By KENDRA SITTON | Downtown & Uptown News
A new analysis of reported graffiti in San Diego has interesting findings about the city’s response to vandalism, including that wealthier neighborhoods like La Jolla and Pacific Beach had faster clean-up times than poorer areas like Mid-City.
Defense Attorney George H. Ramos, Jr. And his firm partnered with data visualization firm 1Point21 Interactive to build a map based on all the removal requests of graffiti from 2018 to September 2020 on the Get It Done app.
While the city aims to send crews to clean graffiti within five days of a request, the group found that the average time between when a report is made and when the city sends a team to clean up the graffiti is 23.5 days, a number that includes cases that are still in process. In some areas, the wait time for a crew to come was much longer. In Pacific Beach, it took an average of 17.8 days to respond to a request compared to 42.7 days in Mid-City.
“The data shows very clearly shows that graffiti in wealthier areas is cleaned up much faster than in lower income areas; in fact, almost twice as fast,” Sam Larson of 1Point21 Interactive said.
The pandemic has affected removal requests. The report found that since lockdown began, reports fell by 27% compared to the same period in 2018.
In total, the analysis found that in the two-year period there were 85, 841 requests to remove graffiti. The largest portion, 13,794, were in Mid-City: City Heights. While a complaint-based system of solving issues can favor wealthier areas, in this case, the area with the most complaints still had a slower response than wealthier areas — suggesting not enough resources may be allocated to address the need there.
View the interactive map bit.ly/3mSUbmX.
— Kendra Sitton can be reached at kendra@sdnews.com
