Officials Swap Tips on Battling Graffiti

Don’t try to tell Michael Parker and others who have to clean it up that graffiti is art. To them, it’s a multibillion-dollar-a-year nuisance.

Parker, who heads the war against graffiti in Long Beach, met last week in Denver with about 40 members of the National Graffiti Information Network for their first summit to swap tips about graffiti artists, how to erase the scrawl and how to set up community anti-graffiti programs.

“I really think it’s a misnomer to describe it as a pent-up artistic expression. That’s not the ticket,” said Parker, manager of the Long Beach Neighborhood Services Bureau. “It’s just the epitome of self-indulgence.”

The graffiti network’s members include city officials, community leaders and neighborhood volunteers. The organization was launched in January.

Network officials estimate that graffiti artists cause about $4 billion in damage each year as they leave their mark on underpasses, park benches, subways and almost anything else that stands still long enough to be painted.

In Long Beach, city officials spent about $600,000 last year to clean up the mess, according to Phyllis Venable, the city’s neighborhood improvement officer.

This year, Long Beach officials expect to cut costs through a 6-month-old program that requires some people who are convicted of misdemeanors to work on graffiti cleanup crews as part of their court-ordered community service, Venable said.

The city’s neighborhood services bureau, a branch of the community development department, oversees other programs that promote community revitalization. But getting a handle on graffiti is one of the bureau’s most frustrating tasks.

Once only seen in the poorer sections of town, graffiti now leaves its mark across the city, from light poles in affluent neighborhoods to tall palm trees lining Ocean Boulevard.

“We’ve got graffiti in Belmont Shore and Naples,” Venable said. “The neighbors there don’t know what to think. They associate it with inner-city areas.”

In Denver, Parker said he doesn’t believe that graffiti can be stopped completely, but that organizations such as the network may help contain it. “We’re close to getting as organized as they are,” he said.

Conference participants agreed that notoriety, peer pressure and self-esteem all figure into why people paint their names and murals in public places, but they said there is no single reason.

Times staff writer Roxana Kopetman contributed to this story.