The untag team
Vandalism, visual trash talk, or urban art form, that painted mess will fall to city's Graffiti Busters
While his partner smeared chemicals over the tangle of spray-painted names and initials on a South Boston building façade, Alan Lockhart surveyed the vandals' damage and readied his countermeasure: a city power-washer.
As he has day after day for 13 years as a member of the city's graffiti removal team - better known by the playful Graffiti Busters logo slapped on its city truck - Lockhart worried himself not with what message was haphazardly conveyed, but with the type of paint that had been applied.
How much pressure would he need to use? How long would it take? How would he avoid removing the "No Parking" message that the building's owner clearly wanted to remain?
"I can't read it," he said on this Tuesday morning run. "I just know it's graffiti."
Boston has police officials responsible for deciphering the graffiti, identifying trends, and plumbing the messages for clues as to whether a dangerous gang might be taking root in a neighborhood. For Lockhart and his partner Alfred Murray, the job is simple: Scrub the offending doodles off private exterior walls, signs, doors, even a South Boston street where on Tuesday they washed away the word kitten.
The task is unending. Leaders of the city's effort acknowledge that in some areas, like Allston/Brighton and Mission Hill, graffiti are removed only to be reapplied within days. They head out each day with a list of reported graffiti sightings, passing dozens of markings, or tags, along the way that they may never get to. They suit up in white coveralls, apply their chemicals, wash off the paint, and drive to the next spot.
The graffiti-removal team has been around since 1996 and operates on a $500,000 budget. Its most prominent role is in ridding neighborhoods of graffiti left in battles by so-called tagging crews, messages that convey no violent intent but frustrate citizens and their mayor, Thomas M. Menino, who is said to frequently call his own hot line to report graffiti.
"We want to remove the graffiti, because it builds a stronger community, it builds a better spirit in our community," Menino said Wednesday, as Lockhart stood in the bucket of a utility truck, washing away a large tag on the side of Farragut Elementary School in Mission Hill while reporters and personnel from several city agencies stood below.
The mayor was declaring a start to "Wipe it Clean Week," a concerted effort by nine other city agencies to assist the Graffiti Busters in clearing five neighborhoods of the vandalism.
Mostly, people love these guys.
"We usually get good reviews," said Michael Bartosiak, executive assistant in the city's Property Management Department. "This is one of those city services that it's kind of hard not to like."
Indeed, passersby and property owners snapped pictures and smiled when they saw the Graffiti Busters truck pulled up to graffiti locations in South Boston Tuesday.
In all these years, Lockhart said, he has never been approached by a member of a gang or of one of the city's benign but pesky tagging crews who was upset about the removal.
"I might get some guy who says, 'Hey, that's my tag,' but he may be lying," Lockhart said.
The city will clear graffiti off private buildings for free when complaints are logged in to the mayor's hot line. When operators receive a complaint, the city sends the property owner a waiver to keep the city free of liability for chipped paint or damage caused by the graffiti removal. Typically within 30 days of receiving the signed waiver from the property owner, the Graffiti Busters show up. The city sets aside that procedure when it gets reports of gang communications or racist or anti-Semitic graffiti. Such graffiti is treated immediately.
"They see it all," Bartosiak said. "They see anti-Semitic stuff. They see the N-word, but they go out and they do the job."
If a crew is not available, Bartosiak said, he and James Hughes, the team's supervisor, have developed tricks to eliminate offensive images as quickly as possible. A swastika, for example, can quickly be transformed into four connected blocks, and the letters of a certain four-letter word can be altered to read "book," Bartosiak said.
Still, not everyone is happy.
While the Graffiti Busters were in South Boston, Bartosiak had them remove a few tags they spotted that weren't on their list for the day. One was of scribbled initials on a sign for the LaMontagne Gallery on East Second Street.
"I'm kind of upset," said Russell LaMontagne, the gallery's owner. "I thought it was kind of funny to have street artists contributing to what we were doing. How do they know it's not art?"
John C. Drake can be reached at jdrake@globe.com. 