A spike in graffiti in recent months has upset Tooele residents and sent city officials scrambling for solutions.

Since this spring, the Tooele City Police Department has reported 172 cases of graffiti. April started off relatively small with only 13 cases, but that number quickly grew by July to 39 cases. In August, the number dipped back down again to 12, but September and October yielded high numbers again with 44 and 34 cases respectively.

Longtime Tooele resident Geneve Gubler’s white vinyl fence along 400 South accounts for five of the 172 cases.

“We’d get it cleaned off and we’d have it again,” Gubler said. “It’s hard work, I’ll tell you.”

The first time the spray paint appeared, a city employee helped Gubler clean it off. Another time, some gracious neighbors scrubbed the fence. But the three other times, Gubler, 84, cleaned the black images off the fence herself, using a special graffiti cleaner to help take the paint off. Still, she said the process still took hours because of the color of the paint and how thickly it was applied.

“I’ve gone two months now without another incident, so hopefully they’ve moved on,” Gubler said. “I don’t know why kids think graffiti is so much fun.”

Tooele City officials are scratching their heads as well when it comes to the reason why the crime appears to be growing in popularity.

“We, like every other city, are trying to come to grips with a problem that is very difficult to deal with,” said Tooele City Mayor Patrick Dunlavy. “We are trying to do everything we can to stop it.”

Dunlavy is hoping stricter enforcement of the city’s curfew laws will help curb the crime a bit. Now that daylight savings time is over, no juvenile 13 or younger will be allowed out unsupervised between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. For juveniles ages 14 to 17, the curfew is midnight to 5 a.m.

The city is also working with utility companies that own the highly-targeted utility boxes around town to quickly clean off any graffiti spotted on the boxes. And it’s been re-advertising a $250 reward for anyone providing information that leads to the arrest of a graffiti perpetrator.

“Rewards have always been in effect, but I’m not sure that people have always been aware of them, so that’s why we are advertising this again,” Dunlavy said.

The rewards system has been in place for over 10 years and Tooele City Parks and Recreation director Kathy Bell said it is publicized in schools, newspapers, and by word of mouth.

“We want people to be aware of it because we believe that friends will turn in friends for the money,” Bell said. “It will get people to talk.”

Kirby said without information coming from witnesses and informants, catching up with culprits is often difficult.

“It’s a difficult crime to investigate because it’s so easy to commit,” Kirby said. “It’s hard to watch all public places in the city.”

As such, the city is appealing for the help of residents.

“Law enforcement is not the solution because it’s one of those things that happens on the spur of the moment,” Dunlavy said. “The community needs to get involved. If they see kids with spray paint or markers, make a phone call. We need their eyes and ears.”

Kirby said Neighborhood Watch programs can be very effective in deterring taggers from decorating neighborhoods, but not many residents embrace the program.

“I think people don’t understand the benefits that can come from Neighborhood Watch,” Kirby said. “If residents would work together, get to know their neighbors and keep their eyes and ears open, then a lot of this would stop. I am convinced graffiti is done by kids in our own neighborhoods. That’s why Neighborhood Watch can have such a huge impact.”

The city encourages residents to take photos of graffiti that appears on their property — which may help police link cases together — and then remove the graffiti as soon as possible.

“Taking it off discourages people from tagging because they’ve gone to all the work and then it’s gone,” Kirby said. “They would rather do it where it won’t get taken off.”

Over the summer, the city hired two seasonal employees to help deal with the problem.

“We were working on graffiti everyday,” Dunlavy said. “We clean it up one day and the next day it’s back.”

Despite not having that two-person crew available now, the city still offers to help any resident unable to clean off graffiti themselves — especially the elderly.

Still, some residents say the city could be doing more to combat the problem.

Ever since moving to Tooele a year ago, Mark Holloway has been troubled by the graffiti problem. He wishes Tooele would incorporate a graffiti abatement program similar to that used in El Paso, Texas, where he came from. The town set up a 24-hour hotline that residents could call to report graffiti.

“Their pledge was that in 24 hours they would have it cleaned up,” Holloway said, adding that shortly after the inception of the hotline, graffiti seemed to decrease significantly. “I don’t know how it would be funded here, but it would be a good idea.”

Kirby said graffiti is usually a juvenile crime, but adults have been found to be connected to it as well.

“There are a few [taggers] in town who do a lot of graffiti, and a lot that do a little graffiti,” Kirby said, citing who makes up the pool of perpetrators.

Of the graffiti scattered throughout town, however, a vast majority is not gang-related, but rather work done by random taggers, Kirby said.

Graffiti perpetrators can face charges as high as a second-degree felony if arrested in a case where the damage exceeds $5,000. If the damage is up over $1,000, the crime can be charged as a third-degree felony; damage over $300 equals a class A misdemeanor; and damage less than $300 equates to a class B misdemeanor. Upon conviction or adjudication, perpetrators are required to pay restitution to the victim to cover removal, repair or replacement costs.

Jack Hottinger, a member of Tooele City’s citizen volunteer patrol, said during his weekly patrol shifts he is troubled to find so much graffiti. He said although he is seeing more and more in residential areas, the bulk of it remains on commercial buildings and in alleyways.

“What gets me is you’d think somebody would see them doing it,” Hottinger said. “I’d just love to catch them — and sooner or later I will.”

Jamie Belnap: jamieb@tooeletranscript.com