Is graffiti a crime, a form of artistic expression, or both?

The first light of dawn revealed an unwelcome sight at a quiet ballpark in Dover late last month. Scrawled across buildings near South Side Little League Field, located off Henry Law Avenue, were a variety of phrases and symbols, including a swastika and the words “Klue Klucks Klan.” The hateful graffiti, albeit misspelled, spurred a police investigation. Detectives reviewed surveillance tapes from the field and arrested two boys on May 9.

The suspects, aged 13 and 14, face charges of criminal mischief and criminal trespass. But Dover Police Sgt. Jeffrey Mutter does not believe the teenagers intended to stir up racial tension or incite hatred. “I think they were just doing general spray paint vandalism,” Mutter said.

Dover is not alone in dealing with the issue of illegal and sometimes abrasive graffiti. In Portsmouth, a group of teenagers spray painted dozens of cars and houses on Gates Street last summer, damaging centuries-old homes and attracting regional media attention. Graffiti covers historic structures at Fort Stark State Park in New Castle, as well as a pair of old World War II bunkers near Odiorne Point State Park in Rye. The North Beach sea wall is a common target in Hampton, as are bridge underpasses, railroad trestles and vacant buildings across the Seacoast.

An entire underground culture revolves around the controversial art of graffiti. Police treat spray paint vandalism as a crime with serious penalties, and it creates an expensive nuisance for property owners who must wash it from their walls. But the question of whether graffiti is an art or an eyesore rests with the beholder.

The Reverend Dean Glover has seen graffiti through the eyes of both a police officer and a sympathetic admirer. Over the course of his 28-year career in law enforcement, Glover became an expert at deciphering graffiti and determining its sources and hidden meanings. “No graffiti is meaningless. It’s all an expression of the artist,” Glover said. “Some of it I am in awe of. It should be in a museum.”

After 10 years with the Seabrook Police Department, Glover moved to Hampton Falls, where he eventually became chief of police. Surrounding departments frequently solicited his help to investigate graffiti crimes, especially those involving hate-laced messages. Glover retired completely from law enforcement in 2005, but he remains especially interested in ritualistic or satanic graffiti. Now the pastor of outreach and mentoring at Hampton Falls First Baptist Church, he recalls some disturbing cases in which investigators found skinned dogs and cats, or the entrails of animals, surrounded by graffiti. A particularly disconcerting case arose in Seabrook, where a vacant house had been transformed into an occultist shrine of sorts. A sacrificial altar, surrounded by satanic literature, stood in a corner of the house. Hundreds of bottles had been smashed in an adjacent room, carpeting the floor with shards of broken glass. In the center of the house, etched with chilling precision, the outline of a body adorned the floor in red spray-paint. Glover called it one of the most disturbing graffiti images he has ever seen.“That concerned me because I said, ‘Wow, someone’s thinking of death,’” he said.

But Glover believes most graffiti, even that which advertises hatred, is relatively innocuous. Speaking of the recent incident in Dover, he noted that the culprits misspelled Ku Klux Klan, an indication that they did not know what they were doing and only wrote the phrase for shock value. He has also seen incorrectly drawn swastikas, pentagrams and other symbols that he believes are more indicative of discontent than racism or Satanism.

“There were some pretty disenchanted, unhappy, frustrated, anxious, spiteful or hateful people that were not socialized well,” Glover said. “They look for avenues of expression, and when people are looking for avenues of expression, they often become copycats and do so poorly.”

Sgt. Mutter agrees. Although the suspects arrested last month are accused of spray painting hateful symbols, he did not see anything to suggest that the boys were actually racist or anti-Semitic.

Portsmouth Police Capt. Janet Champlin also agrees that most graffiti in the area is harmless in terms of its content. “A lot of it is profane, a lot of it is what we call tags—particular markers that are distinctive to that person,” she said. “We haven’t seen a lot in the past that would be considered hate-crime related.”

The onset of summer is often accompanied by a spate of vandalism crimes, and police are bracing for the onslaught of graffiti. The Portsmouth Economic Development Commission has partnered with local company Servpro of the Seacoast to provide graffiti victims with professional removal at reduced prices. But Champlin asks residents to report acts of vandalism before cleaning them up so that police can document the scene and take pictures. Graffiti is usually considered a misdemeanor, but the crime can be elevated to a felony if the cost of damages exceeds $1,000. Investigators look for similarities between tags to help identify repeat offenders in the community.  

“Our officers are very much aware of the problem, and we also have detectives in plain clothes,” Champlin said. “When we start to see graffiti happen or a spike or a pattern, we focus on that and try to be as proactive a possible.”

Not only is graffiti expensive and labor-intensive to remove, it creates a stigma suggesting the area is riddled with crime. Graffiti can hurt businesses by driving away potential customers, or damage real estate by scaring off buyers. Furthermore, if a neglected building begins to amass large amounts of graffiti, vandals often become brazen and turn to more destructive acts like arson, Glover said.

Hampton Police Capt. Richard Sawyer said vandalism is often accompanied by a number of other crimes, such as trespassing, littering and underage drinking. Although it is not uncommon for adults to commit the crimes, juveniles are responsible for a large percentage of graffiti, he said. Graffiti crimes are usually committed late at night in places that are largely shielded from public view.

“You do find a lot of it up on the ocean walls,” Sawyer said. “That area is down out of the line of sight of residences and roads, so they’re in relative privacy to commit that action. We catch a lot of people drinking down there, too.”

Much of the graffiti seen in communities like Portsmouth and Hampton involves lewd pranks, personal tags or school rivalries. But some of it is more vicious. Graffiti on the World War II bunkers in Rye include numerous references to skinheads and Nazis, and some graffiti at Fort Stark threatens violence against police officers and political figures such as President Bush.

