In 2011 Max Good and Nathan Wollman produced a film Vigilante Vigilante that focuses on anti graffiti vigilantes who expend their energy getting rid of graffiti as fast as it goes up. Their operations tend to be as covert as the taggers, bombers, and free thinkers who leave their thoughts on the street. Both parties co-exist in the same communities across the country and feel equally as passionate and enabled about their activities.

Apparently San Francisco is no exception to the rule with one of these self appointed crusaders, with a street name of Dolores Clean, living in the Mission District. So who is this Dolores Clean? Dolores is a high tech vigilante who uses a phone camera, twitter and blogs to identify and report anything.

Dolores set up a blogspot  called Dolores Clean in May,2010 to express their intentions and ideas. The site tag line reads

“Striving to make an ambiental change in the Mission District through the use of camera phone technology to clean things up.”

And the first post defines Graffiti.

“Graffiti is… the difference between living in one of the best neighborhoods in the most beautiful city in America, and living in a ghetto.”

Dolores Clean continues on to say they are concentrating first on public graffiti on public property, which they consider to be the City’s responsibility to clean up, with a secondary focus on private property where they chastise the owners for having unoccupied buildings because they are rent greedy and yet are sympathetic to business owners who have to deal with the graffiti. Their focus is cleaning up the Mission District on everyone’s behalf and their weapon is their phone, twitter and SF311, San Francisco’s 24/7 customer service center for providing and receiving information about multiple issues related to living, working and visiting San Francisco.

Over the course of less than 1 year, Dolores posted hundreds of photos on a Tumblr site DPClean over 5700 tweets and created 79 posts reporting cleaner streets as a result of their activity, somewhat berating the public for enjoying the fruits of their unasked for labor and reporting their calculation of the economics of their graffiti clean up. The last blog entry was in March, 2011 where they state they are no longer reporting the graffiti to SF311 citing the City’s low response rate and time  in relation to their efforts spent on reporting. Also that nominal effort, included no energy spent attacking the unaddressed problem with graffiti on  commercial property. Tumblr activity, with almost 2,800 photos ended a few months later.

“I’ve reported commercial graffiti on the same properties, and the response has been total ineffective.   I mean 100’s of reports and reply that it will be cleaned in 3 days, that never happen.    So that corporate commercial graffiti a key problem that needs to be resolved before I find it worth spending time on other graffiti.       Otherwise, reporting graffiti is always something like bailing water from a leaking boat, but the gaping hole of commercial graffiti is not addressed,….”

 

A quick look now at Twitter shows there was continued tweeting through April, 2012 with some recent activity in November stating their address had been hijacked. There has been no additional activity.

The interesting thing is that the Chronicle published an article on December 27, 2012 titled SF murals become targets for vandals by Matthai Kuruvila stating that muralist have seen increased tagging and monikers to murals throughout the city this past year, making it time consuming and expensive to restore their murals. One muralist, Jet Martinez, who has been one of the directors of the Clarion Alley Mural Project,” called 2012 the worst year for tagging of his murals since he started in 1997″. The city spends about $3.5 million a year on graffiti abatement.

So Dolores Clean’s frustration has been felt by many who are also dealing with the problem. It will be interesting if Dolores Clean comes up with a new strategy and starts up again.

Streetartsf.com takes no position in the legalities of graffiti, defining it or stating if it is good or bad or right or wrong.