Two suspects were booked into the King County Jail on felony charges after police officers allegedly caught them tagging a building with graffiti in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood.
The arrests come after the city's administration pledged to prosecute the "most prolific and destructive" taggers.
According to Seattle police, officers found two men tagging a building near 12th and Pine Street early Thursday morning.
Court records show Casey Cain, 36, of Seattle, and Jose Betancourth, 37, of Yakima, were both booked on charges of malicious mischief, a class b felony.
Betancourt had a $750,000 warrant stemming from a prior kidnapping, burglary, and assault case, according to court records.
A police report said Cain is the prolific tagger known as 'Eager', whose name is tagged on walls all over Seattle.
"Cain had his clothes covered in paint and I asked him what his tagger name was. He responded by saying that I already knew what he wrote. I asked Cain if he wrote EAGER and he said yes. Eager is a prolific tagger that had been damaging properties all over the city of Seattle," a Seattle police officer wrote in an arrest report.
According to the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office, 'Eager' is responsible for hundreds of graffiti incidents totaling more than $100,000 in damage.
"Detectives will continue to investigate to determine if the men are responsible for additional graffiti in the city," Seattle police wrote in a social media post.
Prosecutors asked for a judge to hold Cain and Betancourth on $200,000 bail, though the judge set bail at $10,000 for each.
Despite a pervasive graffiti problem in the city, police said in October that the agency had only arrested 22 people for graffiti-related crimes this year.
Mayor Bruce Harrell wanted to increase funding for graffiti abatement, enforcement and diversion in his proposed budget earlier this fall. The city council, however, cut the proposal from the approved budget last month.
“It just seems like it’s never ending. The minute we clean something up, it just pops back up and it costs thousands of dollars to clean graffiti here," said Tanya Woo, a community volunteer and advocate in the Chinatown International District. “We’ve been helpless all these years – we catch taggers, we hold them, we know who they are, we see them on Instagram – and we report this to the city and nothing happens.”
Woo said many small business owners are faced with either paying on their own to clean up graffiti or risk a fine by the city.
“Earlier this month, letters have gone out to several businesses here in the community where we are being fined $100 a day up to $5,000 for not cleaning up the graffiti," Woo said. “There’s a lot of anger, people are really passionate about it here because it has cost people thousands of dollars. It’s great to hear the city is actually doing something about it.”
City Attorney Ann Davison said her office was ready to take action as the city has seen a 'massive increase' in graffiti over the last two years.
“It is not a victimless crime and the people of Seattle are fed up with it and enough is enough. Everywhere I go, that is what I hear from small business owners – this is a costly problem for us," Davison told KOMO News.
The Washington State Department of Transportation said it is under-resourced to keep up with taggers who intentionally cover road signs.
Businesses and residents can report graffiti to the City of Seattle with an online form. Private property owners are expected to remove graffiti from their property in a "reasonable amount of time" or be subject to fines under the graffiti nuisance ordinance.