What's Going On With Graffiti in Seattle?

by Grace Chinowsky

(This article was originally published on Real Change and has been reprinted under an agreement.)

The City of Seattle's stance on graffiti remains as staunchly "anti" as ever, with Mayor Bruce Harrell doubling down on his graffiti abatement efforts, but the legal and social outlook on street art in the city has evolved significantly.

The City is currently awaiting the results of their appeal against a federal court's injunction of an ordinance banning graffiti — effectively legalizing it until a judge makes a ruling — and one of the city's most high-profile taggers is now out on bail after being arrested for the second time last month. Meanwhile, the City is partnering with a local nonprofit that connects people in need of employment with work cleaning up graffiti, reaching businesses in the Chinatown-International District (CID) hit hard by graffiti writers.

But is graffiti the big problem our mayor has made it out to be?

Free Eagr?

As a municipal ordinance banning graffiti hangs in limbo pending the City's appeal of a federal judge's injunction, one of Seattle's most renowned street taggers is free, for now.

Casey Lee Cain — a 36-year-old graffiti writer better known as Eager, or Eagr — was seen by Real Change staff in Cal Anderson Park in Capitol Hill in early July, weeks after he was arrested in late June. That arrest was his second related to graffiti, made while he was already awaiting trial for felony vandalism charges from December 2022. King County Superior Court records show that Seattle Police Department officers gathered more than nine reports of alleged property destruction by Cain after he was released on bail in December, "many of which" include eyewitness accounts of him tagging.

Cain, whose recognizable tag can be seen all over the city — most notably in downtown Seattle and Capitol Hill — was first arrested in December on the charge of malicious mischief in the first degree, a Class B felony under state law. Prosecutors can apply the statute toward cases of vandalism when the damage involved exceeds $5,000.

Malicious mischief in the first degree is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, a fine of $20,000 or both.

Court records show that after receiving reports of graffiti in the area, Seattle Police Department officers found Cain and Jose Betancourth covered in spray paint at 1208 Pine St. on Dec. 8. Cain later identified himself to officers under his tagger name, which they recognized from tags on structures throughout the city.

He was arrested later that month with his bail set at $10,000. Management of Pivot Apartments — the building he allegedly tagged — declared that the vandalism cost them more than $5,000 to clean.

City Attorney Ann Davison alleged in a court filing earlier this month that Cain had caused "tens of thousands" of dollars in property damage with his tags, all while out on bail for his initial December charges. Superior Court Judge Ketu Shah issued a warrant for Cain's rearrest on July 15, roughly two weeks after Davison's letter to the court.

Cain posted his $2,500 bail on July 11. Court records show that the State has scheduled hearings for July 17 to 24, with a trial date set for Aug. 29.

His second arrest was puzzling to many, coming shortly after U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman filed an injunction against Seattle's municipal ordinance outlawing graffiti, citing concerns about its "criminalization of free speech" and halting the City from enforcing the law altogether. The city's municipal code states that graffiti counts as writing, painting, or drawing any inscription on public or private buildings without "express permission" of the property's owner or operator, and considers the vandalism a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in jail.

Some residents and business owners claimed that the injunction effectively legalized graffiti in Seattle because the City could no longer prosecute people for property damage charges that related to it.

Though the fact that Cain was charged under a state statute clears up any questions about why he got nabbed if graffiti was supposedly "legal" in Seattle, the injunction has spared him some additional prosecution in all of this.

Davison, who appealed the judge's injunction earlier this month, said in a filing upon Cain's December arrest that the City had not yet filed the "matters" due to the block.

"However, simply because there is a freeze on filing these crimes, does not mean Cain is not still committing said crimes," the document states.

While Cain currently cannot be charged in Seattle Municipal Court under the city's property destruction ordinance, his malicious mischief case will move forward in King County Superior Court.

Though Cain's defense attorneys argued in a hearing earlier this month that the tagger could not be charged for new allegations of vandalism while the City was technically not considering graffiti to be a criminal offense, all the parties involved agreed that it remains to be seen how the injunction will apply to Cain's case.

Harrell Is Also Eager

While one of the city's most high-profile taggers is free for now, Mayor Bruce Harrell has not softened his stance on graffiti.

Harrell doubled down on graffiti abatement, including it as a major part of the One Seattle Graffiti Plan program he introduced last October. His efforts come in response to a surge in graffiti during and after the pandemic. Late last month, the City relaunched its abatement campaign, which started last summer, this time with a renewed focus on graffiti removal in the CID.

Jamie Housen, a spokesperson for Harrell's office, said the city has seen a 50% spike in graffiti between 2019 and 2021 and that they have received "a lot" of feedback about graffiti's impact from small business owners in the CID.

He said the "vast majority" of community members and business owners speak of graffiti in a negative manner and that the City had no record of hearing from a property owner who was fine with graffiti on their property.

"Graffiti and unwanted tagging have tangible impacts on small businesses and other private property owners who have to clean graffiti and tagging that they didn't agree to have on their building," Housen said.

However, the onus of cleaning up graffiti falls on property owners themselves in many cases. Seattle's graffiti nuisance ordinance requires owners to remove vandalism on their property within 10 days of receiving a City notice for reported graffiti. If property owners don't remove the graffiti within the 10-day window and up to 48 hours before a hearing, the City hearing examiner will charge the owner a $100 fine per day, with a maximum of $5,000.

Housen said the mayor supports Davison's efforts to appeal the injunction because the City requires an "enforcement prosecutorial tool" to address unwanted tagging by the city's most "prolific" taggers.

But Housen said enforcement shouldn't be the only method of reducing graffiti in Seattle. He pointed to other aspects of Harrell's plan that are aimed at encouraging taggers to express themselves through other means, like legal public mural installations.

