Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has 200 more reasons to hate graffiti vandals.
While the NYPD top cop announced last week that one of his biggest pet peeves was spray paint on city streets, police statistics obtained by The Post reveal that New Yorkers filed 211 more graffiti complaints this year compared with last year. That’s about a 5 percent spike citywide, from 3,956 to 4,167.
In Manhattan South, from Battery Park to 59th Street, there were 453 complaints this year as opposed to 398 — up nearly 14 percent.
The blight has crept up in every borough except Brooklyn, records show.
That’s a problem for Bratton, who touts the “broken-windows theory” of policing.
“The little transgressions beget larger transgressions,” explained NYPD spokesman Stephen Davis.
Davis said that some of the graffiti uptick is likely driven by competition between taggers to be seen among themselves and by the public. For that reason, painting over the vandalism is one part of the solution, he said.
“If we can reduce it to minutes of exposure, not days, that’s a deterrent,’’ he said. “In places where it’s a recurring problem, we can employ cameras.”