The graffiti I chose to write about portrays an NYPD Office as a pig with a sword/knife going through his head and the Wu Tang symbol next to him.  Inside the Wu Tang symbol it says "Cops ruin everything around me" which is obviously a play on Wu Tang Clan's hit song C.R.E.A.M (Cash rules everything around me).  These, along with different traits of the graffiti, provide ground to talk about things that usually make people with opposing opinions angry.  By looking at the face scale/detail, principle elements, and color palette in this graffiti, we can many graffiti artists are anti-law enforcement.

The artist who made this was going against the Police.  You can see especially in the details that it is clearly giving off the "all police are bad people that are out to get you" vibe.  This is shown very well by looking at the detail of the face of the officer.  The face is a pig and is just black and white with few other details besides the black squiggles that are all over.  You can even see the pointy pig ears coming out beside the hat.  Other than that there really isn't very much detail on the face, it's detailed enough to where you can clearly see a face, but it is not at all realistic looking.  The last part of the face is the big knife that is going through the side of the face and out of the mouth.  That definitely brings some more detail into the picture; with it going through the head at both points it gets the blood splatter coming out of his mouth and out of the side of his head.  All of this stuff together results in a not super detailed face of a pig that shows the big picture of an artist going against the police.

Another thing to look at is the principle elements of the graffiti.  The main points of the throw are the Wu Tang symbol, writing inside of the symbol, the police pig man, and the knife going through his face.  The "cops ruin everything around me" part totally embraces the fact that this is a person going against the police.  Graffiti reflects poorly upon the police because the artists are often people who get into legal trouble.  This piece of graffiti proves that many graffiti artists are anti-law enforcement.  This says that these types of people who commit crimes are kind of hypocrites in a way; you always heard as a kid, "don't do the crime if you can't do the time" or something close to that.  These people just expect to never get caught but when they do, they can't even begin to deal with the consequences because they told themselves they'd never get caught in the first place.  They are the type of people to get mad at a police officer for just doing his job and run around screaming "fuck the po-lice" and other obscenities.  There also are other criminals who will fully accept the choice they made and will do whatever they have to do because of a charge and then go on living their lives.  The actual Wu Tang symbol doesn't do much alone but the main reason it is another big part of the whole thing is because it allowed the writer to throw up a recognizable symbol that provided them with space to put the words which is the real point of the whole thing.  The police man is extremely important because that provides the writer to show people how serious they are about the topic; they are so serious that they put a knife through his face which any good person would not want to happen to any other person.  Altogether, these three things come together to make a picture that would catch the attention of someone walking by and hopefully get them talking about the subject matter.

The differences between the "cops ruin everything around me" and the original, "cash rules everything around me" are pretty interesting.  They both usually have something to with some type of crime but the original is talking about the good things that come away from some of these crimes while the one in this graffiti is the product of what happens when you get caught committing one of the crimes.  The artist also took the original which is kind of a happy song I guess, I mean it's about money and everything they do for it, and they changed it to a pretty dark topic especially nowadays with all of the controversy of police and how they abuse power and aren't doing what they should be.  The struggle of these kind of people is usually brought on by their own choices, they usually live in a not so good neighborhood and may resort to causing crimes because that's the only thing they think they can do but that is wrong.

The last element of the graffiti is the color palette.  Looking at all these different colors coming at you in all different directions really makes you realize something, there are not many colors in it.  There are five different colors that make up the graffiti and most of those five colors are very bland and don't stand out much.  The red and blue are the only colors that jump out at me when I look at it and that could be just because they are on the face which is one of the main points of the whole thing.  Yellow, white, and black make up the other colors and the yellow is not a vibrant in your face yellow at all, it is so bland and kind of ugly.  All of this kind of makes me question why the artist would use such dull colors and not more vibrant colors that are more likely to catch the attention of people walking by.  I think the colors might represent what kind of state this person's life is in, maybe things aren't going very well because of police and the dull colors perfectly represent that.

Looking at the face scale, principle elements, and color palette in the graffiti exposes the anti-law enforcement mindset of most graffiti artists.  The graffiti as a whole represents hatred of police but probably not for a very good reason, people going against the police just because they feel that the police are abusing power and out to get them.  I have an odd stance on the subject, I think law enforcement intervenes too much on everyday life but for the most part they are good people doing their job and trying to help others and the community.  All in all, it's a very interesting piece of graffiti that brings forward such controversial topics.

