By J. P. Mitri

It would be hard for someone to walk around the Buffalo State College campus and not notice the graffiti. The graffiti, known as “tagging,” can be found in the bathroom stalls, on the sides of buildings and in some very hard-to-reach places.

According to Lt. Samuel Lunetta of the Buffalo State University Police Department, it’s the profile of skateboarders that are “tagging” the campus.

This problem exits all over the city of Buffalo and in places like Delaware Park where some tags have spilled over onto campus.

“Like the one that’s around ‘attack,’ that individual was tagging the whole city and in a couple of spots we found on campus,” said Lunetta.

“Some neighborhood kids were going around and doing it (tagging) and these kids were clean cut skateboarder type kids and just went out and did these taggings and they did a big number on it, and we did notice some of them (taggings) did spillover onto campus,” said Lunetta.

It’s all about prestige according to Lunetta. Someone who is a true die-hard tagger, they’re going to get it out there, because the more there name is out there the more prestige they’re going to have.

Is graffiti art or a crime? The debate has issues supporting both sides. Check the graffiti art at www.graffiti.org then decide where you stand.

“As far as having people do whole pieces, I actually enjoy looking at it; I own a book of other people’s graffiti. I take pictures of it, but on a whole, I dig it, I like it a lot,” said Jerad Mione, 21, a fashion merchandise major at BSC. “But I’ve seen art in museums with other people’s tags on it, I’m not for that.”