Whitewashing a Myth about Graffiti Abatement

This past weekend, I saw The Honey Trap. The play centers on a former British soldier who lost a close friend during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Years later, while participating in an oral history project, he gains access to interview tapes and discovers that one of the interviewees may have been involved in setting his friend up for execution by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He travels to Belfast to confront the woman who had posed as a “honeypot,” and to kill her.

The play dramatizes how memory, trauma, and narrative combine, forcing the audience to witness these components emotionally rather than analytically. The actors also do a great job in their respective roles, though a handful of aspects of the story strained credibility.

But one comment caught my attention: the claim that the IRA used to whitewash graffiti on exterior walls so their snipers could better detect British soldiers on patrol and more successfully shoot them. It sounded plausible.

However, it’s also not true.

Even at a basic logical level, the claim falters. In urban conflicts, soldiers walk past and take cover against doors, windows, vehicles, and walls of many colors, so whitewashing graffiti alone would not meaningfully change visibility.

More importantly, there’s no credible historical evidence that the IRA or other republican groups whitewashed walls for tactical visibility purposes during the Troubles. More specifically, the IRA favored ambushes over sniper attacks. And most graffiti (not to mention murals) appearing in nationalist neighborhoods served a purpose. It marked territory, commemorated the dead, warned outsiders, and communicated political identity. Whitewashing those walls would have been politically counterproductive, not tactically useful.

But what interests me most is that the claim sounds believable. Not just to the playwright, but to audiences, and initially to me.

Why?

The general public (not to mention government officials) has sweeping, unexamined assumptions about graffiti:  what it is, who produces it, and what its removal is supposed to accomplish. These beliefs are typically unsupported by empirical evidence, or else persist despite the availability of this research, which is ignored, misunderstood, or simply disbelieved.

More importantly, they believe that graffiti creates disorder, and removing it restores order.

With frequent appeals to the Broken Windows Theory, but little empirical work that supports these claims, the public believes that graffiti abatement reduces crime, improves property values, and increases public safety.

Thus, cities, counties, and businesses spend millions on removal. Money that can be better spent on more important prosocial initiatives.

Moreover, beliefs about abatement are so deeply held that a false tactical claim about whitewashing walls during a guerrilla conflict sounds instantly plausible.

The problem isn’t just that the whitewashing claim is false; it’s about how readily we accept claims about graffiti and abatement without consulting evidence.

We don’t actually know much about what abatement does (e.g., who it benefits, what it costs beyond the direct expenditure, what it erases beyond the markings themselves). We just assume removal is neutral, practical, and good. And until we start asking what we’re actually accomplishing when we insist walls or surfaces stay blank, we’ll keep accepting plausible-sounding stories that confirm what we want to believe.