Graffiti cleanup helping business
[attach]534[/attach]There’s lots to see in Danforth Village but there’s one thing Steve Minos is glad you don’t see — graffiti.
The chair of the Danforth Village Business Improvement Area says a targeted effort to eradicate persistent graffiti and tagging seem to be making a positive difference.
Police say recent statistics indicate crime rates, including vandalism, have been steadily dropping in the Danforth area.
“If there’s an increase in graffiti, that’s sort of the beginning indicator to an increase in other types of (criminal) activity as well,” Minos said. “And if it’s allowed to continue and not cleaned up, it seems to start escalating and you get into, slowly, an area of deterioration.”
For this reason, the 400-member BIA, which stretches from Victoria Park Ave. to Westlake Ave., spends more than $50,000 a year on graffiti eradication. That’s in addition to money spent on private security guards and street beautification to keep crime down.
It’s a change business owner Gagandeep Lotey has noticed just in the past four months. The owner of furniture store Beyond Accents said the laneway behind his store used to be rife with spray-painted tags but it’s been cleaned up, for the most part.
“I couldn’t park large trucks here,” he said, surveying the quiet laneway on a sunny July 16. “They’d be full of graffiti.”
Beyond the BIA’s efforts, increased police patrols all along the Danforth since January seem to be helping, says Staff Sergeant George Mullin, 54 Division’s community response manager.
“We’ve been concentrating on the entire strip along the Danforth because there was some activity a while ago that caused us some concern,” he said. “There was extra graffiti that was appearing on the walls, other transient-type people that were hanging around in the area, so we did have our officers doing more patrols down there.”
Danforth Village isn’t the only neighbourhood along the commercial strip trying cleaning up its act.
Farther west at Pape Ave., Carolyn Hogg, owner of Three’s Company Catering, is drumming up interest for a Business Neighbourhood Watch program.
The idea is biz owners would receive communications like police email alerts that would inform them of criminal activity in the neighbourhood.
“I think it’s a great idea, personally,” she said. “It certainly works for residential.”
Though they’re a distance apart, she’s had similar experiences to Lotey’s.
“We’ve been here for two years and we’ve had our front door smashed in twice,” she said. “We’ve had garbage bins stolen, … we have problems in the back laneway.
“I came into work one day and the whole back parking spot was all cordoned off because there had been an assault.”
Hogg, who also sits on the board for the Danforth Mosaic BIA, said she’s hoping more coordinated efforts will encourage owners to pay more attention to what’s happening outside their store.
“It creates a better relationship,” she said. “I think people have the tendency to sort of look out for people they start to know.”
Mullin said the Danforth is no different than any other commercial strip in Toronto, and sometimes experiences spikes in robberies and theft. A spike usually indicates the same individuals are perpetrating illegal acts, he said.
The key is reporting all crimes so police can zero in on any patterns and make arrests.
“If somebody’s in one store perpetrating a crime, like forgeries or robberies or frauds using stolen credit cards or counterfeit money, it’s good that all the stores know as soon as possible a description of these people … so they could be aware of it and on the alert to contact us,” Mullin said.
“The more informed the retailers are about what’s going on in their business community, the more they can prepare a response for it.”
