Town Watch Commits to Documenting "Growing Graffiti Problem"

Bill McGinley says he moved to Phoenixville 26 years ago because, after a long slow drive through the borough, he didn’t see any graffiti.

That was then.

And now, faced with what he characterizes as a growing vandalism problem in his town, McGinley and the rest of the Phoenixville Town Watch are redoubling their efforts to curb the defacement of the borough, and they’re asking residents to help.

At Wednesday night’s meeting at the , president Michael Hill announced the Watch’s new initiative to document all the individual pieces of graffiti that are littered throughout the borough.

“We want to photograph the graffiti at all the locations where we find it, collect all the pictures and send them to [Phoenixville Police Sergeant Glenn] Eckman,” said Hill.

“If we keep all the evidence, we can better prosecute.”

The PTW is asking any resident who sees graffiti, new or old, to take a picture and email it to pvillewatchband@gmail.com.

While the group views this as a step in the right direction, they understand it’s hardly a silver bullet.

The problem that underpins the problem, the attendees at Wednesday’s meeting agreed, is the fact that once graffiti goes up, it often stays there for a long time. This, along with some of the decrepit, abandoned buildings that are scattered throughout the borough, is thought to give would-be vandals the impression that nobody is watching. 

Though filling abandoned buildings falls outside of the volunteer force’s pay grade, they tossed around the idea of creating, with the help of police and local government, a mandate that all business owners have to remove graffiti from their buildings within 24 hours.

“The graffiti sitting up there perpetuates the problem” said Watch member Ginger Murphy, but she, and the rest of the group, acknowledged that while it’s the business owner’s responsibility to remove the graffiti, governing bodies are loathe to enforce that for fear of further punishing the victims.

The Watch also continued to puzzle over the source of the graffiti–much of which bears the signature “.”

“We still don’t know who’s doing it or what it is, if it’s a group of people. It’s all over the downtown, it’s all over the north side, it’s all over. It’s not just one area, it’s throughout the town, which kind of makes me think it’s more than one person,” speculated Hill.

“It doesn’t look like the same handwriting either,” he added.