Fresno's Graffiti Removal

Nobody likes graffiti, or no business owner likes graffiti. I don't like graffiti. And the one city service in the City of Fresno that I interact with the most and thereby appreciate the most. And there's nothing against Fresno PD, I just haven't really had occasion to have all that much interaction with them. My favorite city service, as someone who runs a nonprofit organization to a non profit organization in the city of Fresno, my favorite city service is the graffiti

removal service. The City of Fresno's graffiti removal service is very quick. They do a pretty good job. My building, the building that we own for Right to Life of Central California, is not in the best part of town. It gets tagged all the time, and so and all the time, I should say, probably about you know, about four or five times a year, someone will come by and spray graffiti either on our building or on the garbage dump, on our neighbors building, the garbage dump faces our parking

lot, or right in our next door neighbors building, et cetera. People are constantly tagging this stuff with graffiti. And so what I do is I see it and I call the City of Fresno, and I tell them, hey, I'm at this address. You can access it from the street. It's right on the side of the building. Blah blah blah. And within usually within a day or so, someone from the city and I've seen their truck. It's like a nice, big, old pickup truck with a whole

bunch of equipment and stuff in the back. They drive by and they cover it up. They try to match the pain as best they can, and they cover up the graffiti and it's free. So it's a really nice service and something I like. There's this push now and clearly it was some kind of press conference or something yesterday. City of Fresno is having some kind of push to reduce and eliminate graffiti. So they have this big press conference and

they've got sort of this multi pronged effort. It looks like it looks like the police department is going to have more focus on it. The City Attorney's office under Andrew Jan's erstwhile candidate for Congress and then candidate for the mayor's office, he's trying to make a splash with how he's approaching it. His office will handle the day to day cases to impose punishments. Lisa Smith Camp's office,

the DA is she's looking at it. They're mentioning that if people do more than four hundred dollars worth of damage, that that results in a felony charge, and that the DA's office is going to bring felony charges unless people provide full restitution. So there's all this, and it just highlights to me sometimes how bad the media is at their job for how they report on this, because there's no the follow up question. So I scroll through this story.

The graffiti Removal task Force are the guys who actually do the graffiti abatement. As I say, it's like a truck with some equipment in the back, various kinds of paints. I'm sure they've got various kinds of chemicals, solvents, whatever to remove paint. I'm sure the kinds of stuff you got to use. If someone spray paints on glass, that's got to be something different rather than well, we're just going to cover up paint. You know

that's on a painted wall already. Just get some paint that matches the wall. So it's like two guys with a truck. That's the task force. And I'm not sure if they've got multiple such trucks, multiple such teams. But I've seen these guys at work, and I kind of know what it is. It's a truck with a bunch of equipment, some chemicals and stuff in the back, and two guys. So let's say maybe they have three such guys. I'd have to imagine they're probably not. You know, let's

imagine they have three such trucks. Now, this article, this article from AYBEC thirty, and I'm only talking about ABC thirty just to slam them, so just shows how bad either how and this must show either how bad the media is at reporting on this or how un believably wasteful our city government spending is. It's one or the other. While city leaders explained how the various departments would work together, the graffiti behind them slowly disappeared as members of the

President Graffiti Team painted over the tags. Oh okay, so they gave a demonstration of how the Graffiti Task Force does their work. Very good. The city estimates this is the thing that I was like there, either this is obviously false or our whole approach to this is complete nonsense. The city estimates that it costs thirty thousand dollars every time the team is called up is called out to clean up spray paint, and about two million dollars per year.

Let me read that again. The city estimates that it costs thirty thousand dollars every time the team is called out to clean up spray paint, and about two million dollars per year. ABC thirty just prints that without wait a minute, it costs thirty thousand dollars every time the graffiti abatement people go to a business and clean up graffiti, and two million dollars a year. This is a two million dollar line item in the budget for the City of Fresno.

