Saturday, March 13, 2010

Some local college students lent a helping hand Saturday by cleaning up graffiti on the city's north side. These young students have been learning about gangs in their studies at Wichita State University.

"I was really surprised at how much graffiti there was," said Andrew Geren, of the WSU Criminal Justice Society.

Street gangs across the country use graffiti to mark their so-called territory. These students decided to do a project to help clean some of it up.

"A lot of us are criminal justice majors and so we took a gangs class at Wichita State," Geren said. "That's initially where we got the idea to do this because our professor had said there's a lot of graffiti and gang activity... More than you'd think in Wichita."

In fact, there is so much graffiti in Wichita that a city employee works every day of the year to paint over it. It always seems to come back. However, not all of the graffiti originates from the gangs. Some people use graffiti as a form of art.

"She does this every day. I mean 365 days a year, she paints over graffiti," Geren noted. "I was really surprised that there'd be that much graffiti in Wichita."

As the group of students worked to remove tons of graffiti from the grain elevators in North Wichita, they realized the daunting task ahead of them. Looking back, they felt proud of the work they had done

"We really want to do this again later in the year, because we were expecting it to be a little warmer," Geren said. "It's not and it's windy and cold, but so far we're having a lot of fun."

Having painted over graffiti on two grain elevators in North Wichita Saturday, the group packs up... most in desperate need of a warm shower.