A police officer, with his dog on a lead beside him. Both are turned towards a wall, examining the graffiti on it. The officer reads the writing, the dog sniffs for a scent. It is a classic crime scene inspection, except the crime is nothing more than a sentence.

What is written on the wall reads: “Stop Me Before I Paint Again.”

The whole piece is built on this loop. The police officer is searching for a clue, but the clue he is looking for is already standing right in front of him, mocking him. The culprit’s signature, confession and challenge are all combined in that one sentence. The more the officer reads it, the more he strengthens the offender’s hand, because the only reason that sentence exists is to be read.

The sentence itself is a game of its own. The phrase “stop me” belongs to the language of addiction. It is the plea of someone who cannot control himself, whose willpower has been taken from him. When Banksy applies this pattern to graffiti, the act stops being a crime and becomes a compulsion. The artist is not defending himself here. He is presenting himself as someone in need of treatment. And this is precisely what makes him untouchable. You can punish an offender, but how do you deal with a compulsion?

The dog is the sharpest detail in the scene. A police dog is trained to find what a human cannot see. It tracks, it follows a scent. But paint leaves no scent trail. A dog set on the trail of a piece of graffiti is looking for something it can never actually catch, because the crime is right there in plain sight, and it was made to be seen in the first place.

The authority’s helplessness here is not physical but conceptual. The state can erase graffiti, paint over it, punish it. The one thing it cannot do is stop it from happening again. That is exactly what the sentence on the wall is saying: stop me, because I will not be able to stop.