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Ghost Bus Tries to Snare the Taggers : Graffiti: Squad of RTD police attempts to rein in a problem that now costs about $10 million a year to clean up. The officers say they are losing the battle.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

At first glance, the bus looked like a good target to a pack of young taggers who had been spraying Southern California Rapid Transit District buses that stopped on Vernon Avenue near Leimert Park in Los Angeles.

But this was the Ghost Bus, a Trojan horse unit that carried eight undercover transit cops working on the Graffiti Habitual Offender Suppression Team--called the Ghost squad. As the bus squealed to a stop, the cops inside waited for the taggers to make the first move.

Unbeknown to the young vandals, an RTD camera hidden in a nearby building was filming the action that day as the kids mobbed each bus, swiftly making the distinctive marks they call “tags.” One tagger even jumped up on the front bumper of a bus and, reaching over the windshield, sprayed his marks on the destination sign.

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When the Ghost Bus pulled up, its doors remained closed. That was unusual--and made the kids leery. They milled about, ready to run but not wanting to show fear. One teen-ager slipped off a backpack loaded with extra spray cans and tried to hide it in a doorway.

Just then the bus doors banged open and RTD cops spilled onto the sidewalk, yelling “Police!” and “Freeze!”

The taggers scattered like quail and the chase was on. Nearly half got away, but 15 were captured, wrestled to the sidewalk and frisked, then arrested for vandalism, according to Sgt. Shari Barberic, commander of the transit police’s special anti-graffiti unit.

For Barberic and her graffiti-fighters, this episode was a small victory in a much larger war that they acknowledge they are losing. The arrests were made during the morning rush hour on July 14, but the action could have taken place any time and any place along RTD routes in Southern California.

An estimated 3,000 taggers are operating in RTD service areas. RTD officials report the cost of cleaning up graffiti and repairing the damage caused by vandals has reached $10 million a year, three times what was being spent just four years ago.

“It (tagging) has spread like wildfire,” said Barberic, the RTD’s graffiti expert. Groups of taggers work inside the buses, too, sometimes terrorizing and robbing passengers, she said.

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Trying to fight back with just 15 officers assigned to anti-graffiti duty, she said, is “like spitting into the wind.”

In the 12 months it has been operating, the anti-graffiti unit has cited or arrested 808 people, most of them juveniles, reports show. The juveniles usually were cited for vandalism and released. But officers did arrest 152 people for more serious misdemeanors and 20 for felonies.

There is little to deter the taggers because vandalism, a misdemeanor, carries light fines that range from $40 up to $250 for repeat offenders, Barberic said.

Using the Ghost Bus is just one of the unit’s tactics. Sometimes undercover officers ride the regular buses, followed by a backup car. Other times they stake out a bus stop or patrol the routes, but the problem is so big that no tactic works for very long.

One recent afternoon, Barberic and six other team members climbed into bus 8566--a beat-up old vehicle with graffiti scratched on the plastic windows--and began trolling reported hot spots. Hours went by without any hits. Then, pulling up to the curb by the Annandale School on Poppy Peak Drive and North Figueroa Street, near the Los Angeles-Pasadena boundary, they got some action.

Children were playing basketball in the schoolyard and several older kids were hanging around the bus stop. As the bus stopped, four teen-agers walked behind the vehicle, out of sight. Inside the bus, the officers waited for Barberic’s command. When she yelled “Go!” they were out the doors.

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Three of the teen-agers froze; the fourth ran but was quickly caught and handcuffed by officers in the backup car. But when the officers inspected the bus for damage, they found no new marks. The youngsters were questioned and released.

In the cat-and-mouse game played out every day, these kids had faked a graffiti hit and got the last laugh, several of the officers agreed later.

There is a serious side to the Ghost Bus duty. The officers have automatic pistols and handcuffs hidden under their scruffy clothing. Sometimes they encounter armed gang members who use spray cans to mark off their territory and who fight deadly wars over turf.

