Alarm bells went off when Chief of Police Denise Turner was reviewing her department's crime statistics earlier this month: graffiti, one of the city's most ubiquitous crimes, was strangely absent from the roster.

"It was definitely an 'aha!' moment," she said.

There's no way to know for sure, but Turner said she has an inkling that the omission of the graffiti statistics in the department's monthly reports to the Federal Bureau of Investigation has prevented the department from receiving grant money.

Police track graffiti crimes using a database separate from the one used to keep other crime reports.

"It would be overwhelming to write reports on every graffiti crime," Turner said.

Every time Community Service Officer Angela Locke-Paddon comes across one of the errant scrawls, she logs it into her database with a photo and brief description of the location, Turner said. But even those statistics are difficult to track because of the widespread nature of the problem and the team of volunteers who cleans up some of the less significant scribbles before they come across Locke-Paddon's desk. Filing reports for about 300 graffiti-related calls per month would take her away from her job, she said.

"I wish we had cameras," Locke-Paddon said. But cameras cost upwards of $2,000 apiece. Turner has floated the idea of partnering with local businesses to combat crime with cameras. State funding in the form of grants would help, Turner said.

In the first six months of 2008 alone, Gilroy police have made seven more graffiti-related arrests than they did in all of 2007 and have seen a 151 percent spike in graffiti. Cleaning up the problem cost police, parks and other city departments $121,605 in 2007 and schools chip in another $100,000 worth of resources, annually.

Contrary to popular belief, the majority of graffiti in Gilroy is unrelated to gang activity, Locke-Paddon said. Only 15 percent of all graffiti in Gilroy is gang-related, according to police statistics. Thirty-four active tagging crews contribute the other 85 percent.

With big chunks of city and school budgets going toward graffiti abatement and tightening budgets to boot, Turner is working to integrate the graffiti and larger crime databases to come up with a more accurate portrayal of Gilroy's crime statistics.

"It's a matter of us doing some math," Turner said. "Initially we will see a huge spike in crime."

However, that "spike" will simply reflect the combination of the graffiti numbers with other crime statistics. Turner said that Gilroy's crime numbers look much better than many cities because of the omission. On the other hand, her intuition tells her that, had the statistics been reported properly, the department would have received more grants that could support programs, new technology and staff training.

Many grants are allocated with the sole purpose of fighting graffiti. Berks County in eastern Pennsylvania recently received a $240,000 state grant to fight gangs and crime and fund a project aimed at the county's graffiti problem. The Deming Police Department in southern New Mexico and the Riverside YMCA received $2,000 grants last year from the Graffiti Hurts National Grant Program to help eradicate graffiti in their communities. And the Sioux City Police Department received a $17,591 state grant this summer to stem their city's graffiti problem. Big or small, these grants help wipe out graffiti and are often based on crime rates, Turner said.

"We have applied for grants and not received them," she said. "You get many grants based on crime rates. Chances are, we've missed out on some opportunities that we wouldn't have if we'd integrated the graffiti stats."

The GPD will be more competitive for future grants with a crime rate heightened by the newly integrated graffiti statistics, Turner said.

With more accurate numbers in hand, "we're going to start searching for grants to find solutions to graffiti," she said.