Anti-Graffiti Rally Wins Councilmen’s Promises of More Money, Workers

As more than 500 members cheered and shouted their approval, a San Fernando Valley community-action group Sunday extracted pledges from elected officials to step up efforts to combat graffiti.

Speaking in English and Spanish during a two-hour assembly that had overtones of a church revival meeting, leaders of VOICE, or Valley Organized in Community Efforts, warned that graffiti promotes vandalism, gang activity and community deterioration.

“We are facing a problem of community ownership,” Father Jim Dukowski of Mary Immaculate Catholic Church in Pacoima told the organization’s members in a Cal State Northridge auditorium. “Who is in charge of our neighborhoods--us or the gangs?”

The meeting marked the opening of a campaign to persuade authorities to earmark more money and manpower for the elimination of graffiti in schools, parks, businesses and other locations. The group claims more than 34,000 members, most of them drawn from 19 churches and synagogues across the Valley.

Several members testified about the disruptive influence graffiti has had on their neighborhoods. A woman told of going to her North Hollywood temple one morning to find it defaced with spray-painted swastikas and obscenities.

“I stood in front of my temple and I felt as if someone had stabbed a knife into my heart,” said Lori Dinkin. “All the emotions I felt in Nazi Germany, where I grew up, surfaced again.”

In response to questions by group leaders, Los Angeles City Councilmen Joel Wachs and Zev Yaroslavsky promised to work to see that the council sets aside $3 million in next year’s budget for anti-graffiti activities and passes a law requiring spray-paint sellers to keep their wares in locked cases. Group members said most graffiti vandals use stolen aerosol cans.

In an interview after the meeting, Yaroslavsky criticized city graffiti removal efforts as “very slow.” He said Los Angeles spends about $500,000 annually on graffiti removal, a figure he said should be “quadrupled or quintupled.”

Group leaders also extracted a promise from Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn to convene a meeting of judges to encourage them to sentence more misdemeanor violators to supervised graffiti-removal crews.

VOICE spokeswoman Lois Pinch said local judges sentence only 15% or less of convicted misdemeanants to anti-graffiti details. She said the group wants judges to revise their policies so that 80% of those convicted of misdemeanor crimes are used to fight graffiti.

Organized a year ago, the group is associated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, a creation of the late Saul Alinsky, a Chicago-based community and labor organizer and author of “Rules for Radicals,” a community organizing handbook.

The organization has successfully pressured city officials to remove abandoned cars from East Valley streets and to act against drug-dealing at a park in a Latino neighborhood in San Fernando.