NEW YORK:


/>

I was arrested at Prince and Crosby at 1 in the morning. There was
an animation I did of this character skating so I printed out 15 frames to put
up a sequence(you can see it in the I NY book). At the time they were doing
construction next to Dean and Deluca so they had a long stretch of plywood that
you often see at constructon sites. To me this is a total eyesore and I consider
it fair game. So I had finished putting the 5th one up when I hear someone
behind me ask “What are you doing?” to which I replied taking care of this
eyesore. I turn around and see a guy in plain clothes and he pulls out a badge
and asks me to get up. He then asks me if I have any drugs or weapons on me to
which I reply no. He instantly cuffs me and I ask him if I’m going to jail which
he replies “Yup, that’s what we do with the bad guys.” So now I’m a bad guy I
ask “yup.” I then say look, this is a warped piece of plywood, it’s not like I’m
tagging the building. I then ask him since I’m going to jail if he minds if I at
least finish it to which he replies “Shut the fuck up or you’re getting your ass
kicked.” An unmarked car pulls up and they put me in the back, then about 4-5
other undercover cops come out of the woodwork, one of which was the gnarliest
looking homeless person I’d ever seen. I would have probably bet my soul that
there’s no way she was a cop. they then started photographing the “crime
scene”.

They go into Dean and Deluca and request the manager and show
him what I had done. I was praying they would bring the guy to talk to me so I
could reason with him. No such luck. They take me to the 5th precinct and on the
way proceed to tell me that I’m a bad guy. I get there and there is one other
person in there. When he sees the cops that busted me he says man you got picked
up by the worst cops. Great I thought. I then ask them for a drink of water and
they tell me they have none. Theythen order food and let me sit there until it
comes and they are finished eating. I really think they just wanted to get off
the streets to eat, because that is the first thing they did and they took their
time. Then about an hour later I’m practically begging for water. The guy can’t
get my fingerprints to read and starts getting really pissed like it’s my fault.
What’s crazy is that I was backpacking at Bear Mt. earlier in the week and ran
into a bear at night, had to make an emergency camp and had to keep chasing it
away all night. I told the cop I would rather be dealing with that bear again
than him. At that point it didn’t matter and I let him know how wasteful this
all was. Eventually another officer came along and got a
drink for me. This
whole process took about 2-3 hours and the call I had to make was to tell work
why I wouldn’t be coming in the next day. They forgot to take my cellphone from
me so I had it the whole time. Then they take me to 1 Center street and just
entering that place is like being on the set of a Batman film. They take you
down about 3 floors where you are thrown into a cell with about 23 thugs and
instantly you assume you will never make it out alive. Luckily nobody really
fucked with me. The place is nasty, and I actually remembered feeling sorry for
the cops that have to work there everyday believe it or not. I would have killed
for a book and I highly recommend carrying one with you if you’re going to be
out risking it. It would have helped drown out all the gangsta babble I had to
listen to all night.
They call out maybe 1 or 2 people per hour to go
upstairs and everytime you’re just praying that they call your name, and it is
so crushing when they don’t. There is a nasty sink you are supposed to drink
from, but there was no way I was doing that. The place was infested with
roaches. Most of the people were in there for smoking weed on the street. One
guy said he was in for having one open can of beer in the subway. Nobody had
matches and everyone was desperate for a smoke. There was a kid that put a smoke
in a straw and put it through a grate in the ceiling to touch a lightbulb hoping
it would light.

I had to wait until about 6pm the next evening before
I was moved up to the cell where the lawyers talk to you. While in that cell
someone asked a guard for toilet paper. She said if I smell smoke you’re all
going back downstairs. At this point the last drink I had was at about 2:30 am
and I was feeling seriously ill. Those kids rolled up a joint out of toilet
paper and one of them had a match and they smoked it while everyone else moved
away from them. I’m no tough guy, but if we would have been moved back
downstairs because of them I seriously would have laid into them. I was honestly
feeling like a rabid animal at that point. When the judge found out that it was
a temporary structure and my first offense he said “Why are they wasting our
time with this?” And I was let go without a fine or anything. Supposedly if I
didn’t get into trouble for 6 months my fingerprints would be destroyed and
there would be no record of it. All said and done I was locked up for 16 hours
and it was the worst experience of my life. You can not imagine how bad it is
being locked up in a small room with 23 loudmouth thugs for 14 hours.

