If you can’t beat ’em… sponsor ’em

Maria Gallucci, writes in The (Mexico City) News about one small way the Mexico City administration continues to turn our pre-conceived notions of crime and punishment on their heads.  Don’t punish what really isn’t in need of punishment:

Standing outside Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, Méndez Rodríguez shakes a can of gold paint and puts his finger to the trigger. He stomps out his cigarette, points the can at a barrier and sprays the word “Spat” – his tag.

Police officers are close at hand, but the 19-year-old “grafitero” pays them no mind. After all, it was the police department who invited him here.

Rodríguez is one of 450 young graffiti artists who participated in the city´s second Mega Graffiti Exhibition last weekend. As part of the event, the city´s Public Safety Secretariat, or SSP-DF, encouraged high school-age artists to spray-paint their way to cash prizes, asking the teens to cover the stadium´s exterior walls with colorful murals and designs.

The Federal District attempted to criminalize the graffiteros after former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his “Giuliani Group” managed to get Mexico City businessmen to pony up 4.3 million U.S. dollars to come up with various anti-crime suggestions. I remember Giuliani touring Tepito in an armored anti-personnel vehicle, and… not doing a heck of a lot else. He didn’t even seem to understand the legal structure or the police bureaucracy, confusing federal and district police responsibilities and not knowing the difference between preventative and investigative police agencies.

But… rather than admit they pissed away the money, the “powers that be” did try adopting some of Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” policies… which basically made being poor and/or young criminal offenses. Somehow graffiti — which I do think is vandalism when done without the consent of the property owner (who has rights to what appears on his or her walls) — was, in itself, a gateway to criminality. Please… it’s a gateway to, one hopes, an appreciation for the fine arts. What criminals come from the graffitero class? Art thieves? Forgers?

The city wants to channel its young talent and give the youth viable forms of self-expression, SSP-DF official Nora Frias Melgosa said. Last year, the graffiti unit commissioned 7,000 high schoolers in Mexico City to paint murals in designated spaces, she said.

Othón Sánchez Cruz, the police department´s director of institutional prevention programs, said the graffiti exhibition brings kids who would normally run from the police together with the authorities, providing a context in which the painters can be encouraged to reject vandalism in favor of more positive expressions.

Mexican businessmen are getting smarter. “To help accomplish the task, Comex S.A., Mexico´s largest paint producer, provided 13,000 cans of spray-paint and 2,500 liters of traditional paint to participants.”