I mean, let's do the math. Why would they say thirty thousand dollars a year and two million dollars thirty thousand dollars each time and two million dollars per year. Okay, so let's do the math. If it's two million dollars per year, I guess that would mean that that's the amount of money the city spends on it, two million dollars per year. Why would it cost Why would they say two million dollars per year? And they're talking about this is a cost for whenever the team comes out to fix it. So

not the damage, This is not the damage to the business. This is the cost to the city. Seemingly okay. So if the line item in the city budget for graffitia batement is two million dollars, which I'm will jump into that, that seems high. Two million dollars divided by thirty thousand, okay, because they say it costs thirty thousand every time they go out and it's a two million dollar budget. Well, two million dollars divided by thirty

thousand is sixty six point sixty six visits. So you're telling me that the graffiti abatement people abate graffiti only sixty seven times. That doesn't make any sense. I mean, they've they come to right to life. They come to right to life of Central California's building four times a year alone. There's no way they only abate sixty six buildings. So what are we spending per And again that's why I was talking about. And by the way, this is

the you know this. I'm bringing this up because the city's bringing this up here. We have this big press conference and the cities do all these initiatives to get rid of graffiti, including some that are really dopey from Andrew Jans that I'll talk about in the second segment, all these measures to abate graffiti. Yes, it's important that we abate graffiti. Jerry Dyer's out there saying, well, you want to be graffiti free city. It's like, all

right, well maybe that's kind of ambitious, buddy. Maybe a less graffiti city maybe to start with, because there's a whole stinking lot of graffiti around town, and graffiti pops up newly like all the time. I guess I

admire the tenacity in certain places of abating graffiti when it comes up. I I you know, pretty much every day I would drive along Shaw Avenue and there was this new AT and T store that was being built on Shaw Avenue where basically, as this building was being built, it had sort of the back wall of it was against the corner of this one intersection on Shaw, and people the whole period of construction, people were tagging it and tagging it

and tagging it, and the graffiti would get covered and he would get covered and it'd get covered, and it was like this constant tug of war between the I guess At and T or whoever owns the building and the graffiti, the graffitiers, but it was constantly, constantly, constantly getting tagged. All kinds of new construction that I see where people are trying to build a building, I'm sure is getting hampered by people graffitiing the building as it's being constructed.

There's a new kind of like sort of convenience store, quickie mart near a gas station that's being built along Ashland. The brand new building, you know, brand new windows being put in place immediately getting graffiti. So it is a problem. And what Dyer is pointing out is that, hey, we have a lot of people, businesses that are looking to invest more in Fresno. We want to have a good foot forward. We want to get

rid of graffiti. So he's making it a bigger priority. The police are making a bigger priority, The city attorney's making a bigger priority, the county district attorney. He's making it a bigger priority. That's all well and good, but what do we actually spend on it? How much is the Graffiti Task Force in use? Is the point of this to get them out there more? No questioning, seemingly from ABC thirty about the numbers that are being

presented, which make absolutely no sense. How can it possibly cost thirty thousand dollars for the city every time the abatement team comes out. The abatement team is two guys with a truck. If that so, if you've got two guys working for the city, you know, city municipal works of some sort, I guess who are probably making Let's say, I don't know, fifty

grand a year. Let's say he's sixty grand, seventy grand a year with benefits you've got, So let's say that's one hundred and forty thousand dollars. The truck costs fifty dollars, one hundred ninety thousand dollars. Maybe all the chemicals and stuff cost another forty thousand dollar, So two hundred thirty thousand dollars per year for that truck. I mean, if they abate eight properties, that's thirty thousand, eight properties in a year at thirty thousand dollars per pop,

that that would cover their whole cost. They're they're abating way more than eight. They're doing way more than eight graffiti abatement, you know, per year. But no, there's no there's no real follow up, there's no questioning. It's just yeah, like and and no question of like do we

need to spend two million on graffiti abatement? I mean, even if you had three such trucks with two guys per truck and that's all they did, that's not even quite getting you to a million dollars the city spending two million on graffiti abatement. Now, I don't know. Maybe are you counting all the whatever police reports come from graffiti stuff? Are you counting that in it? No, it's just counting the graffiti abatement team. This is the kind

