Cleaning Up Their Act : Spray-Paint Vandals Sentenced to Remove Graffiti Under New Court Policy

A 20-year-old gang member, leaning on the back of a graffiti cleanup truck Thursday, acknowledged that putting gang markings on walls is a lot easier than taking them off.

“You ‘strike up’ a wall without really thinking about it. You just do it because there is nothing better to do,” he said of his past work with a can of spray paint. “When you’ve got to clean it off, then you know it takes a lot of work and it costs a lot of money. It makes you think.”

He should know. After pleading guilty to misdemeanor vandalism this month after his arrest for defacing a park wall, he was sentenced to 100 hours of community service--cleaning graffiti off public buildings, buses and structures.

The young man’s lesson is one that authorities hope to begin teaching more often.

Los Angeles officials announced Thursday that ordering vandals to “clean up their own mess” will become a sentencing standard in a new effort to crack down on the graffiti problem.

“We are going to vigorously prosecute these individuals,” City Councilman Richard Alatorre said during a press conference at a graffiti-marred bus stop on Kingston Avenue near downtown. “We are going to force the individuals to clean up their own mess. We have gotten to the point in this city that we are tired of spending the money” to hire cleaners.

Alatorre said that more than $50 million is spent in California each year to clean up graffiti.

RTD Spends $8 Million

The Southern California Rapid Transit District spends about $8 million annually to clean its fleet of 2,400 buses.

Alatorre, flanked by representatives of the RTD, Los Angeles police and the city attorney’s office, said previous efforts to crack down on inner city graffiti were “haphazard.” The new effort will have “all of the components” of the criminal justice system working together, he said.

The first step, officials agree, is catching more of the vandals.

Authorities said RTD police have created a graffiti task force and Los Angeles police will also increase efforts to catch vandals. But they declined to reveal specific methods that will be used.

Bob Ferber, assistant supervisor of the city attorney’s gang unit, said his office will now routinely seek a two-part sentence for individuals convicted of the misdemeanor.

“We are going to go for as much jail time as we can get. And no matter what we get, we are going to insist that (the defendants) be forced to clean up the graffiti,” Ferber said.

Jaime R. Corral, presiding judge of the Northeast Juvenile Justice Center, said several judges have ordered vandals to clean up their own graffiti in the past, but the new effort will make such orders a matter of policy.

“These kids will be automatically expected to do some graffiti cleanup,” he said. “It will be a deterrent, we hope.”

Gene Anderson, the justice center’s coordinator of programs for juvenile offenders, also praised the new effort.

“It gives me another place to put kids where the punishment is more appropriate,” he said.

Civic organizations such as Community Youth Gang Services will supervise the graffiti cleanups, officials said. Alatorre said the city has set aside $500,000 to fund the organizations that will handle the supervision.

After Thursday’s press conference, a Youth Gang Services team set to work cleaning graffiti off the walls at the Kingston Avenue bus stop. One member of the team was the 20-year-old gang member. He declined to give his name. He said he had been arrested for painting the initials of his gang, Marijuanos Locos Sur, on a wall in South Los Angeles.

He said it will probably take him three weeks to work off his 100 hours of community service and added that his graffiti-writing days are over.

“It has gotten me off the walls,” he said. “I won’t drop out of the gang, no. But I think I’ll leave the graffiti to the younger guys after this.”