As Soon as Lomita Taggers Put Up Handiwork, Committee Rubs It Out

“Don’t let the sun rise on graffiti.”

Inspired by this motto--and aided by the city’s maintenance crew--the Lomita Anti-Gang & Graffiti Committee took paint and brushes in hand earlier this year to clean the city of gang-related scrawling. Today, Lomita is virtually graffiti free.

“As soon as (graffiti taggers) put it up, we take it down,” said Cindy Beiro, the committee’s chairwoman. “That is the biggest deterrent. It is of no value to them if it’s down before it’s seen.”

Last February, the City Council, irritated by a surge of graffiti in residential neighborhoods and commercial areas, appointed seven residents to tackle the problem. The committee enlisted the help of the Sheriff’s Department and established a 24-hour-a-day hot line so residents can anonymously report tagging. Beiro says the hot line gets about eight calls a day.

Volunteers who monitor the hot line report the graffiti to the city’s maintainance crew, which responds as soon as possible to wipe out the taggers’ sometimes obscene work. Sometimes committee members personally get rid of the graffiti, as they did during a paint-out in September, but usually the work is done by the city.

By distributing flyers and through word of mouth, the committee encourages Lomita residents to come to its monthly meetings, where sheriff’s deputies keep them up to date on the graffiti problem.

Through the committee’s efforts, Lomita residents have become the “eyes and ears” of the Sheriff’s Department, watching for loitering groups of youngsters with aerosol cans. Typically, a resident who sees a tagging crew is asked to call the hot line (325-3694) and give the name of the crew, if it is known, and the location of the graffiti.

“The deputies were skeptical at first,” Sheriff’s Capt. Bill Mangan said. “They thought it was an overwhelming problem that no one could fix. But it’s been real quiet the last three months. They have been real instrumental in erasing the graffiti.”

No statistics are available on the amount of graffiti in Lomita, but Mangan said that over the summer there was hardly any evidence of tagging.

Several local groups and businesses have joined the graffiti fight. The Torrance Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce and the Kiwanettes, a high school service group for girls that had been cleaning graffiti at Narbonne High School, support the committee. The committee hopes the Kiwanettes will be an example to students as they try to keep the school free of graffiti.

Lomita Plastics Co. and Golden State Paints have donated materials to the cleaning crews.

Before graffiti is removed, members of the committee photograph it. They also keep a map of all tagged locations, including businesses and homes, to record how often certain areas are tagged.

Among the most frequently hit are the stores along Lomita Boulevard between Western Avenue and Walnut Street, the Pic & Save store on Pacific Coast Highway and the wall at the corner of Ebony Lane and 253rd Street, which has been marred 19 times since the beginning of the year. Beiro says these are popular targets because they are close to where the taggers live.

The graffiti-spraying pranksters include some gang members from surrounding cities, and also include youngsters from local tagging crews who are not affiliated with gangs. They bear such names as Lomita 13, Lomita Marijuana Patch Kids (MPKs), Easy Stepping Queens and Kings (ESQs and ESKs), Down to Destroy (D2Ds) and Dope Is Sweet (DIS). The taggers spray-paint their abbreviated tag names as a territorial symbol.

“These kids ‘get up’ on climbing a wall and scribbling their tag names from top to bottom,” Beiro said. “They do it within seconds. And for them, it’s a physical high.”

Through the network it has established with the Sheriff’s Department and the community, the committee has been able to identify some of these youths and report their criminal activities to their parents.

Parents are alerted rather than law enforcement agencies because state law require that taggers be caught in the act by a deputy or police officer before they can be prosecuted. However, parents who are witnesses to their child’s involvement in tagging can turn the child over to the Sheriff’s Department.

Some committee members are so committed to graffiti removal that they have turned loved ones over to the department.

Beiro, for one, turned in a relative. The child was placed in the court-sponsored South Bay Diversion program, where he was given psychiatric counseling once a week for 10 weeks. Taggers can qualify for the diversion program if they are first offenders and have committed no other serious crimes. Placement in the program is at the discretion of the Sheriff’s Department.

Now that tagging is on the wane in Lomita, the committee is trying to develop preventive programs to stop graffiti completely.

Committee members are making an educational video for the Lomita and Eshelman Avenue elementary schools with $2,100 in donations from the City Council and the Community Reclamation Project, an organization that has been working in several South Bay cities to rid neighborhoods of gang violence, drugs and crime.

The committee hopes that the video will discourage Lomita students from joining gangs and becoming taggers. Committee members say they want to spread the message to the children that “graffiti offends everyone, no matter what it says.”