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.  Graffiti is a form of art used by many people to express anything from their thoughts on a subject to just having a unique style of writing.  By looking at face scale/detail, principle elements, and color palette in this graffiti we can see that it is another vehicle of oppression used by law enforcement on the lower class.

The artist who made this was going against the Police.  Especially after looking at the details, you can see 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.  The squiggles could represent sweat trickling down the officer's face because law enforcement should be scared of the artist; even just seeing the artist would lead to shaky knees and nervous sweating.  You can even see the pointy pig ears coming out beside the hat.  There is a lack of 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.  Having it go through the head at both points greatly increases the presence of violence towards officers and gets the blood splatter coming out of both his mouth and the side of his head.  Overall, these aspects of the graffiti result in a face that lacks detail which aids in presenting the bigger 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 scene 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 absolutely 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; we've all been told, "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time." which some people clearly do not understand.  These individuals 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 folks 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 Wu-Tang symbol is another big part of the piece because it allowed the writer to throw up a recognizable symbol, along with putting a twist on the letters of their song "C.R.E.A.M." by changing "Cash Rules" to "Cops Ruin".  The police man is extremely important because that provides the writer to show people how serious they are about the topic; they put a knife through his face which any decent human being would never even consider doing.  Altogether, these three things come together to make a picture that would catch the penis attention of someone walking by and hopefully get them talking about the subject matter.

The differences between "cops ruin everything around me" and the original, "cash rules everything around me" seem minimal but, dissecting them exposes much more.  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 represents the product of what happens when you get caught committing a crime.  The artist also took the original which is kind of a happy song, it's about money and everything Wu-Tang does to acquire 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 this group of people is usually brought on by their own choices, just surrounding themselves with the wrong people can lead them to resort to causing crimes because that's the only thing they think they can do but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.  Along with that, these people usually live in some rough neighborhoods because that's all they can afford; they don't want to live there but since it's in their budget, it is usually the only choice and this puts them right in an area that will lead to crime and bad decisions.

The last element of the graffiti is the color palette.  Looking at red, blue, yellow, white, and black coming at you in all different directions really makes you realize something, there are not many colors in it.  Most of the five different colors that make up the graffiti are pretty bland, except red and blue.  The red and blue 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 piece; this could also be because the knife leads directly to the red blood splattered near the wounds.  Yellow, white, and black make up the other colors and the yellow is not a vibrant yellow at all, it is so bland and ugly.  All of this 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 would represent that perfectly.

Looking at the face scale, principle elements, and color palette in the art, shows that graffiti is another vehicle of oppression of the lower class used by law enforcement.  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 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.