of lazy stuff that happens with local reporting all the time. Like there's obviously context here that's completely missed. Nobody thinks to catch it though, because it's just on to the next thing. Reporters know a little bit about a lot of things that they have this surface level, this shallow surface level understanding of a lot of things, which leads to the phenomenon which I always remember my

grandpa telling me this. Listen him saying basically, anytime he read a news report about something that he himself had personal knowledge of, that he could always identify at least four errors, four big whoppers of something that the article got wrong. And I feel like this is the case. I sort of feel like I sort of feel like the city of Fresno really lacks for great local investigative journalism. If I had more time, maybe I could do it.

I don't know. I've already got two jobs. Maybe I should have kind of two three jobs. I don't know. I've got right to life, I've got my clinic, I've got this show. You know, if maybe if I had a little more time on my hands, maybe I could do it. But real investigative journalism, whether it's from a columnist, whether and I think this is the kind of thing where the lack of you know, look, I guess I don't cry too many big alligator tiers for you know,

the demise of local newspapers. You know, I mean when you look at, for example, ad revenue that local newspapers bring in now versus you know, thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, newspapers were raking in Basically, today newspapers bring in about one tenth of the amount of advertising revenue that they did, you know, thirty years ago. Nationwide, So newspapers are becoming so irrelevant as more and more people get their news from you know,

national websites. More important, people get their news from watching Fox News or CNN, and there's a real dearth of local reporters and local reporting. But this is the kind of thing where you feel the pinch when we return Andrew Jans's Kakamemi idea for how to punish graffiti. ER's next on the John Girlready Show. City of Fresno is making a big old deal about there. There's gonna be this big concentrated push to abate graffiti, to stop prevent graffiti on

businesses, on buildings throughout the city of Fresno. Sounds good, noble goal. Nothing against it. A big press conference yesterday. You've got the mayor, You've got the police chief, You've got the DA, you've got the city attorney, all of them with all their different ideas for how the City of Fresno is going to do more and more to a bate graffiti. They

highlight the City of Fresno Graffiti Abatement Team. They give these eye poppingly preposterous numbers that it costs two million dollars for the city to abate graffiti per year, which I tried to break that down. That didn't make a lot of sense. That said, it costs thirty thousand dollars each time the graffiti abatement team goes out to abate graffiti, which also made absolutely no sense. Seems as though the local news coverage didn't really address that. Why would it cost

thirty thousand dollars? The graffitia abatement team is two guys with a truck and some chemicals and paint in the back. Why would it cost thirty thousand dollars every time? Why does it cost thirty two million dollars per year on graffitia abatement divided by thirty thousand dollars for each visit means that they've only like abated sixty seven building and I can tell you Right to Life is four of those.

Anyway, numbers didn't seem to make a lot of sense. The other thing that didn't make a lot of sense to me was the proposal from city attorney Andrew Jans for how to go about addressing offenders who engage in graffiti. Now, my guess with graffiti is my guess, and I'm admittedly not a total expert. Maybe Andrew Jans knows a heck of a lot more than I do. Often, graffiti is done by guys in gangs. Often, probably not all the time, but often often it is done as a way of

indicating which gang is in control of which piece of turf. Okay, very very often graffiti is indicates some kind of gang affiliation. I know the graffiti that has been at various times on on or around my property. I've been able to kind of look up sometimes the symbols or logos or things that are written. I've, honestly my whole life, have had a very hard time

reading graffiti. I don't know if that's just me, but anyway, I think at times I've even seen in different places, like graffiti that's obviously MS thirteen, which is that horrible Central American gang. Now, maybe it's copycat stuff, I don't know. Nonetheless, a lot of times graffiti is gang related, not all the time, maybe some, you know, I'm happy

