NYPD And MTA Team Up To Trick Pro-Trump Graffitist With Fake Wall

Womp womp.

Walls may not do much to stanch the flow of narcotics over our national borders outside established ports of entry, or to deter immigrants from entering the country, but they do have one extremely niche but proven use in law enforcement: Helping authorities to catch a pro-Trump graffitist who'd lately hit up a Downtown Brooklyn subway station.

The NYPD and MTA reportedly worked together to lay a Scooby Doo-like trap for a vandal who, in January, began scrawling #lovetrump on the same beam in the Borough Hall/Court Street subway station. After fielding a bunch of complaints about the missives, transit officers Aaron Nieves and Billy Wong set to scheming, according to the Daily News. I imagine the brainstorming session went roughly as follows: This deviant, obviously, loves the president, and our president, as you may know, loves walls, so by the transitive property, the graffiti artist must also love walls. If you build it, he will come, and thus a plan was born.

According to Politico reporter Joe Anuta, NYPD Transit Chief Edward Delatorre dropped this chestnut in the course of a budget meeting on Tuesday. Delatorre explained that the MTA built a plywood wall inside the Court Street R station on March 12, cordoning off the culprit's beloved beam. The wall looked like standard construction zone fair, but in fact, it created a small hidden room large enough to conceal two officers. Per the NY Post, "Transit cops took turns lying in wait behind the door in their spare time" on the 15th, anticipating the vandal's imminent return. Because, as a police source put it to the Daily News, no graffitist can resist the siren song of a blank canvas; they will always be "prone to do graffiti on it."

I am not clear on how the officers, hidden inside their plywood cabinet, could tell that the arrival was their man tagging the wall, and not a random straphanger brushing up against it. Secret cameras, perhaps? A peephole? A magician never reveals their secrets. In any case, as the Trump tagger began writing on the wall, the cops reportedly threw open the door installed for precisely this purpose and caught the miscreant in the act.

"I imagine he was surprised," Delatorre said, according to Anuta. "It was his first arrest." He has since been charged with criminal mischief and graffiti.