A Hunger for Attention Propels Taggers on Their Nightly Rounds

The four teen-agers sauntered down a darkened Long Beach street until they reached a delivery truck parked at the curb. Three of the four stationed themselves as lookouts. The fourth approached the truck’s broad white side.

He produced a spray can from under his coat and painted in quick, deft strokes. Moments later, the only trace of the outlaws was their handiwork: a string of black, stylized letters marking the fleeting presence of these vandals of the night.

Time elapsed: about 20 seconds.

“I like to see my name up,” said a 15-year-old called Acer, one of the lookouts on that recent night.

“What a bunch of jerks,” says Paul Miranda, a homeowner who lives nearby.

This is no ordinary graffiti, but a quick-hit variety known as tagging. The challenge as the youths see it is to be the fastest, the boldest, to scrawl one’s name on the most surfaces in the shortest time. The challenge for authorities is to try to stem the staggering increase in property damage that results.

Indeed, tagging, imported from the subways of New York City, has dramatically proliferated on the streets, buses and freeway overpasses of Southern California. Stylized insignias are everywhere, and they are frustrating law enforcement officials, neighborhood leaders and taxpayers who pay millions annually for cleanup.

But a strange transformation has occurred somewhere along the route from East Coast urban plague to West Coast youth craze. Police say that tagging, long associated with gang activity, has become more or less a street sport in Los Angeles, albeit a destructive one.

Tag teams of teen-agers compete for style and space. Star performers worry about their reputations among peers. Leaders hold practice sessions to improve the skills of their teammates.

“It’s better than being in a gang,” said one member of a Long Beach-based tagging crew called Knocking off Suckas--or KOS. “This is a hobby.”

KOS members--who generally carry markers with them and admit to spending many of their waking hours tagging--say they know of at least six other active tag teams in Long Beach alone.

In Los Angeles, they say, dozens of other known crews patrol the streets, including the Notorious Kings (NTSK); Kings With Style (KWS); King Time Lords (KTL) and Under The Influence (UTI).

Generally based in the neighborhood where its members live or attend school, a crew may have hundreds of adherents between the ages of 9 and 18.

When tagging, the youngsters inscribe their crew’s initials along with their own stylized “signatures,” or tag names. Favorite targets include trucks, sound walls, buses, buildings and street signs--any surface that is likely to be seen by large numbers of people.

Strategies for reaching overhead freeway signs include shimmying down embankments or overpasses to get to them, the youths say.

“We just want to be known all over the city,” said a tagger who goes by the name Crazie.

“We’re just signing our autographs, but on walls,” said another, known as Saker.

But what of the anguish, exasperation and cleanup costs the taggers cause homeowners, store owners, other property owners and government agencies?

“We don’t care,” a youth called Biser said. “They don’t do nothing for us.”

Psychologists who have examined the phenomenon say personal and group recognition is a big part of what fuels the trend. There is little understanding of the realities of property damage.

“These are people who don’t feel that they have any recognition or power in the world,” said Robert Butterworth, a Los Angeles psychologist who specializes in youth trends. “This is their way of making the only statement that they know how to make and, at least in their group, it makes an impression.”

B. David Brooks, a psychologist and educator who trains police how to deal with gang members and graffiti artists, agrees. “It’s a way that they build a pseudo self-esteem,” he said of taggers. “They get a big rush.”

The number of taggers in Los Angeles County is estimated to be 3,000 to 5,000, up to four times what it was believed to be in 1986, experts say. Originally, many came from lower-income Latino backgrounds, but tagging has begun to draw practitioners from almost all ethnic and economic groups, including upper-middle-class kids.

“In the last year, it’s really gotten out of hand,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Robert Contreras, adding that the youths seem more and more unrepentant. “Now it’s more of a sport. It’s no longer just gangs.”

