Lower East Side Has The Most Graffiti In NYC, Study Finds

LOWER EAST SIDE, MANHATTAN — The Lower East Side has more graffiti than any other neighborhood in the city, a study by the New York Post found.

A Post analysis of 311 complaints about graffiti found that there were 2,988 in the Lower East Side over the last five years, the highest in any neighborhood for the same period of time. The neighborhood was followed by Sunset Park in Brooklyn, which saw 2,556 complaints.

The report looked at the rate of vandalism over Mayor Bill de Blasio's tenure and found that complaints about graffiti to the hotline have gone up 54 percent since 2015. There were 13,560 calls in 2015 and 21,006 last year, the Post reported.

And even though the Lower East Side was the neighborhood with the most vandalism during that time, Brooklyn's numbers far surpassed those of Manhattan as a whole.

The analysis found that there were more than double the number of complaints in Brooklyn than in any of the four other boroughs. Brooklyn had 36,365 complaints, followed by Manhattan Manhattan, with 15,606, The Bronx, with 12,936, Queens, with 11,758 and Staten Island, with 996.

The report noted that arrests for graffiti seemed to have dropped despite the increase in the incidents of vandalism. There were 3,586 busts for graffiti in 2013, 2,583 in 2015 and only 1,849 in 2017, according to NYPD logs. There were not numbers available for 2018 or 2019.

This year, there have been 11,367 complaints so far, which is an increase of 69 percent compared to the same time period last year, the Post said.

Former cop and prosecutor Eugene O'Donnell, who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told the Post that all of these numbers likely only represent a fraction of the total vandalism throughout the city. Residents often feel like nothing will be done and don't report the crime, he said.

The spike in vandalism includes a comeback in subway graffiti, which officials once thought was a thing of the past.

The Post reported that the number of major subway graffiti incidents went up 70 percent from 262 in 2016 to 443 in 2018.

This has led the costs to deal with the vandalism to increase, too.

An April report found that the MTA shelled out more than $610,000for graffiti cleaning last year as 765 subway cars suffered "major graffiti hits," THE CITY reported. Those figures are way up from just two years before, when the MTA spent $131,539 on cleaning and saw 406 cars hit and pulled from service, according to the story.