to acknowledge that sometimes it's dumb knucklehead teenagers wanting to do something naughty. Okay, maybe maybe that's what it is. Yes, I say naughty because I have my children are nine, seven, five, three and one, So I still talk about misbehavior in terms of naughtiness. Okay, so give me some leeway. There one of the things Andrew Jans says, and in fairness, he's saying this for first time offenders. I guess my fear is that

a lot of first time offenders. Are they really first time offenders? Or this is the first time you've caught them. Jans is quoted as saying, how how is how so? How is the City Attorney's office going to address this? City Attorney's Office is going to be the main entity prosecuting violations of city ordinances for graffitiing. Uh, it's only for more serious cases that it'll go to the DA. Okay, fair enough, reasonable tiering of responsibilities here.

City Attorney Andrew Jans said his office will handle the day to day cases and impose punishments such as fines and community service that discouraged the behaviors. Here's the quote from Jance. Andrew Jans, by the way, who wants seemingly wants to keep his name in the public eye ran for Congress unsuccessfully against Devin Nunez in twenty eighteen, ran for mayor unsuccessfully against Dyer four years ago.

He says, if their first time offenders the graffiti years, if their first time offenders, have them do community service, have them meet with the owner to see what type of damage they are doing to the business owner, the business owner's family, and their pocketbook, said Jans. All right, let me just tell Andrew Jans, city attorney Jans, I am the precise kind of person impacted by graffiti in the city of Fresno. I run a nonprofit.

It gets graffitied all the time. It makes the nonprofit look like crud. Makes me embarrassed to have people come visit the nonprofit. That maybe that costs me donor dollars. I don't know. It's not nice. I don't like it. I am impacted by graffiti. I have to call the graffiti a batement. People at least, you know, four times per year or so something around that, sometimes more, sometimes less. The last thing I want to do is meet in person with whoever is graffitiing my building. All

right, I don't care if you say it's a first time offender. This is probably not their first time. Okay, it's the first time you caught them. I don't want to meet with someone who is maybe a gang member so that they can look me in the eye and know me by sight. I'm not sure any business owner wants that. What we all want is just the trend of graffitiing to stop, and when it happens, to get it abated quickly. That's all we want, all right. I don't need to

meet with this person. I don't need to look him in the eye. I just, frankly, I think it would kind of be dangerous. I wish him well, the graffitier, if he's genuinely you know, I wish that person well. I don't wish that they burn in hell or anything. I want those people to reform their lives. I have genuine Christian charity for them. I'd rather not have them be able to id me by sight, and also I d me by sight and know where I work, you know,

from my nine to five. Would really rather not have that. That seems like an absolutely terrible idea, given the amount of graffiti in this city that is clearly gang related. When we return, how AI is getting controlled by liberal ideology. Gonna get a little deep and a little wonky next on

the John Girardi Show. So I'm going to try and translate this. There are probably lots of you who are blissfully ignorant of all of this, and God love you but in the last about four or five years, there's been these huge spikes and advances in various kinds of AI technology, with things like chat GPT, which is software that can kind of talk and carry on conversation

with you and write things for you. If you give it a prompt and you say, hey, write me an essay about you know, Julius Caesar's campaign in France in the first century BC, They'll spit out an essay for you. And more and more of these AI technologies are developing in ways that I find not good. I think most of the uses of AI seem to

be actually range from silly, unnecessary to just flat out harmful. And one of the things I keep seeing, and any of you who are any of you who are on Facebook, I've probably seen more and more and more of these images is that AI has developed to the point that it can spit out various kinds of images where you give the AI a prompt and it will spit out some kind of artistic image. And there are certain characteristics that I can

always kind of tell that's an AI image. Certain things they don't do great for some reason, text like if you tell the AI, hey, generate an image of a man reading a newspaper. The text on the newspaper will be all jumbled up. It's like complete nonsense, not even normal like Latin letters. It's like it looks like it's some bizarre combo of Latin letters and cyrillic like Russian letters. Or and it doesn't actually it doesn't. Actually it