While some taggers may belong to gangs, most of them “are kids who need something to do,” Barberic said. “They have a lot of creative energy and want attention. . . . Tagging gives it to them.”

Tagging started in New York City a decade ago, where graffiti had already reached epidemic proportions in the subways operated by the New York Transit Authority. It has since spread to metropolitan areas, and transit officials in other areas acknowledge the problem is getting out of control.

After years of unsuccessful efforts to crack down on the vandals by tough police work, New York officials say they discovered the best way to fight back was to make sure all graffiti was cleaned off the trains--immediately. Now, no car is allowed out of the rail yards with graffiti on it, and trains that get marked are quickly taken out of service.

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“By not allowing any graffiti to be seen, we hit on the motivation,” said Albert O’Leary, spokesman for the New York transit police. “We learned (the taggers) derived their warped sense of celebrity from seeing their tag cruising around New York on the trains . . . and we took that away from them. It took six years to do, but now we’re clean.”

The RTD has stepped up its bus-cleaning efforts, but many buses still rumble by with graffiti marks on them. And the district relies heavily on the Ghost unit to police the problem, at a cost of $570,000 a year.

In the process, Barberic and her team have become experts on taggers who use names like Whiz or Rust. These taggers belong to “crews” with names like Kids Commit Crime (KCC) or Abuse Public Transit (APT), and, when they put up their tags, they also mark their crew initials and the date.

The Ghost unit has dossiers on 800 taggers working in 200 crews across the Southland, said Barberic, who estimates there are 3,000 taggers working in areas served by the RTD.

Along with their spray cans, markers and knifelike “scribers”--used to scratch tags on plastic windows and metal--the taggers sometimes carry guns or slingshots, she said. A growing number are now terrorizing bus passengers and, on occasion, committing strong-arm robberies, she said.

Last fall a tagger stabbed a bus driver. The wounds, inflicted by a small, sharp-bladed scriber, were minor and the attack occurred after the driver had tried to stop a pair of taggers from vandalizing his bus, Barberic said.

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The case might never have been solved if it were not for the tagger’s desire for notoriety. The tagger who stabbed the driver telephoned RTD police to taunt them and brag about his skills. He proudly used his tag name and, in the course of one call, admitted the violent crime.

Then, by chance, his tag turned up in a “phone book” seized during the arrest of another tagger in a different case. These little notebooks contain tags and phone numbers so taggers can keep track of each other, Barberic said. Police telephoned the boy, offered him a job cleaning graffiti from the buses and arrested him when he showed up, she said.

Fame, not crime, is the taggers’ goal. They seem willing to go to any length to get recognition, even posing for photos of their work. Some have even agreed to be filmed by RTD investigators.

“You’ve got to be bold,” one San Fernando Valley tagger said on camera, explaining the risk of getting caught was worth the thrill of seeing buses “take my name through the city.”

Chaka, a 16-year-old youth now in custody, agreed to be interviewed on videotape. In the film, Chaka told Barberic he belonged to the Interstate Freeway Killers (IFK) and that he worked “walls,” not buses. He had been arrested by RTD police for jaywalking and carrying a phony RTD pass, Barberic said, and was later turned over to Los Angeles police, who charged him with 88 counts of vandalism.

Working only late at night, Chaka said he put up as many as 75 tags before sunrise, using up seven cans of paint. He estimated he had done 2,000 jobs, large and small. To supply his need for paint, he told Barberic, he stole spray cans from auto parts stores.

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In the film, he demonstrated the quick “throw-up,” swiftly writing his tag in black, then switched techniques, taking more time to create a stylized cartoon of his name in balloon letters. These “throw-ups” are fun, but the more deliberate “pieces” done in two or more colors, are his pride.

While Barberic acknowledges that many of the taggers are creative, she said she is exasperated by the costly problems they cause. And she is pessimistic about stemming the growing tide of graffiti.

“There is no way to stop this,” she said. “We can’t get enough police. . . . We don’t have enough power to wipe it out.”

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