A can of black spray paint and four letters. That's what the FBI now says can tip off local police to a coming act of violence. A counterterrorism report obtained through a public records request tells law enforcement agencies across the country that anti-capitalist graffiti belongs on a checklist of warning signs.
What the report actually says
The document is dated Jan. 30 and comes from the FBI's Counterterrorism Division and its Office of Partner Engagement, the unit that runs the bureau's relationship with local and state police. It was obtained and reported by Prism Reports. The report groups a set of people under the label "anarchist violent extremists," shortened to AVEs, and calls them a persistent public safety threat. Then it lists behaviors meant to help officers spot one before something happens.
Graffiti is on that list. Specifically, the report names "creating anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-government, or anti-law enforcement graffiti" as a potential indicator of mobilization to violence, according to Truthout. It sits next to three other flagged behaviors: casing government buildings or law enforcement facilities, calling for criminal action on extremist websites, and acquiring bomb-making materials. One of those things is not like the others.
A single letter can do the job
The report doesn't stop at broad categories. A related, more detailed FBI assessment goes further and names specific graffiti terms as indicators of anarchist extremism, including the acronym ACAB and the phrase May Day, per Truthout's reporting. ACAB has been painted on walls, jackets, and overpasses in cities worldwide for decades. May Day is a labor holiday older than the bureau itself. Neither one is new. What's new is a federal document treating them as data points in a threat assessment.
The report does carry a disclaimer. It states that no single indicator should be the sole basis for a determination of criminal activity, and that the listed behaviors may include constitutionally protected activity. That line does the work of covering the bureau. It does nothing to stop an officer from writing down a tag as a data point anyway.
This isn't the first time
Street artists and writers have never needed a federal memo to know graffiti gets treated as evidence of something bigger than paint on a wall. But this report puts a name on the pattern. Civil rights groups have flagged the trend before. In 2023, the ACLU, the Brennan Center, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sent a joint letter to the Department of Justice warning that broadening the definition of anarchist extremism echoes older campaigns against civil rights and labor movements, a history Truthout traced back through the bureau's own paper trail.
That history includes COINTELPRO, the FBI's decades-long program of surveilling and disrupting political groups it disagreed with, most of them on the left. A tag on a wall was never just paint to that program either. The current report doesn't reference COINTELPRO by name. It doesn't have to. The playbook of treating a message as a threat because of who might have written it is the same one.
What it means for the wall
Nobody is being arrested for a stencil today because of this memo alone. What changes is quieter than that. A beat cop who sees a fresh anti-government tag now has a federal document telling him it might mean more than vandalism. A department writing up an incident report has language ready to escalate it. The report is guidance, not law, but guidance shapes what gets reported, what gets photographed, and whose door gets knocked on.
Street art has always lived at the edge of what a city will tolerate on its own walls. This report moves that edge. It doesn't just ask whether a piece is legal. It asks what the piece might be warning you about, and hands that question to counterterrorism analysts instead of a public works crew with a roller.
Related reading from TasteBueno
- Austin Rolled Gray Paint Over 'Black Artists Matter' This Week. The State Ordered It Done.
- Philadelphia Spent $11.5 Million Erasing Graffiti at Its Front Door. The Neighborhoods Asking Loudest Got Nothing.
- Portland Spent Years Chasing a Tag Called Rango. It Ended With 150 Cans of Spray Paint and One 22-Year-Old's Arrest.
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