO district,
We have seen that massive increase in graffiti since 2020,
and it has taken a tremendous toll.
So far in 2024,
the SODO BIA's clean team has responded to
and removed over 3200 tags from SODO properties.
And our SODO clean team is four people.
Additionally, we have heard from businesses
that they have spent thousands of dollars this year
to remove or cover up tags
that were outside the clean team's scope,
and it is a vicious cycle.
No sooner is a tag cleaned up then
the taggers return,
often within hours to re-tag the very same wall.
But the impact is not just financial.
The emotional and psychological toll on business and
property owners from repeated vandalism is profound.
When a business owner finds
their storefront defaced by graffiti
for the fifth, sixth, 20th time, it is a violation
and it contributes to their sense of insecurity,
lack of safety.
and discourages customers
and damages the entire SODO community's sense of pride.
And we see the effects of this damage
to both property and neighborhood pride
in the devastation
that has been inflicted on the SODO track.
This iconic, award winning mural project,
with 51 murals by local, national,
and international artists,
spans the two mile transit corridor,
providing a visual delight for passengers
on light rail and buses traveling through SODO,
and is quite literally the welcome mat to downtown Seattle.
And today many of these amazing artworks
are covered in graffiti.
What used to require a monthly painting repair walk
could now be done daily and still not keep up.
And sadly, several of the works
have been tagged so significantly,
they are no longer repairable.
Enough is enough.
Holding these individuals responsible
for the significant property damage
and repeated vandalism they have caused
is a necessary first step towards protecting
the hard work of local business owners
and restoring our sense of pride and safety in this community.
I want to thank Mayor Bruce Harrell,
King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion,
City Attorney Ann Davison, their offices and teams,
and all of the investigating agencies
for taking this first action to keep our district clean,
vibrant, and welcoming for everyone.
Thank you, and it is my honor to welcome Tom Graff.
Thank you.
-I'm Tom Graff, chair of Belltown United.
I work and live in Belltown, and I have often been asked,
why are you so adamant about removing graffiti?
And we have done weekly cleanups in our neighborhood
with just residential and business people.
I beg the MID to help me out.
I beg Paul Jackson, who's in the back here,
who's my partner, to help us out,
and I harass my property owners on a continuous basis
to get the graffiti off their buildings.
Metro doesn't talk to me anymore.
It has to be removed in 24 hours
if you expect to sustain a clean neighborhood.
And that is where I live, and that is what I demand.
How would you feel
if your garage door was spray-painted with a tagger?
That happened on my tower,
and we have 170 people who live in this tower,
and it's their home and it's personal when it's on your home.
How would you feel to go to your favorite restaurant
and the glass has, you know, this opaque film on it
and is scratched to death?
You would not feel safe
and it would no longer be your favorite restaurant.
How would you feel to drop off your child in a school
that has its front door covered with a graffiti image?
You would not take your child there,
and we expect the people who live
and work downtown to put up with it, and it is unacceptable.
And it has to stop.
The property owners and the city are doing their part,
and we have to get into the head of these people
who are causing this damage to stop.
And I want to say, we love art.
And in the leadership of Mayor Harrell,
he put up money for the Downtown Activation Plan
to give $150,000 in murals in Belltown last year.
We put up 12 murals.
The UN put up a mural with the Parks Department
that was even more stunning at Western and Bell --
five-story mural.
These murals are wonderful,
and some of them have graffiti art in it,
but the landlord approved it
and the artist was assigned this wall.
It is not done randomly,
and it doesn't damage the property.
It enlivens our neighborhood and not distract it.
I applaud the efforts of County Prosecutor Manion.
I applaud the partnership Mayor Harrell has given our community,
and we are going to win this battle because there is --
I'm not the only one.
There is a slew of us out there
that are not gonna put up with it.
And I demanded Leesa come down and paint out graffiti with me.
And she did it.
And she knew firsthand what the damage it does.
-Thank you.
-We have time for a few quick questions.
-I'm so sorry. What was your name again?
-Tom Graff. -Tom Graff.
So do you think you can stop through arrests?
I mean, is that kind of like the long-term goal
being to stop this?
-Microphone, please.
-There are two ways to stop it.
You must remove it in 24 hours.
And I manage property, so I know exactly what to do.
You remove it in 24 hours, they go on to the worst target.
Um, but there are people who don't remove in 24 hours.
And I promise you, Metro just can't do it.
I know as much as I want them to and scream at them, they won't.
So to get to those people
who are damaging our public property,
you have to hold them accountable and arrest them
and say this is not acceptable.
Otherwise, it's like everyone running through our red lights.
If you don't give them a ticket,
they keep running through the red lights.
