Graffiti In Chattanooga - And Solution(s)

When I travel up and down Hixson Pike, my car alerts me to the traffic cameras that monitor vehicles for speeding.  Sure enough, if I speed through these zones, I get a ticket in the mail a few weeks later.  The radar is incredibly accurate at detecting speeders.  The cameras are a technological marvel with their ability to zoom in on a moving car and read the license plate. 

When I travel through other parts of Chattanooga, I see multiple areas of graffiti.  Our city does a good job of painting over these areas of vandalism, but quite often the graffiti has returned a few weeks later.  This has been an ongoing issue for years.

This has me wondering.  If our city has enough technology to monitor our citizens as they travel the S curves, why don’t we use that same technology to monitor the areas most prone to graffiti?  Surely cameras could be programmed to detect human presence near these bridges and concrete walls and alert the authorities to vandalism in progress.  If they can read my license plate at 41 miles per hour, then I suspect they could make out the facial features of the vandals.  If we can spend resources to monitor our citizen drivers, then why not spend resources to monitor our criminals as well?

The other option that I can think of would be to offer a reward - a bounty if you will - to our hunters and our more militia-prone citizens for the safe capture of these graffiti “artists.”  I suspect that if a cash reward was offered, the vandals would be caught within one week.  Just like there is both bow season and gun season for deer hunting, we could have net season, handcuff season, and paintball season for our vandals. Once word of this bounty got out, I suspect the vandals, for fear of their impending comeuppance, would cease and desist altogether.

Daniel Kueter

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