Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/13/graffiti-removing-drone-tested-in-washington.html
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Breezes might be a bit of a problem. Unintended neighborhood overspray consequences and a lot of painted drones?
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Revenge of the Taggers:
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Which is going to make it all the more embarrassing when one inevitably returns to base covered in tags.
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There’s a plan for tag removal:
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Or gets hacked, and spend the rest of its life tagging hard to reach spots.
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Like high up on the police station.
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They should give the drone to the graffiti artists.
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If the spots are that hard to reach, how are they getting graffiti in the first place? Also, I’m pretty sure people have already modified drones to paint graffiti with a lot less needs than the remover has. And oh look, there’s this nice fresh canvas just waiting to be painted …
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That’s the obvious escalation in this war!
I have seen graffiti where I wonder how the hell they get up there, and that was pre-drone days.
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$30,000 is a lot to spend on something that WILL be sabotaged.
graf writers do time-consuming crimes in extremely public areas for a hobby. coming up with ways to take these drones out of the sky is probably easier than putting up pieces, so…
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Your first question is easy – taggers may have little regard for their own safety, but whichever governmental entity is charged with removing it has to take its workers’ safety into account. So a place that an athletic, daredevil 15 year old can reach could be hard for the middle-aged worker to reach.
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Drones are certainly relatively fragile; but since this thing is operating on a paint tether it’s going to be fairly closely attended(if only because the ground equipment will need to be moved pretty frequently as it finishes in a given area) so attacking it seems like it would be a relatively high risk operation. Presumably lower legal exposure that just walking up and sucker punching a DOT employee while they are getting the supplies unpacked, since it’s just hardware; but not markedly different in terms of odds of getting caught.
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Wait until this thing is deemed not effective enough and they send the fire breathing robot dog out with it to find graffiti artists.
When graffiti artists move somewhere else and take other counter measures, we get Minority Report style AI that determines who is going to do a graffiti and where before they do it (spoiler: It’s really racist AI) and round them up.
Meanwhile you could solve the “problem” for a fraction of the cost with some social changes and better opportunities for people who tag in the first place.
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One of the first things I thought when I read this was that $30,000 could buy a lot of art supplies with money left over to hire taggers–some of whom have real skill–to create public murals.
I can’t find it now but back in the '80’s I saw a documentary about New York graffiti and how one of the ways the city tried to deal with it was to give taggers canvas and studio space. I was just a kid but it left a strong impression on me that making art should be encouraged, not treated as a crime.
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