PROVIDENCE — Now you see it, now you don’t.

That’s the way it went yesterday with the graffiti smeared on fences, Dumpsters, houses and commercial buildings in the Mount Pleasant, Elmhurst and Manton avenue areas. A mostly volunteer blitz bolstered by four teenage ex-taggers made quick work of graffiti at 27 locations.

Michael Correia, president of Providence Crime Watch, which organized the blitz with the mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, estimated that 90 percent of the graffiti in the three areas was either painted over or washed off.

The reformed graffiti taggers took the quality of their corrective work very seriously, said police Patrolman Anthony Corsetti, a school resource officer assigned to Mount Pleasant High School. They were among seven Mount Pleasant students rounded up by Corsetti and his school resource partner, Patrolman Derek Shields, as volunteer laborers.

Even as the Mount Pleasant teens worked, they critiqued the graffiti they were covering. Some of it was garbage, they said, but other pieces were called “heavy,” or high quality, according to Corsetti. None of it, apparently, was theirs.

Corsetti offered his own critique, calling out with a grin to the seven, “That looks good. You guys, maybe, come paint my house.”

Yesterday’s blitz was conducted by six members of Providence Crime Watch, the Mount Pleasant students, 8 to 10 members of Youthbuild and employees of the city’s Graffiti Task Force, and they were overseen by members of the staff of Mayor David N. Cicilline. Cicilline himself pitched in at the outset of the 1½-hour project, grabbing a roller and applying a good coat of paint over graffiti on a wall of Acme Liquors, 1023 Chalkstone Ave.

Besides the four ex-taggers, the Mount Pleasant contingent, according to Corsetti, included three teens who were likely to have become taggers. The group ranged in age from 14 to 17.

“They don’t realize the damage they do to people’s property,” Corsetti said. “They’re good kids. They need to express whatever they have [to say] on paper.” Some may have sufficient artistic ability to be enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, he speculated.

Corsetti said that he and Shields have tried to be mentors to the reformed taggers and the tagger wannabes, and that by working closely with the seven teens’ parents and with the high school administration, they have been able to turn the teens’ inclinations to more productive activities. The difference in these cases, compared with unsuccessful interventions, he said, is that these seven have sound family support.

Corsetti declined to identify the seven either by their given names or their tags, because they are minors and because he does not want them to be found out by troublemakers who would harass them.

The Providence Crime Watch and the Mount Pleasant resource officers were able to put a crimp in the tagging in and around Mount Pleasant earlier this year. Crime watch volunteers did some detective work on their own after a graffiti spree on Academy, Chalkstone and Manton avenues and Aldine Street. They gave Corsetti the first names of two suspected taggers, the fact that they were students at Mount Pleasant High School, and some photos of the graffiti they may have been responsible for.

“Officer Corsetti was really the one who identified who those two kids were,” Correia recalled yesterday. Nevertheless, in recognition of its preliminary work, the Crime Watch is to receive a $1,000 reward under the city’s revamped antigraffiti program.

The two vandals’ tags, according to Corsetti, were Base and Sed. Sed was a 14 year old who attended Mount Pleasant and Base, a 14 or 15 year old from the South Side who attended Hope High School, and they were friends who tagged together. They hit 13 properties, including two locations at Rhode Island College. Sed was charged with seven vandalism-related counts and Base, six.

Corsetti also was instrumental in the recent arrest of Halo — a tag for a Hope High student from the Hartford neighborhood — for vandalizing Pleasant View Elementary School with graffiti.

“I followed the breadcrumbs,” or their trail of self-identifying graffiti, Corsetti quipped. “I put the feelers out. They’re not ashamed to walk with their [graffiti] names on their bookbags” and act proud of their handiwork.

Yesterday, he pointed out the graffiti on Dumpsters behind Family Dollar store at 1030 Chalkstone Ave.

One of the curlicued tags, WDS, represents the acronym for the three-word name of a group of graffiti vandals that starts with the words “We Destroy.” The third word is a vulgarity.

The taggers often run in groups that follow a leader and have interchangeable members, according to Corsetti.

“They change players like trading cards,” he said.

Another scrawl was the tag Sane and the acronym PST, which Corsetti said used to stand for the group Providence Street Taggers.

“They’re always looking for a flat surface,” the patrolman said. “It’s their easel.”

Fueled by coffee and doughnuts, the volunteers yesterday used various color paints to eliminate graffiti at: Acme Liquors and behind Family Dollar; garages at 170 Regent Ave., which Correia said were marred by gang graffiti; the foundation of a house at 138 Regent; a business on Fallon Avenue; a house at 46 Andem St.; a business on Cliff Street; a business at 312 Valley St.; Brooks drug store on Academy; a combination house and business at 101 Academy; a house at 100 Hendrick St. and a garage at 116 Hendrick.

Also, a house at 1024 Atwells Ave.; businesses at 896 Atwells and at Parnell Street and Atwells; a house at 229 Carleton St.; a house at 9 Yale Ave.; a business at 32 Yale; businesses at 415 and 319 Manton Ave.; a business at 300 Amherst St.; and a commercial garage at 73 Maplehurst Ave.

The Graffiti Task Force, which travels the city in two vans towing power-washing machines, traveled a wider area than the volunteers did and eradicated graffiti at 10 Justice St., Elmhurst; 38 Wealth Ave. and Wolcott Street, both in the Valley neighborhood; and Lavaughn and Hannah streets, which are in Olneyville.

“We still have some more work in the Manton area to do,” Correia said.

gsmith@projo.com