Graffiti and Criminal Law: War or Peace? How Does New York City’s Zero-Tolerance Approach Regulate Graffiti in Comparison to the Liberal Approach Taken by the City of Toronto?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Graffiti is a rather controversial concept in modern days. It has managed to divide contemporary society into a bipartisan reality. One can either favour graffiti and be of the opinion that it is capable of being classified as artistic work and as a result susceptible to recognition and admiration or be completely against it and advocate that graffiti is an evil that instigates the further commission of a crime. What is interesting to note is that these approaches can be found during the analysis of the regulatory frameworks of different jurisdictions that cover graffiti. It can be seen that some jurisdictions adopt a zero-tolerance policy by criminalising graffiti, and everything related to it and going as far as rewarding citizens who turn in graffiti artists. New York City serves as an excellent example of such jurisdiction. On the other side of the spectre is the liberal approach that albeit is not necessarily in favour of the presence of graffiti on the streets, still makes an attempt to consider the interests of graffiti artists at least to some extent. An example of such jurisdiction is the city of Toronto. The Toronto Municipality starts from the presumption that unsolicited graffiti is to be regarded as vandalism. However, this presumption is rebuttable should the owner of the wall request a specific administrative body for reconsideration. This paper aims to address the 2 approaches that jurisdictions can take in relation to graffiti works. In doing so it will attempt to find an answer to the following question: How does New York City’s zero-tolerance approach regulate graffiti in comparison to the liberal approach taken by the city of Toronto? In doing so, the first step is to clarify the sufficiently confusing terminology in the area of graffiti. After that, the graffiti problem as such will be explained, namely how it is viewed and what are the ideas governing its opponents and proponents. Additionally, the motives of graffiti artists will be explained. This will then be followed by a comparative overview of the approaches taken by the 2 above-mentioned jurisdictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".