Thousand Oaks to Crack Down on Graffiti Taggers

Thousand Oaks law enforcement officials have announced plans to crack down on local youths suspected of being responsible for a recent outbreak of graffiti.

Unlike the gang-related monikers spray-painted on buildings to mark territory, the graffiti turning up in Thousand Oaks is being blamed on middle-class youths called “taggers” who have no known ties to gangs.

“They’re kids who think it’s great fun to deface anything. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a city bus or a sign or a side of a building,” Ventura County Sheriff’s Cmdr. William Wade said. “And it’s our children who are doing this. It’s not kids from another area.”

Councilman Alex Fiore said the city spent $45,000 cleaning up graffiti on public property last year, and the number of incidents is going up.

“They do these small symbols and some of them have done hundreds of them,” said Fiore, who heads the city’s crime prevention task force.

Existing ordinances allow the city to recover the costs of cleaning up graffiti from a person convicted of spray-painting graffiti on public property, Deputy City Atty. Nancy Kierstyn Schreiner said.

Fiore has asked the city attorney’s office to look into a law that would also allow the city to charge minors’ parents for the cost of cleaning up their handiwork.

“If we apprehend them, I think they should be held responsible,” Fiore said.

Last year, the city removed graffiti from 15 to 50 locations each month. Between January and June this year, that number increased to between 37 and 90 locations each month. Figures have not been compiled since then, but “if anything, that number’s going up,” city Public Works Director John Clement said.

Taggers have scrawled on private houses, businesses, freeway and street signs, light poles, flood-control channels and bridges.

Clement said the city’s full-time graffiti crews have been busy painting over the markings or spraying chemicals on signs that cannot be painted over.

“We’re out every morning. There’s regular areas of town that always get hit,” he said. “In some areas it tends to be a game with some people. Our crews literally have eyeballed people sitting watching them remove graffiti. And as soon as they drive off, all of a sudden it’s back again.”

Maintenance crew leader Frank Lepold said that Mondays are usually the worst because taggers have all weekend to wreak their mischief.

Taggers hit the Firestone store on Thousand Oaks Boulevard three times in the past month, manager Ron Watkins said. Last week, Watkins repainted a back wall facing the freeway that was covered with 3-foot-tall letters. He did it so quickly, he said, that he couldn’t remember what it said.

“For a while there, they were hitting us every couple of days,” Watkins said. “It costs us time and effort, and that’s valuable.”

Wade said the trend mirrors the handiwork of taggers in Los Angeles who scrawl meaningless words on freeway ramps all over the county. Some of the local taggers have been arrested more than once.

“We arrested a young lady on multiple counts not too long ago, and she was writing ‘SANE,’ ” Wade said. “We asked her what ‘SANE’ was, and she said ‘Nothing. It has no meaning.’ It’s characteristic. They just take a name or a set of letters or whatever. That’s what they do.”

Each time maintenance crews have to clean up graffiti on public property, it costs $200 to $500 to remove, city officials said.