You must change the behavior and we have let it go way too long
and they have faced no consequence.
-[ Indistinct question ]
-Well...where is Paul Jackson?
How would you handle that, Paul, in terms of our policy,
constantly evolves, and we realize that,
as Tom so eloquently said, that we don't want it up long at all.
But, Paul, the question is,
are we changing any policies in the near future
to speed up the time at which we get it off?
I-I-I'm not aware of any recent changes in policy.
-We attempt to get the hateful messaging
off within 48 hours,
from the time it's reported, and through your leadership,
we have resources, abatement teams consolidated.
And we abate, and attempt to abate, anything
within 10 days of it being reported.
-Come on up here, Paul.
Let's give you a little camera time there, brother.
-Yes!
-Did you catch that? That he responded?
Okay, okay. All right.
Go ahead. Thank you.
-Hi. -Don't get carried away here.
[ Laughter ]
-Here we go. -There's one over here.
-Hi, Guy with Real Change.
Uh, firstly, have any of you all kind of tried to talk to some
of the people in this graffiti subculture and try
to negotiate or understand what their motivation is?
And secondly, what do you say to residents
who aren't in this room who think this is
a lot of taxpayer dollars that are being used on interests
of rich people and business owners,
and not the rest of society?
It's like a pet project, pet grievance,
and it's not actually going to the poor people
or the working class folks.
-So I'm going to respond, and, Paul,
maybe you could take it from me.
And we've talked before about this issue.
What interests me as mayor,
is why someone wants to commit an act of, um,
some -- some form of graffiti.
And I've asked those that have -- uh, have done this,
many of them, are you an artist that wants to express yourself?
We want to know that. We want to provide murals.
I've said publicly, and I'll say it right here,
privately, amongst all my close friends here,
that when I see a freeway, which is state property,
I don't like what I see.
But I also see a canvas that can be painted by an artist,
some of our beautiful, um, sunsets or a sunrise
or some of our Native American art.
So part of our strategy are to find out
why someone feels the need to do that.
They're human beings.
And at the same time, we have zero tolerance for hate speech,
unwanted graffiti.
So I've had conversations, and through Paul's fine leadership,
we have these conversations
because we want our city to feel good about themselves.
And so, Paul, maybe you could talk about some of your
personal experiences with some of the graffiti artists
out there or your team. -Yes.
So we approach this in a multi-prong approach.
We have canvas space available
that artists can express themselves
in a safe environment.
We have a member on our team as the graffiti writer coordinator,
and we look and look at concepts to make sure
that they are safe and there is no negative messaging.
And we provide canvas space in our right of way
for somebody to come paint safely and express themself.
We also abate and use enforcement.
It must be agreed upon, and agreed upon,
make sure it's safe messaging and truly art
and not damaging somebody's property.
-State your name.
-Paul Jackson, and I'm the Director
of Graffiti Programs and Initiatives
for the city of Seattle.
-We've got time for one more than we're out.
-A question for [indistinct]
So is the goal here by pressing felony charges to, um --
to imprison people, um, for graffiti?
And have you quantified the cost of, you know --
you all talked about, you know, the need to investigate,
you know, doing all this work, arresting and [indistinct]
Have you quantified the cost of all of that?
-We've not quantified the cost of arrest and prosecution,
but we are seeking accountability for what amounts
to felony-level behavior.
So it is appropriate to file felony charges.
It is not the jail time and the incarceration
that we think will make a difference.
It is getting folks to pay for the damage
that they have caused, is why we are seeking restitution.
And to this person's question,
I think most small business owners
would be reluctant to describe themselves as rich.
Many small business owners are struggling
to keep the lights on,
and they are impacted by someone else's vandalism
and the defacing over and over again of their storefronts
and their property.
I don't think this is a crime that impacts simply
what you may have said is like rich white people.
This impacts our entire community.
-Mayor, have you quantified the cost -- Sorry.
Have you quantified the cost at the city level of the work,
the police time, the investigative time, the arrests?
-I'm sure we could probably do that,
but I don't have it in my -- -I guess what I'm asking is,
if it's significantly more than the cost
of cleaning up the graffiti, is it worth it anyway?
And if so, why? -I will tell you that I'm sure
that it cost way less than $6 million
for us to bring this case.
But we know that in the city of Seattle alone,
it is $6 million to remove graffiti,
and that does not consider the expenses
that private business owners have to spend.
It does not include the $1.4 million
that the Department of Transportation
spends in King County.
It does not include the costs
that local private homeowners also spent
to remove graffiti from their private property.
The cost is great. These 17 --
We believe that the damage $100,000 in these 34 cases, yes.