Punishing the victim, not the perp

Photo: Alan Bamberger

Letter to the editor in today's SF Chronicle:

Excessive graffiti fines

Regarding “Supervisor proposes to halt fines for graffiti” (Bay Area, March 10):

As a property owner in San Francisco, my building has been graffitied more than once. Almost immediately each time, I would get a notice from Department of Public Works telling me that it was my responsibility to clean it up, then report to them that the graffiti had been “abated.”

If I did not do it in time, I was threatened with a fine. The notice was not friendly nor sympathetic. Thus, I had been victimized twice, once by the vandal, then by DPW.

To read that the restaurant owner had been fined $300 after repeatedly painting over his graffitied parklet was bad enough, but the $320 “Inspection Fee” was outrageous. 

How much does that city worker get paid per hour? Or did the inspection require two employees to go look over the paint job? And did it take more than one hour for the employee to leave City Hall, go to the restaurant, look it over, and then get back?

Now, I am not a government-basher. I know a lot of important and necessary work gets done by city employees. But this seems excessive.

Ron Morrison

San Francisco

See also: San Francisco: A predatory government.

Rob's comment;

I've posted critically about this form of vandalism dozens of times since Supervisor Gonzalez thought it was cool to have an "artist" vandalize his office walls in 2005 with a juvenile political slogan. (We're not talking about this sort of thing, by the way, but this.)

The Dept. of Public Works is in charge of this ongoing outrage. Not surprising that the department has grown by 500 employees in the last ten years.

Like the SF Weekly, the SF Chronicle enables this vandalism.