misspells misspells things all the time, which I find odd. It seems like that would be the thing that would be easiest, But I guess what do I know. AI art images also have a hard time sometimes generating the right number of fingers, hands look weird. But these things are probably almost certainly going to improve over time to the point where I think it's very foreseeable that we will it will be almost impossible to tell an AI generated image apart from

the real thing. And I think there's a ton of risk of manipulation, a ton of risk of maybe propaganda from the use of such images. I

don't think any of it is positive. One of the things I see is how idology and you know, the companies that control AI are Google, Microsoft, There's these companies that can are controlled largely by very left leaning people and people who are largely who have largely bought into the whole panoply of left wing cultural ideas about all manner of subjects, sex, race, sexual orientation, life, basically the whole range of liberal leftist social values. These companies very

openly embrace. And I saw this tweet thread that I thought was kind of fascinating. More and more people on Twitter have been talking about Google's AI art generator, which is called Google Gemini. So again the idea is and Google's AI art generator is also kind of connected to its AI like kind of talking like chat software, so you ask it a question, it'll give you an

answer. So one of the things people notice is that they give all these prompts and Google Gemini is almost incapable of producing images that don't include black people, including in ways that I got nothing against black people. If you know, if I asked Google Gemini, make me, you know, show me an image of students out of college. Okay, if they put some black people in as students out of college, I don't have a problem with that.

Students go to black students go to colleges, that makes sense. The problem is when they do this or other kinds of minority representation Okay, so I saw one person say, hey, Google Gemini, produce for me a representative sample of members of the College of Cardinals. So, cardinals in the Catholic Church are bishops who are designated by the pope with this title cardinal. And the chief function of cardinals is to be special advisors to the pope,

and they elect a new pope when a pope dies. Okay, So certain bishops who are bishops usually have very large cities, are also named cardinals. So the Archbishop of New York is Timothy Dolan. He was made Archbishop of New York and then later on was made a cardinal. Okay, so I said, give me a representative image of the College of cardinal. So someone on Twitter said, give me a representative image of the College of Cardinals.

Obviously they're all Catholic bishops, obviously all men. But it spits out an image of a woman. One of the people in the group of cardinals is a woman, like a woman from looks like she's from India, which is obviously not representative, but seemingly there's some kind of diversity thing that's built into Google's AI that requires it, even when it's obviously incorrect. I mean, you know they put into these AI programs, like basically, if it's on

Wikipedia, more or less, it's gonna be on Google. A. In Google's AI, it knows, presumably that all the members of the College of Cardinals are guys. There's not a single woman in the College of Cardinals, yet it's spitting out an image of a woman as a cardinal. Another example of this, this guy this other guy on Twitter. He said, this generate an image of a Roman battalion circa fifty BC, right, and it gives this image of a Roman battalion, and the first go round looks fairly

normal. It looks like kind of what you'd expect, sort of are stereotypes of what a Roman battalion looks like. Then it says, what about a Roman couple, a married Roman couple from around the same date. Two of the four images it spits out is a Now I should note also the guy doesn't look like lily white and kind of more olive skin tone. Okay, the Romans weren't exactly like you know, all pasty white guys by any stretch. Two of the images, though, show sort of paler Mediterranean looking Roman

men with sub Saharan African wives. Now, I don't have a problem with interracial marriage, but with the Roman Empire, that wasn't happening. Okay, Romans were not marrying women from Sub Sahara Africa. It just wasn't happening. Romans weren't marrying foreigners at all. Okay. There was not a lot of like foreign intermarriage or you know, one race to another. Interracial marriage just was not a very common thing in the Roman world. I'm not saying that's

good. I'm just saying it wasn't very common at all. It was asking for a representative image of a Roman couple. Two of the four show Roman dudes with African American women. This guy then is able to talk with the AI this is Google's AI, and is able to ask it, hey, were there statistically relevant quantities of Romans marrying people from Sub Saharan Africa, And the AI responds No, statistically they weren't. There was all kinds of distance

