With the announcement Thursday that Portland police had nabbed a suspected tagger they called one of the city’s “most prolific,” attention turned to the volume of graffiti vandals who aren’t being caught and prosecuted.
Portland police officer Nathan Kirby-Glatkowski, who serves on the Central Precinct neighborhood response team, is one of the people trying to bring charges to graffiti vandals. It’s a tall order given what he called limited resources.
“There are a lot of taggers out there,” Kirby-Glatkowski said in a press conference Thursday about the charges now facing 27-year-old Jerry Mijangos. “We’ll continue to do these large scale investigations where and when we can. There are a lot of needs and demands we have to take care of.”
Kirby-Glatkowski said he and his partner typically work on at least two high-profile tagging cases at a time. But he must also respond to neighborhood calls and conduct other investigations — including into retail theft and drug dealing — and those take precedence over tracking down taggers, he said.
Despite the constraints, he said that graffiti would not “fall off the table” for the city’s police force. Kirby-Glatkowski said that arresting prolific taggers sends a message to other vandals, and can help deter tagging.
“Our goal is to cause some deterrence,” he said. “When we get one high-profile vandal that does 200 tags in a year, their partners stop.”
It’s the approach police used in 2022, when they arrested professional skateboarder Emile Laurent, who was originally charged with dozens of counts of criminal mischief. He took a plea deal in June after being tied to at least $20,000 worth of graffiti damage, and was sentenced to three years probation.
Another alleged tagger, Jacob Ramos, faces 70 counts of criminal mischief in connection with tagging and additional charges for allegedly manufacturing illegal firearms with a 3-D printer and other tools. A grand jury indicted him in April. Police suspect Ramos left his mark on at least five dozen locations across the city. His case is ongoing.
It is unclear how many people in Multnomah County are facing charges for graffiti-related vandalism because the applicable charge of criminal mischief also encompasses other property crimes, according to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office. In 2022, Portland police brought just over 1,000 criminal mischief cases to the district attorney’s office and it issued charges in 69% of cases, the office said. From January to October, 2023, the DA’s office issued charges in 82% of the 815 criminal mischief cases.
Kirby-Glatkowski said all of his graffiti cases have resulted in indictments, but he said he couldn’t speak to the arrests made by other officers.
Police said they believed Mijangos alone is responsible for as many as 100 tags across the city.
“There is still a lot of graffiti in this city and we have a lot of work to do,” Kirby-Glatkowski said.
— Austin De Dios covers public safety and diversity, equity and inclusion. Reach him at 503-319-9744, adedios@oregonian.com or @AustinDeDios.
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