Page 2 - Program Edmonton News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Me these are the priority neighborhoods through this year where i have to find out whats going on in those neighborhoods in terms of what we can be doing to address the programming needs of those communities. 7 neighborhoods accounted for 59 percent of the graffiti, this is visually showing you how most of the graffiti continues for us to be concentrated in 7 specific neighborhoods. Im going to have to turn the light off again. So this map is a sample of one of the maps that was created. So the original dots reflect where the graffiti was and the intensity of the graffiti that occurred in 2011...

That particular location. The blue dots indicate how much graffiti or what the graffiti was at each location in terms of the incidents for 2012. So you can see from here, its not i was hoping for a better visual, but in here in the hot spot neighborhood, this is one example where the hot spot neighborhood isnt as significant as the random area. The random area is showing more graffiti vandalism than the hot spot neighborhood, but the intensity is pretty clear. If were going to tackle a neighborhood we need to be looking here, we need to be looking in here. So its been very beneficial in terms ...

The argument that we keep getting that they are beautiful pieces of art just isnt holding because they are very small pieces of graffiti. Thats just the same visually. Again, most graffiti is text. 90 percent of the text, with all those categories that we have where were trying to depict what graffiti is out there, we can now go to the arts council or anybody else who wants to argue with us and say 90 percent of the observed graffiti we have in edmonton is text only. Given all those options, thats what were finding. So the other avenue thats important for us in terms of how i run my program is...

Telling us how we should be managing or programs or which neighborhoods we should be looking at. This is a graphic analysis of the neighborhoods. I dont have a pointer, ill get my head out of the way. Downtown was one of our key problem areas that we started out with but were seeing a steady decline in the downtown core. So basically we have been focusing a lot of our programming in the downtown area. We had a huge decrease in the gardineau neighborhood in the second year but something has happened in that neighborhood to pop it back up. So its allowing us to look neighborhood by neighborhood ...

Put in the notification system. So we have those tags documented against him so they are going to levy more charges against him. So its been clearly helpful in terms of our enforcement efforts but it is clearly seen if you can get out those top 10taggers its going to make a huge difference. They accounted for 40 percent of the activity seen this year in the audit. Most graffiti we found is small, 88 percent of the observed graffiti was smalled or extra small. So basically were not looking at big tags. The argument that we keep getting that they are beautiful pieces of art just isnt holding bec...