Cameras planned to track taggers

Thursday, Jan. 23, 2003 | 9:26 a.m.

There is so much graffiti being scrawled across Las Vegas that officials will be installing surveillance cameras at locations where tagging is prevalent.

The city removed gang symbols and other graffiti from 13,556 locations through the first six months of the current fiscal year compared with 16,510 graffiti removal cases in all of fiscal 2002, Las Vegas' Neighborhood Services Response Department officials reported Wednesday. If it continues at its current rate, graffiti removals will be up by 64 percent by the end of the year.

Sharon Segerbloom, director of the Neighborhood Services Department, told the Las Vegas City Council that her department is working with Metro Police to try to curb the vandalism and to try to arrest taggers. Surveillance cameras will be installed at locations where tagging is prevalent, she said.

Since 2001, when the city began adopting stricter and more specific ordinances to address blight and problems caused by nuisances in the community, the Neighborhood Services Response staff has had a mandate to reduce not just the amount of graffiti but also to whittle away at such things as the number of dangerous or abandoned buildings around town and the discarded appliances and similar junk in vacant lots.

While they may be losing on the graffiti front, Segerbloom reported her crews deserve credit for reducing the number of abandoned shopping carts on streets.

City ordinances require that grocery stores collect their own carts and keep them off city streets or pay fines. Since last June, those fines have totaled $13,774, Segerbloom's report noted.

Segerbloom's report indicated that had happened with shopping carts. From July through December 2002, the city rounded up 41 percent fewer carts than it had during the same period of the previous year -- 2,857 compared with 4,825. And there was a 52 percent decrease from the 5,978 carts the city rounded up from January through June last year.

The report also said that: