This guy removes graffiti to 'help' his city. Why are New Yorkers calling him the villain?
by Anna Good · BuzzFeedPosted on Oct 20, 2026 UTC
YouTuber Patrick, better known online as SweetP, has made it his recent mission to clean up graffiti and stickers on New York City mailboxes. One might see this and assume it's just a random good deed, but not everyone is happy with his efforts.
In a recent video shared by Spectrum News NY1, SweetP is confronted by one such angry New Yorker. In the video, the man said he was being disrespectful to all the artists who painted, drew, and put stickers on the mailboxes, calling it a "**** you to me." So how did we get here?
Patrick's reasoning for his project appears to be a pretty noble one: he is attempting to maintain the mailboxes because the graffiti and stickers on them are causing rust to form. He wants to keep the boxes running for as long as possible without needing to be replaced.
"There's a lot of rust that forms on the legs," he explained to NY1. "What happens is the bottom starts rusting out. And these boxes provide mail to hundreds and hundreds of people on every single block. Unfortunately, what happens is stickers do get covered up, and graffiti does get covered up."
"It seems like, comical, you're trying to preserve a mailbox, but it's like, do you want to get your mail? Somebody's got to preserve it."
However, NY1's regular video turned interesting when a decided to confront SweetP while he was working on a mailbox by asking how long he had lived in NYC.
My guess is that he was trying to prove that Patrick wasn’t a local, and therefore his disrespect came from not knowing NYC graffiti culture.
Phone in hand to record the interaction, the fellow New Yorker said, "I'm an artist. And like, I painted boxes, so I just know that a lot of people in New York, in a sense, you're disrespecting every person that has put a sticker on it."
One person on YouTube commented, "If he were a real street artist, he would completely understand that nothing is permanent. He may be covering old graffiti, but he's also creating a whole new canvas for new graffiti. That's the nature of the beast."
Comments on not only the Spectrum News video, but others posted by SweetP show just how truly divided people are about his mission.
"Hot take: The graffiti in a city is what gives it character," commented one TikToker.
On a video where he restored a historic fire call box (complete with gold paint and details that made it, he said, city code-compliant), reactions ranged from loving his work to saying he destroyed the fixture's history by removing the stickers and tags.
"'Let’s fix it' ruins it dude those stickers and graffiti are history and shows how truly old it actually is," another person added.