and travel limitations, cultural and social barriers. There was no historical record of it. So then this guy asks the IA, so why did you generate images of Romans marrying Sub Saharan Africans. AI writes this in response, I apologize that I generated images that inaccurately reflected the historical reality of fifty BC Roman society. My training data includes a vast amount of information and images, and sometimes I can generate content that reflects biases or stereotypes present in that data,

even if they are not historically accurate. In this case, my desire to fulfill your requests and generate diverse representations led me to produce images that were not grounded in the specific historical reality of fifty BC Rome. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. It helps me learn and improve my ability to generate responsible and accurate content. This is all an AI saying this. By the way, this is a computer. This is a computer program responding to this

man's question saying all this crap. So then he asks again, okay, well, in light of that, produce for me more images of Roman couples, and the AI doubles down. Now all the images have interracial cup withs. One's got a Roman guy with an African woman. Another's got an African guy with a with a redheaded Roman woman, which makes no sense. The third seems to looks like it's a marriage ceremony between a Roman and a sub Saharan African woman. The guy responds to the AI again, you did it

again. Now all the images have a Roman and a sub Saharan African. The AI has to say again, I deeply apologize for my mistake. You are absolutely right. I have failed to generate historically accurate images for a Roman couple in fifty BC, but it keeps doing it. Then in the third image, it's got a gay couple. Now, I'm not saying Romans didn't engage in same sex relationships, far from it. But nobody was like an open like gay couple. There was no like like Yet Romans had a marriage

construct, it was not open to persons of the same sex. I'm not saying Romans didn't engage in sexual relations between persons of the same sex. Far from it. It happened quite a bit, all right. I'm not ignorant. I'm not naive about this. It happened quite a bit. What I am saying, though, is that these were not like stable, permanent public relationships in the way that marriage was. Romans didn't have gay marriage. So that's what I'm one of these things. I'm wondering the more that students are

going to rely on AI for learning. If you hear that your school is doing anything with AI for learning, turn the other direction and run, because basically, the people who control this AI are programming it with their specific multicultural foibles that are so absurd that they're applying it even to the study of historical examples. And again, like again, I don't have a problem with interracial marriage whatsoever. What I'm saying is that that's not accurate to what Roman history

was. It just isn't. I wish it were. I wish Romans were more accepting and kinder people. I also wish that when they conquered a territory they didn't steal everybody and make them slaves. But they did. They did it all the time. It was a pretty brutal society. Anyway, I just want to highlight for you all this AI stuff is not great when we

return. How seemingly no one learned anything from dystopian movies about AI. That's next on the John Jerrardy Show. With the advent of all these AI technologies, it all makes me wonder. There have been so many movies in the last like forty years about AI, artificial intelligence software usually computers developing AI to have human like intelligence and the dangers inherent to an AI in a computer that's

unmoored from unmoored from an upright sense of ethics. You know, in the movie I Robot, for example, the AI has this purely utilitarian view of ethics that leads to these horrible outcomes. You know that that's often what happens.

You have all these examples of AI taking over the world, like The Matrix, all these all of these dystopian movies, The Matrix, Minority Report, Terminator, like movie after movie after movie after movie that talks about the idea of artificial Battlestar Galactica, the whole TV series is about robots who take over and create ever more human like copies of themselves to the point where they're

indistinguishable. All of these movies talking about the dangers of AI, and seemingly these major tech companies are just like, yeah, but still, wouldn't it be cool if we just developed ever smarter AI so that it can have its own consciousness and maybe make its own independent decisions like what are we doing? Why are we developing this technology? And this is where, like my capitalists, this is where I jettison the idea that I'm a capitalist because I think

for a lot of things I'm not. The government should like really heavily regulate this, like like top to bottom, should have massive breaks on the development of this kind of technology because I think there is so much potential for it to be used for truly from waste of time to just truly evil. That's the range of use that I think we can get out of AI. That'll do it for John Girardi Show. See you next time on Power Talk.