Police take a shine to scrub squad

Graffiti NABBers such as John Wadlington are working to clean up tags in the Back Bay. (Bill Brett For the Boston Globe/FILE 2006)

Scattered throughout the neighborhood, on Back Bay storefronts, street signs and alleys, the graffiti was so much a part of the urban landscape you might have even stopped noticing it. But the Graffiti NABBers didn't. Armed with bottles of Goof Off and other cleansers, the group's dozen or so members attacked the hundreds of spray paint, marker, and adhesive tags, helping to scrub the Back Bay's surfaces clean.

The Boston Police Department approves of the NABBers' handiwork, so much so that the BPD's Neighborhood Crime Watch Unit selected the group for one of its 2008 Top Ten Neighborhood Crime Watch Awards. The Graffiti NABBers, which started as a subcommittee of the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, will receive a plaque at a community awards celebration next month.

"Coming from the police department, this award really means a lot," said Kathleen Alexander, a co-chairwoman of the NABBers and a Back Bay realtor. She said group members saw themselves simply as residents who were sick of seeing their neighborhood covered in tags, the name given to graffiti markings.

"We live and work in what is supposed to be one of the premiere places in Boston and this is something very basic that we can clean," Alexander said.

She said the idea for the NABBers came to her one day as she stood on a street corner looking at the graffiti covering storefronts along Newbury Street.

"We wanted to preserve our historic buildings," she said. "So, we started going alley by alley. People were like, 'You can't do it,' but we said, We'll get it done.' "

Alexander says the group used a three-prong approach to the markings. On their own, the dozen or so NABBers began removing small amounts of graffiti, like stickers and small tags from street signs. The heavy-lifting, like the removal of 4-by-6-foot tags covering buildings in public alleys, was left to the City of Boston's graffiti-cleaning team, the Graffiti Busters.

Using cleansers followed by pressure washers, the Graffiti Busters remove markings from buildings at the city's expense with the permission of the owner. To help the Graffiti Busters, the NABBers canvassed the Back Bay, cataloging tags and getting permission slips from building owners.

The group also worked with the Suffolk County district attorney's office to help prosecute taggers. The NABBers assembled notebooks of evidence, linking tags to repeat offenders and showed up in court for sentencing, Alexander said.

"It takes about a year for each case to move through the court system," she said. "[In the past], the community hasn't really been present in court and a lot of the offenders are young and have no record, so the judge just says let them go. We show up. We collected 42 victim statements about the cost of removing graffiti. We want the fines and penalties enforced."

According to Officer James Kenneally, a Boston Police spokesman, taggers can be found guilty of a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the intent and severity of the damage to property. He said a misdemeanor charge carries up to a year and half of jail time.

Alexander said the NABBers' efforts have met little resistance. While a few people have approached the group during their Saturday morning cleanups to complain that they were encroaching on taggers' freedom of expression, she said no one has complained about the prosecution of the taggers.

Alexander said in the past two years, every commercial alley in the Back Bay has been cleaned by the city and though tags are coming back in places, the offenders seem to have been deterred by the thorough scrub down.

"Taggers want to see their names up in lights and if it's being erased, they won't come back," she said.

The group is taking a vacation for the summer, but Alexander says it has plans to resume in August and September. The NABBers hope to finish cleaning residential alleys in the Back Bay and then start working with the city to figure out a schedule to clean up any reappearing tags. Even with the occasional reappearance though, Alexander said, the difference is marked.

"Once the alleys were clean, it was a whole different world," she said.

Kimberly Sanfeliz can be reached at ksanfeliz@globe.com.