North Beach data wizard Riley Walz has struck again. The 23-year-old tech prankster who brought you real-time parking cop tracking and orchestrated the first Waymo robotaxi traffic jam has now scraped 100,000 graffiti violation photos from the SFPD’s public database—and transformed them into an unexpected art gallery.
“San francisco cops take photos of graffiti violations. i scraped 100,000 citations from their website. art, but through the eyes of the law,” Walz posted on X Sunday morning, alongside a link to his latest creation at walzr.com/sf-graffiti. The post has already racked up over 102,000 views as of Sunday afternoon.
san francisco cops take photos of graffiti violations. i scraped 100,000 citations from their website. art, but through the eyes of the law https://t.co/lc8aZN02QQpic.twitter.com/eWmmy3qBlm
— Riley Walz (@rtwlz) January 26, 2026
The images themselves tell a fascinating story about San Francisco’s evolving street art landscape. One photo from October 2019 captures a gray wall adorned with a colorful character piece—a pink figure with a blue mohawk leaning on a cane, flanked by bursts of orange and yellow. Nearby, yellow wooden panels display layers of tags and throw-ups, with one featuring a simple white birdcage outline. Another shot from May 2017 shows a close-up of a turquoise surface with a playful cartoon face, its bulbous eyes and zigzag mouth rendered in black against the bright background.
Street Art Through a Law Enforcement Lens
What makes Walz’s project particularly compelling is the perspective it offers. These aren’t Instagram-worthy shots from street art tours—they’re the documentary evidence that city inspectors collect when issuing violations. The timestamps stretch back years, creating an accidental archive of San Francisco’s graffiti culture as seen through the most unsympathetic possible lens: municipal code enforcement.
Some images capture elaborate pieces, like a March 2025 photo showing a plywood construction barrier covered in text written in multiple languages—Chinese, Korean, Arabic script, and Japanese characters—alongside messages in English like “If you don’t like graffiti, then just look away.” The multilingual commentary sits alongside painted phrases about human rights and suffering, according to San Francisco Chronicle.
Other photos document simpler tags: a January 2016 shot of a turquoise building with bubble-letter graffiti on a metal rolling door, or a January 2019 fence covered in competing throw-ups rendered in blue, white, and yellow. A particularly striking February 2021 image shows a blue mouse character painted on plywood saying “FINE, I MOVE. ALWAYS 2 STEPS IF I NEED”—a sardonic commentary on displacement that became evidence in a municipal violation case.
The Latest in a Series of Provocations
For Walz, the graffiti project represents the latest chapter in an ongoing exploration of urban data systems. In September, he launched “Find My Parking Cops,” a website that tracked San Francisco’s parking enforcement officers in real-time by reverse-engineering the city’s predictable parking ticket numbering system. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency killed the data feed within four hours, cutting off the public information Walz had been scraping…