• Concerned residents can send photos of problematic graffiti to the new graffiti@nypd.org email address
• Cops and community leaders will examine tags made by gangs and prioritize graffiti with hateful and offensive messages
• Multiple officials in the department's top brass hailed the initiative as means to building relationships and trust with the community
• The initiative, which has been in the works for months, was started after the department received more than 6,000 complaints last year

NYPD officials announced a new initiative on Wednesday, asking citizens to report and help clean up neighborhood graffiti after the department received more than 6,000 complaints last year.

Concerned residents can send photos of problematic graffiti to the new graffiti@nypd.org email address, cops announced outside the Lower East Side store MOSCOT - which has been smothered with the vandalism.

The tips received by the NYPD will be investigated by local precincts and community leaders who will examine the graffiti for tags made by gangs and prioritize those with hateful and offensive messages and symbols.

Multiple officials in the department's top brass hailed the initiative as a means to building relationships and trust with the community.

The department will schedule regular 'paint-in' days, with the first on the books for April 10, to clean up the graffiti with paint cans and rollers donated by local businesses.

'As I'm driving over here today, I think it's apparent to everyone why we're out here when we look around. It's spring, we're coming out of COVID, but New York City needs a little sprucing up today, so that's what we aim to do,' Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said.

He added: 'We think it's a great opportunity to continue to build trust and relationships in New York City, it's everything we are trying to do. So why not combine two things that we need. We need to work closer with the community … and we're asking today for something really simple: we need your help.'

The clean up days will comprise of teams made up of auxiliary police officers, cadets and the young members of the NYPD's Law Enforcement Explorers Program and community volunteers.

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In 1995, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani signed the Mayoral Executive Order No. 24 - which formally established the Mayor's Anti-Graffiti Task Force to clean up the graffiti which decorated the city through much of the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2005, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg expanded the task force and created the graffiti rewards program which awarded up to $500 to people who reported graffiti vandalism in progress through 911.

Chief of Department Rodney Harrison, who is beginning in his new role after the departure of Terence Monahan, said the city takes graffiti 'seriously,' the New York Post reported. 

'We do have a vandals task force team already in place … making sure that they're out there engaging individuals that choose to dirty up the city,' Harrison said, according to the Post.

'So it's something that we take seriously … we have to juggle a lot of different balls, one of them being violence, but we also have to address minor things.'

Commissioner Shea said that the graffiti initiative has been in the works for months while acknowledging that the city has seen a surge in violent crime through the pandemic and in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd last May.

'It's been a tough year, not just for New York City but across this whole country. This is about moving forward, it's about the recovery, it's about coming out together and cleaning up. That's the big statement we want to make,' Shea said.

According to the New York Daily News, the top cops refuted that the rise in violent crime should be more of a concern for the department and argued that the graffiti initiative will give officers a chance to 'reform and reinvent.'

'We often speak about that. We speak about reform and re-invention,' Chief of Patrol Juanita Holmes said, according to the Daily News.

Residents and business owners claim that the initiative comes a little too late.

'This has been going on too long and I've asked on several occasions what can I use to remove the graffiti from the glass of an establishment in Crown Heights to no avail,' @Dewarrestaurant tweeted at the NYPD after the announcement.

'The graffiti on the walls and shutters are easy to remove by painting. Nostrand Ave looks like a war zone.'

Ryan Chadwick told the Daily News that he has to spend $5,000 to remove tags on his Lower East Side seafood restaurant Grey Lady.

Chadwick said his restaurant can't reopen until the graffiti is cleaned up and his insurance company isn’t helping. 

'We have to take care of the graffiti ourselves. It costs money,' he said.