Grappling With Graffiti

The wooden posts of the old white sign in front of Rosedale library were rotting. The vandal who has been defacing the library and other buildings in the vicinity had left his ugly mark there, too. So the library removed the sign a few days ago.

Judy Kaplan, who’s been the manager at Rosedale library for seven years, said there are no immediate plans to replace the sign. Kaplan, energetic and well-spoken, has a tall stack of library books in her office at the Rosedale branch. She’s reading up on California in preparation for an upcoming trip. While she’s there, Kaplan said, she will inevitably visit a few libraries. She has visited libraries in Nagasaki, in Wales, and in many places in the U.S. 

When she meets other librarians to compare notes, Kaplan must have a lot to talk about. Her branch maintains a collection of 56,633 books, 3,359 DVDs, 2,586 audiobooks and 5,521 CDs that saw a circulation of 319,860 from July 2009 through June 2010. The library provides computer access to folks who might not have it otherwise, and draws visitors from around the state and beyond to Storyville, an educational playroom for kids under age six. And, particularly on weekday afternoons and evenings, the Rosedale branch is home away from home for a number of teenagers. Sometimes they play strategy card games, sometimes they work on their homework or meet with tutors. They are hard on the furniture, and some of them have a tendency to loiter out front, and sometimes they smoke, curse, and spit. Sometimes Kaplan calls them out on their behavior, addressing the ones she knows by name. And sometimes, someone—no one knows who, for sure—vandalizes the building. Kaplan talked about the graffiti in a recent interview.

MW: How long has graffiti been a problem at Rosedale library?

JK: It’s been a problem as long as I’ve been here. 

MW: Does it shock you that someone would deface a library?

JK: It disappoints me. It does, it makes me angry, just as it makes me angry when they do any other sort of vandalism to this building because we’re here for them. We have our hands out offering things for them that are free and beneficial. You know, we feel kind of kicked when they do that.

MW: What is the library doing to address the problem of graffiti?

JK: One thing we do is in most cases we call the police. Sometimes we’ll just take a picture of it rather than take police time and have them come over and look at it …We’re responsive, our facilities department is responsive and comes very quickly to cover it up, so at least it won’t remain something for somebody to be proud of for very long.

MW: What can the community do to help combat this problem?

JK: I think exactly the same thing people in communities could do with any other sort of crime, which very often they’re reluctant to do, which is to share what they know. Right now I’m pretty angry at the person who’s been doing a lot of the graffiti on the outside of the building, and I want to see this person held accountable, and have some consequence.

MW: Do you think the people who did this understand how much of a negative effect this sort of graffiti can have on a community? Certainly it makes people feel worse about their neighborhood.

JK: It does make people feel worse, and it gives people who are driving through a bad impression. I don’t think they do [understand the impact]. I was trying to think back to myself at that age and visualize either doing something like that or trying to remember what kind of careless, irresponsible, inconsiderate things I might have done at, you know, 15, 16 or 17. And, you know, I don’t remember doing anything specifically destructive, but I do remember having a sort of cavalier attitude about things. And I think for a lot of these kids, and I’m just guessing, there’s a cavalier attitude about it, maybe it’s something for them to brag about. I don’t know that they think twice about it. That’s my opinion.  I don’t think that there’s any little part of them, as they turn away, that they think ‘I wish I hadn’t done that.’

MW: If you could talk directly to the person or people who vandalized the library, what would you say?

JK: I want them to be successful. I don’t want them to do things that are going to screw up their options for the future, that are going to prevent them from having healthy, successful, productive lives. And that’s usually what I talk to kids about. You know, whether it goes in one ear and out the other, whether they roll their eyes when they walk away… I find that when I have interactions with the kids, I feel that they’re hearing, whether or not they’re actually listening.  [Their success] is really what I want for them because we all benefit.

MW: Storyville is so great. Isn’t it odd to have such a successful program with people coming here from all over the place, and they’re seeing the graffiti out front?

JK: Oh, absolutely. It bothers me for them to see kids smoking and spitting on the ground. I’ve gone out and addressed kids who were smoking. I’ve asked them to go around to the other side, the other entrance where we have an ashtray. I’ve asked them not to spit on the ground. They completely don’t understand that even spitting on the ground is disrespectful to where they are, and, you know, expresses a kind of disdain, an irreverence for where they are, and it’s inconsiderate to other people. I don’t like any of our customers coming in and seeing the graffiti, and seeing certain behaviors that are related to that kind of thing outside. But I think Storyville’s so successful,  and when you go into Storyville, it’s so nice in there, I think the staff here is very welcoming, and I think people do understand that there are certain things that are just out of our control and we do what we can to mitigate it.

MW: The library makes an effort to welcome teens. They’re here doing homework after school, they’re stopping by for a video game club or a comic book club—how do you balance welcoming young people with having to discipline them for unacceptable behaviors like loitering, using foul language, and vandalizing the library?

JK: It’s not the same groups of kids that come to our programs, necessarily. And the reason I think that program is really successful—and people may think, ‘Well, why is the library doing that?’—I feel for us that is a big relationship-building aspect of our service or outreach to teens because it’s usually the younger ones who want to go to that, the adolescent ones, and they start to see the staff who works here in a different way. We get to know their names. It’s always good to know the kids’ names. That makes a huge difference.