On the streets, tag crews tend to stay within their neighborhoods and in some cases even assign specific areas to specific taggers. But occasional “battles” do break out. Recently, for instance, KOS members decided to take on a crew called BES for encroaching on their turf. During a single day of concerted “mobbing,” the taggers said, they virtually “took out” the rival club by covering each of its painted insignias with one of their own.

The results of all this spraying, marking and inscribing, of course, have been devastating to the property owners, local municipalities and public agencies that have been hit.

The Southern California Rapid Transit District, whose buses are favored targets, spent about $10 million in 1989 cleaning the stuff off--three times what it spent just four years ago. During the past year, according to RTD officials, a special anti-graffiti unit has cited or arrested more than 800 people--most of them juveniles--for vandalism. Yet the problem keeps getting worse.

Many cities have increased the amount of money set aside for battling graffiti, and some law enforcement agencies are offering sizable rewards for information leading to the arrests of taggers. They are also trying to catch taggers by videotaping their activities.

Residents of some areas are beginning to fight back by organizing informal neighborhood patrols to either ward off or capture the vandals in the midst of their destructive behavior.

“People are really getting disturbed by all this garbage,” said Miranda, a retired city employee who has lived in the same Long Beach neighborhood for 35 years. “(Residents) are going to have to start taking care of what’s important to them--this is our community and we have to start doing something. We can’t just let these idiotic little jerks go around painting everything.”

Said a Long Beach parks employee who spends much of his time painting over graffiti-splattered walls: “We just painted and it’s back up already. It makes us feel like we’re wasting time.”

Getting caught isn’t much of a deterrent. Although tagging is a misdemeanor carrying fines of $40 to $250 for repeat offenders, law enforcement officials say first-time offenders often get off with a warning or probation. Some judges are beginning to mete out public-service sentences that include time spent cleaning up graffiti, but officials say the tactic so far has not had a measurable effect.

“The judges lecture them up one side and down the other,” said Art Close, a Lakewood attorney who has represented taggers, “but what can you do when you have a kid coming in at 14 for a minor offense while you have other guys coming in for rape and murder? Looking at the judges’ caseloads, (they) can’t spend much time on this type of offense.”

At a recent gathering of KOS members at a Long Beach park where they meet about every two weeks, the legal ramifications for their actions were low on the agenda.

“I want you guys to know how to write,” 14-year-old Ciper told the more than 20 kids sitting quietly at picnic tables, some marking their names on the wood. “I want you to learn. You guys know my phone number--if you need any help, just ask me.”

In recent months, Ciper told his followers, he had personally “booted” a number of taggers from the group. The quality of their tagging styles had fallen below club standards, he said, which require tags to be attractive and have letters that match.

“Wherever you guys live,” said Saker, another tagger, “try to write more. We want everyone to know KOS. If you get caught, don’t let that stop you.”

At night, on the streets and alleyways, the obsession gets fully vented. After marking up the white delivery truck on a recent evening, the KOS team fanned out quickly on both sides of the street, defacing signposts and storefronts.

Earlier the same night they had been threatened by a gang member who, apparently mistaking them for rivals, had waved a gun in their faces. So now, they figured, they had two enemies, the gangs and the police. Shortly afterward, a third one appeared--a man who worked in one of the buildings the crew was tagging. Stepping outside, he questioned them pointedly, shook a fist, and appeared to make for a telephone.

The taggers scattered in panic. Then, running down a side street, they regrouped in front of a large clean block wall, only to have to retreat again moments later when the headlights of a passing car appeared.

Finally, they reached an alley in which the lights were low and the traffic sparse. They sprayed and marked with impunity, hitting garage doors and back-yard walls as they went. As they emptied spray cans, they dropped them where they were and resumed the assault with grease markers.

In less than an hour the taggers had made a wide loop of several blocks, ending at the burger joint from which they had begun.

“It’s a habit,” explained a tagger called Dsire. “Once you start, you can’t stop.”

“It’s addictive,” Saker said. “You see someone’s name up there and you just want yours up too.”