But an equal share of graffiti consists of philosophical musings, love poems and peaceful song lyrics. On the interior wall of one Fort Stark structure, scrawled in large black letters with an exclamation point, is a famous Beatles line: “Love is all you need!”

Graffiti is also used as a way to anonymously herald political views. In January, a stenciled image of President Bush holding a piece of chalk appeared on the side of a brick building in Portsmouth’s Vaughn Mall. Beside the image, the artist meticulously scribbled 3,000 marks with yellow chalk, indicating the number of U.S. soldiers who had died in Iraq. Above the marks were the words “And counting,” and a bubble beside the president’s smirking face said, “Stuff happens.” The display was removed the same morning it was discovered, but not before dozens of curious passersby stopped to have a look.

Opinions vary on whether any graffiti carries true artistic merit. Of seven art instructors at the University of New Hampshire contacted by e-mail for this story, only one opted to speak about the topic. Others said they knew nothing about graffiti or did not consider it a legitimate art form.

Grant Drumheller, a professor of painting and drawing at UNH, said the art of graffiti has existed for millennia. He noted that wall paintings dating back some 2,000 years have been unearthed at the ruins of Pompeii.

In modern times, several talented street artists have managed to graduate to the world of fine art by attracting attention from critics. He pointed to the example of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who began spray painting graffiti on the streets of New York in the late 1970s and became a leading figure in contemporary art in the 1980s.

An article in the May 14 issue of The New Yorker magazine describes British graffiti artist Banksy, who has garnered recognition for his controversial and overtly political etchings on the streets of London. Banksy’s graffiti paintings include an image of two male police officers kissing and Wintson Churchill sporting a Mohawk. But like most graffiti artists, Banksy hides his true identity to remain anonymous.

“It is a kind of outsider, kind of contrary art,” Drumheller said.

Nevertheless, the most serious graffiti artists clearly want their artwork to be seen. Glover noted that many graffiti artists climb bridges or scale walls to spray-paint highly visible surfaces, putting themselves at risk for the sake of their art. “They take great risks to get their work noticed above the run-of-the-mill average graffiti artist who’s just hacking around,” Glover said.

Drumheller agrees that many graffiti artists will go to great lengths to have their work noticed. Some authors of graffiti are young aspiring artists who lack conventional outlets for expressing themselves. They therefore must improvise more unorthodox methods of getting exposure. “One way to do it is be really clever,” Drumheller said. “You have to put it under people’s noses to get notoriety.”

According to Drumheller, graffiti requires many of the same skills as painting with a brush or drawing on paper. But graffiti artists tend to focus on refining a unique and identifiable style. The act of spray painting in public constitutes a sort of performance art, he added, and the noncommercial nature of graffiti frees it from the corrupting forces of money and commerce.

The charm of graffiti has become pervasive enough to create demand for graffiti-style art in the professional realm. Ramon and Kristen Valdez, owners of RRRamon’s concession van behind the Paul Creative Arts Building at UNH, inquired at the school’s art department for someone who could decorate their business with graffiti. They were referred to S.H., a senior art major at UNH. He used spray paint to create a graffiti-style image of the business’s name on the back of the van, along with a portrait of Ramon Valdez wearing a UNH T-shirt and the words “home of the mocha java.”

S.H., who grew up in Connecticut and asks to be identified by only his initials, has been contracted to produce professional graffiti art at a number of locations, including the Dover Skate Park off Henry Law Avenue and Red Alert Skateboard Shop in Dover. Although he stresses that he is not a street artist and all his work is done legally, he has great respect for the graffiti culture.

“When I was a young kid I saw a lot of tagging, and it was something that I noticed and paid attention to,” he said. As his fascination with graffiti grew, he began practicing the style at home. “It’s kind of just something I picked up fooling around in my parents’ garage,” he said. “I’m not a tagger, I’m an artist. So it was an impetus to explore another artistic medium.”

S.H. admitted that he has no inside knowledge of the graffiti culture on the Seacoast, but most of what he’s seen on public streets has not impressed him from an artistic standpoint. “From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t appear that the majority of the graffiti around here is exceptional,” he said. “I’m sure that there are a few people around who know what they’re doing, but I don’t think this is an area where graffiti seems to be flourishing.”

But police across the state are very aware of the issue. Glover has given lectures across the state about how to identify patterns in graffiti. He noted that many motorcycle gangs and other groups use tags to identify themselves and mark their territory. “Motorcycle groups often distinguish themselves by colors or insignias,” Glover said. “People identify themselves and delineate themselves from others by some expression that’s visual.”

Although gang activity is not a significant problem in Portsmouth, Capt. Champlin said cliques of juveniles often use tags to identify their groups. Portsmouth police cooperate with other departments to search for similarities in graffiti, and they ask members of the public to provide feedback if they have knowledge about a particular tag or design.

Successful methods for combating graffiti have included asking merchants to keep an eye on juveniles who purchase large quantities of spray-paint, adding lighting and surveillance cameras to areas that are hit hard by graffiti, and patrolling streets on foot or by bicycle. In Manchester, where graffiti is far more rampant than on the Seacoast, city officials have experimented with public graffiti walls where artists can legally practice their craft. The city’s Web site includes extensive information on how to report, remove and prevent graffiti. 

Glover believes being proactive and engaging juveniles is the key to stemming graffiti. Offensive and hateful graffiti is symptomatic of deeper issues within its author, he said. It is, therefore, important to be attentive to kids who commit acts of vandalism and determine what’s motivating them.

“Since graffiti is often an expression of the artist, you’re not going to change that situation just by repression,” he said. “If the individual changes his way of thinking, it could be productive for everyone concerned.”