Anaheim Punishes the Victim

This is a neighborhood that, one would guess, most residents aspire to leave. You get a feeling about this place, and that feeling is pretty scary if you don’t belong.

It’s in Anaheim, within sight of the tip of Disneyland’s Matterhorn, although not quite close enough to walk. The neighborhood park is called Ponderosa. There was an unsolved murder there about two months ago; the cops say it was over drugs.

I am here about the graffiti, though. It’s a problem, most everyone agrees, as are the drugs, and the shootings, robberies and crime in a general sense. The city’s graffiti-removal coordinator, who manages a volunteer group called “Wipe Out Graffiti in Anaheim,” places this neighborhood in the top 10, graffiti-wise, that is.

In other words, there are worse.

But somewhere, the city of Anaheim believes, you’ve got to draw the line. To wit, city officials are drawing it with one Jack Hanshaw, the owner of a rather seedy-looking strip mall a block from the park.

The city characterizes this man as a graffiti scofflaw extraordinaire, and it has charged him with four criminal counts. It says Hanshaw allowed graffiti to remain on his property and didn’t keep the building grounds clean.

The city’s lawsuit, scheduled for trial in Municipal Court later this month, says that Hanshaw was “maintaining a public nuisance,” and in essence, Anaheim ain’t going to take it anymore.

Except Hanshaw, who owns 19 shopping centers throughout Southern California, says the whole thing is an outrageous lie.

“It isn’t right,” he says. “If you are a slum lord, that’s another story. But I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Hanshaw says he doesn’t want to pay the city a red cent for his alleged crimes, on the principle of the thing. He says he always paints over the graffiti--four times alone last week--and was never cited for the three days in June when the city says it verified his alleged crimes.

In fact, Hanshaw just turned down the city’s plea bargain offer that would have fined him $200 in a civil action in exchange for dropping the criminal charges.

Only in Anaheim, Hanshaw says, have city officials tried to blame him for what is essentially an abdication of the responsibilities of their job.

Says his lawyer, Cheryl Thomas: “I’d love to have a jury trial. I think that the people would be irate.”

But John Poole, the city’s code-enforcement supervisor, suggests that it’s neighborhood residents who should be irate, that they are the ones suffering this blight of graffiti and trash. He notes that the city had received 10 complaints about Hanshaw’s property before.

“The city can’t manage people’s property,” he says. “He should hire a security guard to get those (gang members) off his property. I would think that if you get rid of those people, things would get better.”

And as for the matter of legal jurisdiction, Assistant City Atty. Mark Logan laughs when it is suggested that the matter might better be settled in civil court.

“In other words, take five years?” he asks with a hoot. “It just doesn’t work.”

Yet it may be argued that Anaheim’s iron-fisted approach toward controlling graffiti in gang war zones raises questions of workability itself, and who knows, maybe constitutionality, as well.

Should Hanshaw be punished for a crime committed by somebody else? It seems a questionable tack in the admittedly thankless job of trying to keep the city well-scrubbed.

And the odds are very good that the graffiti will appear around here again.

“Weasel,” hanging out with his homeys the other day in front of the strip mall’s market and liquor store, points to the momentarily graffiti-free outer wall of the store.

“You want, you should come tomorrow,” Weasel tells me, with a cocky grin. “All that’s going to be covered.”

Weasel’s a skinny guy with a cigarette tucked behind his ear. Like the rest of the homeys, he’s got his gang name tattooed on his skin. They all demand that I write down their names in my notes.

For now, the strip mall is painted a reasonable facsimile of clean, except for the scrawled-over signs warning loiterers that they are subject to arrest. The owners of the small businesses in the mall say that the arrest part is pretty much a joke.

Alfredo Torres, who owns Casas Video, says the police should patrol the area round-the-clock to keep the gangbangers from leaving their mark. He adds, however, that when he suggested this to an officer the other day, he told him he and the other merchants should pool resources to pay for the protection they need.

Only they don’t have the money for that.

And Torres says that he, personally, won’t call the police to rid the sidewalk of the loiterers, many of them openly dealing drugs.

“You call the police, they come into your store,” he says. “Then the (expletive) see who it was that called and they could smash your windows or hurt your kids.”

“Little Man,” meantime, points to the gigantic gang initials spray-painted on the apartment building across the street. He boasts that he did it, and who can say whether it’s true.

No matter. This guy sort of struts when he says it, he’s so proud that his gang is a force around here.

Such is the vicious cycle at work.