Don't Get Bagged in Queens

A Canadian in jail, a cop who hates snitching, and a look at NYC’s senseless graffiti laws.

“Tugboats in the East River,” Aloysius C. O’Kelly, 1910.

Last summer, I took a nine hour Megabus bus from Montreal to New York City, where my friend Allee had offered me a couch to sleep on. I was subletting a cheap room in Montreal, where I was enjoying a lazy, unemployed summer. In New York, I did much of the same, spending days aimlessly wandering and nights drinking beer in nearby Maria Hernandez Park. On Saturday, I went to a block party hosted by Brigade USA with my friend Lei. An hour or so into the outdoor festivities, I noticed someone painting a throwie—a bubble-lettered spelling of one’s graffiti tag—on a garage door across the street, a little bit away from the crowd. I pointed it out to Lei, and asked if he recognized the tag. He said he was unfamiliar, but added that most graffiti writers wouldn’t hit up like that on a busy street in broad daylight.

I didn’t get it: on a block filled with people drinking and dancing in the street, in a city synonymous with graffiti, how could it not be chill? In the two months I had just spent in Montreal, I saw people doing graffiti quite brazenly on multiple occasions. Though Montreal largely embraces graffiti culture, getting caught can still result in community service, or a ticket upwards of one thousand dollars. Lei explained that the NYPD is notoriously strict on vandalism, and that spending a night, or even a weekend in jail was not uncommon for writers in the city. He stressed that if I planned to do any graffiti while I was here, I needed to avoid getting bagged in Queens. As a Canadian somewhat naïve to the American judicial system, I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by “the tombs,” or what a “district attorney” was, but I certainly wasn’t planning on getting caught in any borough.

Shots from the Brigade block party, by jive.

Though I wouldn’t claim to participate in graffiti at any sort of high level, the history and culture of the art form has fascinated me since I was young. Through skateboarding in my teenage years, I met a number of graffiti writers in my hometown of Victoria, a small city on Canada’s West Coast, and even began to throw up some toy handstyles of my own—a habit that, at the age of 26, I had still not kicked.

Artistic merits aside, I was always fascinated by the declaration of “I was here” contained within every tag, a bluntly-human impulse to be recognized and remembered. Immersing oneself in the culture transforms the streets into an international easter-egg hunt—every tagged mailbox, wall, and back-alley becomes a guestbook of sorts, intricately signed by a like-minded community. Even walking through New York, I had spotted tags from friends back home etched into the glass of subway station windows, or spray-painted on rolldown gates in the Lower East Side. Perhaps what I like about it is the sense of familiarity it brings, similar to spotting a friend’s face in a crowd of strangers. Or maybe it’s just the beauty of knowing that you and someone you know have both been in the same grimy bathroom stall.

Freeman’s Alley, LES.

The day before my bus back to Montreal, I spent the evening hours walking around Brooklyn alone, stopping occasionally to buy another tall can, slap up a sticker, or write on a dumpster. I like to imagine that someone I know will one day find one of my tags on their travels, and experience the same thrill that I do. A little past midnight, I made my way back to Allee’s place with Chief Keef’s Almighty So 2 blasting in my headphones.

Minutes away from her front stoop, I stopped in a parking lot where I admired fill-ins from NYC heavy hitters Wombat and ZigZag. I snapped a photo of the wall, eyed a rolldown gate on the sidewalk, and pulled out a Presto whiteout pen to add a small signature of my own. Through my headphones, I heard a shout. Something along the lines of “You’re under arrest.” I turned around and saw three officers hopping out of an unmarked vehicle.

Wombat and ZigZag’s fill-ins.

I figured I had to play the innocent tourist card—convince them that I, a Canadian, had no idea it was really that bad. There’s graffiti everywhere in New York, right? I offered them my markers, and assured them that I’d never do it again, lesson learned. I was leaving for Canada the next day, anyway. They told me that I would need to speak to a judge, and that since I was a “flight risk,” I would have to stay in custody until that happened. We stood there, waiting for a transportation vehicle to bring me back to the station for processing.

Since the scene of the crime was just off the corner of Myrtle and Wyckoff, we were technically on the border of Ridgewood and Bushwick. Ridgewood is technically in Queens, and the officers that arrested me were serving the Ridgewood 104th Precinct.

So technically, I had just gotten bagged in Queens. Sorry Lei.

104th Precinct.

Inside the precinct, I was led to a small holding cell with two other men sitting silently on a small bench. I took the floor. While the rest of the force dicked around and watched TikToks on their phones in the lobby outside, one of the officers that arrested me sat in the room with us. Clearly bored with his assigned task of doing nothing, he eventually broke the silence by asking me the most pressing question of Summer 2024:

“Yo Canadian, Drake or Kendrick?”

I told him that I thought Kendrick won the beef. He seemed shocked that I was not rocking with the 6 God. I told him I don’t really care much about Drake (outside of Take Care) or Toronto, and that I grew up on the West Coast, much closer in proximity to Los Angeles. I asked him what he thought of 6ix9ine. He answered that he doesn’t listen to him anymore, since he snitched. I laughed, and reminded him that he was a police officer speaking on the street politics of snitching. He said that didn’t matter. He also said that there was a Canadian rapper currently locked up that he thinks should be free.

“Man…you’re not talking about Tory Lanez, are you?”

He was talking about Tory Lanez.

He started to tell me how Tory didn’t shoot Meg. I tried to move past this, and switched the topic to his favorite rapper in New York (Cash Cobain). I asked if he liked Xaviersobased. He hadn’t heard of him, but said he’d play a song. I told him to look up “Special.”

The jerk music echoing through the cell from the officer's phone speaker seemed to perk up the middle aged Hawaiian man sitting behind me.. He started telling the officer about some stupid conscious lyrical Australian rap, trying to get him to play a song. Later in the night, I found out that the Hawaiian guy was arrested for a domestic dispute with his wife which occurred in front of their developmentally disabled children. He told me that his wife would likely divorce him after this, and that he would probably have to move back in with his parents in Hawaii.

Around 2 a.m., I was taken out of the precinct cell and handcuffed again, before I was driven to Queens Central Booking. The cops explained that I was lucky it was a Sunday night, and that court would open back up at 7:30. They assured me I would make it out in time to catch my Monday evening bus back to Montreal, which departed from the Port Authority at 9PM.

Once we arrived at Central Booking, I was brought down a long hallway to a large cell with a single toilet in the corner. The A/C was cranked, even though nearly everyone in the room had been picked up in shorts and a T-shirt. There were a few benches, all taken by people lying down in uncomfortable positions, scrounging for sleep. I chose an unoccupied spot on the cell floor that didn’t look too dirty, and followed the lead of everyone else, wrapping my hands around my body inside my shirt for warmth, and pulling my t-shirt over my face to block out the bright fluorescent lights overhead.