The City announced a $400,000 investment in street art through seven arts organizations for public art in March. Housen said the organizations are in the process of planning and executing murals in neighborhoods across the city and added that the City included $1 million for public art in the 2023 budget.

"We have not heard of small businesses or private property owners welcoming tagging on their walls," Housen said. "However, we have heard from a number of businesses that would welcome sanctioned murals and art on their businesses — both to create more vibrant neighborhoods and to prevent those walls from being tagged in the future."

An Uplifting Abatement Alternative

Local residents and nonprofits have also stepped up to the plate to involve community members in Harrell's graffiti abatement program. Uplift Northwest, a nonprofit that connects residents with local job opportunities, partnered with the City and neighborhood organizations — like Belltown United, the Enactus student group at City University of Seattle, and the Downtown Seattle Association's Metropolitan Improvement District — to remove graffiti this summer while providing people in need with employment. The majority of Uplift Northwest's participants are experiencing homelessness or living in poverty.

Gina Hall, CEO of Uplift Northwest, said the partnership between the nonprofit, other local organizations, and the City to tackle graffiti began last summer as a pilot program and relaunched this summer.

After an Uplift NW liaison communicates with someone who wishes to have graffiti on their property removed, she said, crews of two employees and a driver set out to remove and paint over graffiti in spots targeted for cleanup, which sometimes requires buying paint to match the walls. She said the nonprofit is currently prioritizing cleanup efforts in the CID as a "valuable community that has been overlooked for way too long," but plans to expand their work to the whole city.

Hall said that it's common for crews to clean graffiti only for it to reappear on the same wall within the next couple days, but the resurgence doesn't hurt employees' morale. They teach workers in their trainings that the faster and more consistently one removes graffiti, the less likely it is to come back.

"The owners come out, and they're just like, 'Oh, my God, thank you, we appreciate you,'" Hall said. "They get people like honking going down the street honking at them and thanking them. It's like a rule where they're being appreciated publicly, on a daily basis."

The experience of at least one CID business owner indicates that the program's emphasis on graffiti removal in the neighborhood is welcome. Kelly Huang, the daughter of the owners of Szechuan Noodle Bowl on 8th Avenue South, said her parents have seen a rise in graffiti on their property over the last two years, leading them to put boards over the exterior walls of their business.

Huang said the vandalism makes her feel "unsafe" and that the entire neighborhood struggles with unwanted tagging on residents' properties. She said customers have volunteered to help repaint their building after noticing tags on the storefront.

She supports the City's ordinance that would enforce penalization against graffiti because the vandalism is "out of control," she said. Legal mural installations in the neighborhood, on the other hand, she "appreciates."

Looking Behind the Curtain

Daudi Abe, a professor of humanities who teaches hip-hop at Seattle Central College, said graffiti appeared on the walls of Seattle's Central District in 1983 following the release of Style Wars, a documentary about New York City's graffiti and hip-hop subculture that played on PBS. He said the film uplifted the stories of some of New York City's most prolific taggers, fostering a newfound interest in tagging and other graffiti art among Seattle's youth.

Abe said the "watershed moment" of graffiti's growth in Seattle was a block-long burner (a term for a larger, more elaborate piece of graffiti) that artists DC3 and KUO "Mr. Clean" Yang sprayed over the downtown Nordstrom storefront in 1984.

"That was the first high-profile hit-up the graffiti artists did in downtown, where people who were outside of hip-hop might get a look at it and that might be their first exposure," Abe said.

He said graffiti and hip-hop were both born from the necessity to "make something out of nothing." After New York City cut public school arts budgets in the 1970s recession, he said, the first hip-hop artists were unable to learn an instrument or take music lessons through school. They filled the gaps by repurposing music and spinning together a new genre.

Abe said graffiti appeared alongside hip-hop because it also provided young people an opportunity to make a name for themselves, with up-and-coming writers aspiring to spray paint the most daring locations — like subway cars or freeway overpasses — or aiming to tag their name in as many locations as possible.

"It was all about like, you take this name and how big can you make this thing?" Abe said.

"That was the whole motivation behind graffiti work. How many times can you put it up? Where can you put it?"

Abe said Seattle police rarely caught graffiti in progress in the 1980s because they lacked a "formal strategy" for enforcing laws against graffiti and assigned detectives to only the most prolific cases. He added that Seattle didn't have a formal strategy for law enforcement against graffiti until a decade later, when Seattle Public Utilities formed a six-member graffiti ranger team in 1994.

Abe said the rangers removed thousands of graffiti pieces on City property — costing the City roughly $1 million at the time — but still required residents to remove graffiti on their private properties, per Seattle's graffiti nuisance ordinance.

"The argument that the coat of fresh paint solution of the rangers simply offered a fresh canvas that invited more graffiti was frequently proven," Abe said. For many artists, it's more about the act of tagging than the endurance of the tags themselves.

"Although it's not permanent, the process and feeling of doing it is what I value most from it," said Chris Keyz, a graffiti artist and musician in Seattle.

Keyz added that he values what street art has taught him, including getting to know some of the city's best graffiti writers.

"It's a lot of hard work putting up a word or name and it's also very hard to get credit and respect in the graffiti world," Keyz said. The experience of doing graffiti and being part of the subculture is what makes it so alluring, he concluded.

Abe said a lot of people associate graffiti with "problematic neighborhoods," but that one's outlook toward street art can vary based on their background and personal experience.

"At least for someone like me, I see graffiti as a little bit more different," Abe said. "I see graffiti as something that can add beauty and color and style and flavor to something like that."

Grace Chinowsky is a contributing writer for Real Change.

Featured Image: Several graffiti tags fill a brick wall in Pioneer Square, including one that reads "eager." (Photo: Charlie Fei, courtesy of Real Change)