/>-gooDs

LOS ANGELES:

I was caught after
painting a piece in Los Angeles at about 3:30 am. I was with another person, who
had gotten away, and the cops had me stand in cuffs on the corner where I got
caught. They were constantly asking me questions about who I was with (in their
words, who my “buddy” was); the call they got told them that there were three or
four people. I was a minor at the time, so they told me that they were taking me
to a Juvenile Detention Center. They tried phoning my parents, but they were
asleep and didn’t pick up. At one point, two other cop cars came up, one of them
came just to chat. The others went to where i was painting to see what it was
like, they came back and said that i had been doing “murals or something” up
there. I was driven off with the two new cops after about 45 minutes, one of
the cops told me that he especially hated graffiti. So,  they drove me home,
which was across town; they weren’t too happy with having to drive over there,
and asked me why I didn’t do graffiti in my own neighborhood.  They then got my
keys and let me into the house, where they woke up my parents and had me
positioned so that my parents saw me in handcuffs. Once my parents were awake,
they undid my handcuffs and gave me my citation for possession of spraypaint
with intent to vandalize, before telling my parents that they should punish me
and that I talked back to them. The only thing I can recall saying that might
seem smart-assed was telling the cop that I was sorry to hear that he hated
graffiti. Otherwise, they were probably angry that I didn’t say who the other
person was. I ultimately had to go to court and pay a fine.

-
Anonymous.

CANADA:

/>

First I would like to clarify that there is a difference between prison and city cells. When you spend the night in city cells, it is nothing compared to spending time with the violent, hardened crimininals that you encounter in a prison. People in prison want to fuck you, or fuck with your head, or use you as a pawn in their miniature dirt war. People in city cells just want to sleep and get back to petty crime. Most city cells have belligerent or violent drunks. The experience is all different.

I got busted for stenciling, several years ago. I was living in a small city on the west coast of Canada and my friend and I, were painting the back of a bus stop. He was doing a throw-up and I was doing a crazy intricate stencil that had taken forever to cut out (this is before I knew about the efficiency of Tyvek plastic and heat guns) We had shitloads of gear and a car trunk filled with paint. We also had some beer in the trunk and we were headed to a hot-tub party later on that night. We were hyped.

The problem with smaller cities and towns is that the police are a lot more bored and much more melodramatic. They play out their fantasies of domination upon you much more thoroughly than a big-city cop ever would. I suppose they have plenty of time to fantasize about this while sitting complacent at Tim Horton’s, chewing thoughtfully on their sixth cruller.

Anyways, we had the misfortune of getting a flat tire when we stopped for gas, whereupon four cop cars, including a paddy wagon, surrounded us. They pointed their guns at us and made us get out and lay on the ground with our hands on our heads. Obviously someone had called us in. We found out later that a local ‘hero’ who had been raped a few years prior had called us in, because,  well, obviously, graffitti artists are rapists too, right?

We faced one another on the ground, various large cop boots smushing our stomachs and faces into the ground, as they patted us down and then ran our names. My record was clean while my friend’s record had a few previous graffiti offences. They towed the car and took us downtown (the wreckers/towers, where I went to get the car the next day, they heard my story and gave me a free new tire).

It was very dramatic and the pigs tried to intimidate me into confessing the whole time but I refused to confess. In this little room, they pushed us, squeezed the cuffs super tight and shook our arms until the cuffs cut our hands and threw my friend against the wall and threw him off his chair and roughed him up. Nothing like a room full of fat, power hungry freaks with big batons to ruin your day. Then the pigs told me to call a lawyer even though I didn’t have one so I just called my room-mate and said I would be home tomorrow sometime. The cops made us strip down and do naked jumping jacks and bend over for them to make sure we didn’t have any contraband up our ass cracks.

We were fingerprinted/mugshot and put in separate jail cells. It was boring inside the city cells, but, it was Canada, and so I had both breakfast and lunch, as well as a comfy blanket. You don’t usually go to jail for graff in Canada, it’s just a misdemeanor here. There were plenty of drunken crazy neighbour dudes, probably high on crystal, screaming and banging their heads against the cells.

Luckily my cell had some comics and magazines, and a talkative hooker. We were released after about 16 hours, and we immediately went down to the beer store, then the park downtown, and drank tallcans and swam in the river. (it’s a very clean river)

This story ends three months later, when I was in court. My super cool art history teacher had written me an affadavit saying that all of paint was mine, that I was an art school student and that’s why my car was full of paint, and that it was a big mistake to charge this innocent meek art school student. So my cohort got the rap for the throw-up and I still buy him paint to this day, because I feel like he sacrificed for me. The End.

... Road Rage

/>ENGLAND:

One night i met up with an old friend of mine and as you do we drank a large amount of alcohol and talked about the good things in life. This was in a little town called Seaford on the southcoast of England where there are only pensioners and pissed off teengers. Anyway my mate had work the next day so he went home about 12ish which left me drunk, wide awake and in the mood for graffiti. I was the only guy in all of Seaford who did graffiti at all (stencil graffiti) and being such a tiny little town once one person found out it was me everyone knew.

My tag at the time was ‘Sixteen’ due to it being my lucky number and i had sprayed my stencils all over the town and was planning many BIG things to shock the dull people living in it. Anyway, I had cut a really basic stencil of Sonic the Hedgehog because i was planning on starting a ‘Bring back the 90s movement’ around Brighton. I had borrowed my mates skateboard the day before so i skated back to my place, grabbed my paint, Sonic and my other stencils and put them in a my bag and skated down to town. I dropped a stencil of a little boy’s face with a nuclear sign over it on a building site then skated further down the road. I was still very drunk at this point and found a give way sign that was very lit up so i decided to spray the Sonic the hedgehog there, i did two of them and due to it being a windy night and me being off my face the turnout was bad. Banksy was right though, if your drunk and go graffing expect a night in a cell…should have trusted the bloke. Well after dropping the stencil i skated down the road and sat on a bench due to drunken dizziness. A cop car drove towards me and i said to myself “Stay cool, stay cool!” and it drove right past…then it reversed! I got on the skateboard and i couldnt believe the speed of this cop…he had my head down on the bonnet in less than five seconds.

He cuffed me and shouted “Whats in the bag!!!?!” I said “Oh you know mate…the usual stuff” in a friendly way. He took out my paint and six or seven A4 stencils then grabbed my head and put me in the car. There was a female cop driving and she said “We caught you on CCTV graffiting now we’re going to drive you to the spot so you can explain througholy what you meant by it” by this point i was laughing slightly and not taking the arrest seriously. The police drove to the spot and took several pictures of Sonic and my tag and got back in the car. I had to explain that Sonic the hedgehog is a legend and that i did it to make people my age remember the good old days of spending hours infront of a sega mega drive. After them taking the piss out of me I started giving them a lecture on street art and asked them if they wanted to arrest Banksy. They both didnt know who he was so i took the piss out of their ignorance for a good 10 minutes.

Afterwards i gave them a massive chat about Blek le Rat, Dave Kinsey and other favourite street artists. They didnt care less. We got to the station and they searched my pockets, the guy took out my wallet and found ?12, two condoms and a picture of my girlfriend. He asked who she was and i said “Whats that got to do with Sonic the hedgehog?” and repeatly asked who she was and then when i said “My girlfriend mate, alright?” he didnt believe me. He kept saying “No she’s not”...???? Anyway after this they uncuffed me and got all my prints. At this point i was still drunk and not realising that they hadnt given me a phone call…i realised this the next morning. They then chucked me in a cell for 6 hours. There was a camera above the toilet, so i avoided taking a piss so some security guard wasnt staring right at my dick. After a while i spoke into the microphone linked to reception and said “When the hell will i get out of here?” after about five minutes the man said “Once we’ve finished searching your house”...i was confused. But the police had woken up my girlfriend and stripped my house at 4am WITHOUT A SEARCH WARRANT! They cleared out my room, they found all my stencils and spraypaint and destroyed them all. They returned to the station with digital photographs of every one of my stencils. They then held a one hour interview making me confess i had cut them all… i would have been reluctant but i was hungover at this point, had no sleep for about 28 hours and hadnt eaten a thing for almost 11 hours or so. They showed me almost 40 photographs of different stencils i had cut and also went through my sketchbook with me. They thought i was in a street gang called ‘The Sixteen’s’ and kept asking the relevance of my tag name. I said almost 100 times “ITS MY LUCKY NUMBER!” but they wouldn’t buy it. It was then 6.30 am and they handed me a slip saying i owe the police ?80 in damage money and if i didnt pay it in two weeks then i’d be held in court for vandalism. I got home at about 7.00 am and thought to myself “Did i just spend a night in a freezing cell over Sonic the Hedgehog?”..

...after that i couldnt help but laugh to myself for hours on end.

/>NETHERLANDS:

Here’s a short story a
out me getting arrested in the Netherlands while doing graff for the very first
time… and last. It’s already several years ago and I just came home after a
night out. I made a little design at home a few days earlier and the alcohol in
my blood convinced me to take the spraycans and put it up somewhere close to my
home. It was the first time I went out and the adrenaline and alcohol made it
feel like a true rush. I went to a nice little wall I spotted a few days earlier
and took out my stuff. I began with the first lines, when I heard a van close
by. I stopped and waited for the van to go. The car left and I went on… but a
few minutes later I heard the same van again. So I stopped again, and right at
that moment a flaslight was pointed at my face. Crap! The police!

/>Where the alcohol made me go out, it now made me decide it was best to run
away fast. I was close to home and thought I would make it easy. I started to
run and I chucked the cans over a wall. One officer went after me. I overlooked
a little pole standing at the side of the road and fell over it. The officer
arrested me while I was still on the ground and took me to the van. There was
another cop with a dog, telling me he was at the point of releasing it.

/>I spent the rest of the night in jail. They wouldn’t let me go to the restroom
and I couldn’t sleep because of the hard wooden bench and the bright light in
the cell. In the morning, around 6.30, an officer came into my cell and told me
I was free to go.
They told me they thought I was a burglar who just made a
hit and tried to escape. They had no evidence against me for doing graff.
/>
Now I know I didn’t get caught for doing graffiti but the whole
experience made me decide graffiti was to dangerous as you stand for to long on
the same spot. I decided to start stickering as it is much faster… never got
caught for that… yet.

LukeDaDuke / FooB