Scrutinizing Work of Taggers, Gangsters, Street Artists : <i> Graffiti Tagger: I’m an artist. County Supervisor Gloria Molina: No, you are a criminal.</i> --Dialogue at March 2 “Graffiti Summit”

Street gangs and graffiti tagger crews aren’t the same thing.

But they’re increasingly doing some of the same criminal things.

As that happens, more and more mainstream publications are focusing on both groups. Meanwhile, like every other microfaction of society, taggers and gangsters often reveal themselves more clearly in their own niche magazines.

For example, Teen Angels (P.O. Box 338, Rialto, Calif. 92376) features art, poetry and photographs of Latino street gangsters, who pay $5 or more to get their material published.

On its first page, the magazine informs readers that it belongs to the American Civil Liberties Union and the Free Press Assn.

It is, it says, a “ ‘Gang’ Rights Activist News Agency Organization dedicated to informing the barrio Youth of their Civil Rights and Liberties as defined in the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Hidalgo Treaty between the U.S. and Mexico.”

In stylized photographs, gangsters from sets such as the “Santa Monica Suicidals” and the “San Fer Jokers” strike stylized poses, glowering and throwing hand signs.

Their monikers--Spooky, Silent, Giggles, Dreamer--are scratched graffiti-style into the photos.

Other pages feature street art-style drawings of lowriders and old cruiser cars, buffed-out dudes and buxom young women, and love letters and poems, many of them connecting incarcerated gangsters with their lovers and friends on the streets.

Most touching, and disturbing, are the photographs of babies, posed gangster-style, with notes such as: “We loves you mommy--Li’l Anthony and Li’l Freddie, Li’l Valley Gang.”

Juxtapose that with another lovingly arranged photo of automatic weapons, and you’ve got a graphic illustration of how gang violence recycles through generations.

Can Control (P.O. Box 406, North Hollywood, Calif. 91603) is a different sort of magazine. Editor Tim Preacy, 26, calls it the first graffiti magazine, and the only one that’s lasted.

The cover art on issue No. 4, a large canvas by “Relm and Sandow,” is fresh and interesting. But most of the work featured makes you wonder if someone hasn’t stenciled Ralph Bakshi, Franzetta or Ron Cobb paint-by-numbers outlines on every wall in America.

Unlike the hyperactive taggers who strike as often and conspicuously as possible, graffiti artists go for quality not quantity.

Troubling, though, is the iconography that taggers now share with so-called “gangstas.” One ad in Can Control, for instance, features a grinning young man with the de rigueur artiste goatee. Super-imposed behind him is a huge .38 handgun.

Word is that the once-harmless tagger posses and graffiti art crews prowling the city are now arming themselves against predatory street gangsters--and shooting themselves and others in the process.

Still, regardless of what you think of gangbangers and graffiti artists, Teen Angels and Can Control speak to their audiences directly and authentically.

What Dirt magazine does is much more annoying.

Dirt is Sassy magazine’s brother publication: Sassy for boys. Beyond that it doesn’t really define its audience. But you can pretty much discern that it consists of bored adolescent suburbanites.

In question here is an interview with “Philip,” a self-described graffiti writer and gangster. The article, by Dirt reporter Spike Jonze, is a straight-ahead Q & A.

But do the mommies and daddies who presumably spring for Dirt subscriptions know what their presumably latchkey darlings are reading?

Judging from Philip’s rap, it’s unlikely he’d offer more resistance than a speed bump to this region’s true, hard-core gangbangers.

But he is clearly a bona fide graffitist, one of the young citizens who keep the city looking like the boy’s room at its more poorly managed junior high schools.

Tagger pretensions aside, doing graffiti is really just a hobby, not unlike macrame or doll collecting, and Philip pursues it in many ways.

He likes, for instance, to tag buses with markers called “mean streaks,” so that “they can’t wipe it off with alcohol, they need to, like, scrape it off.”

He also enjoys “bombing” freeways with graffiti: “They cover the billboards and freeway signs with barbed wire, so you can either cut a hole in the fence with some bolt cutters or you climb over the wires as best you can . . . “

And he really gets hyped by running from the police: “Getting chased is scary, you really think you’re gonna get caught sometimes, and when you don’t you’re all, Yes! Yes! Yes! and you laugh about it.

“A lot of citizens hate graffiti--they’re closed-minded,” he laments. And he and his compatriots so hate the cops and citizen “heros” who attempt to stop them, that they’re not above violence.

While Dirt’s 30-year-old editorial director, Jane Pratt, has shown the parameters of her social responsibility by running the article, Philip is more morally conflicted.

“I’m totally in the wrong for writing on somebody’s wall,” he admits. “But it doesn’t make a difference to me.”

Required Reading

Whether graffiti is harbinger of more serious crime is debatable.

What’s not, is that the rate of violent crime has increased 400% since the 1960s.

The March/April Utne Reader addresses the results in a package of stories titled “American Fear.”

Charles Derber’s article, from “In These Times,” is an prime example of intellectual disingenuousness on the subject.

With great ideological dexterity, he jumps from the infamous Central Park gang rape of a jogger to condemn the ‘80s for the “Wilding on Wall Street,” as if Michael Milken’s greed and corruption were the moral equivalent of a rape or beating.

“One dangerous person can make a community wild, bringing on aggression, violence and a fortress mentality,” he writes, adding this sappy remark: “A particularly competitive salesperson or account executive can turn the whole office into a jungle, since those who do not follow suit and sharpen their own swords may be left sundered in the dust.”

In another article, Meredith Maran unwittingly confesses to a crime that might be termed “Child Neglect by Hippy-Dippism.”

Her naive willingness to enroll her child in a dangerous school resulted in his asking permission to carry a knife to class. She doesn’t let him, nor does she scream for the expulsion of any student caught carrying a weapon.

Instead, like so many clueless baby boomers, who never figured out that poor people don’t have the option of viewing urban life as romantic, Maran now screams “ . . . I’m entitled to better!”

There are some pieces in the package that don’t play pretend.

Lynnell Mickelsen’s hard-edged essay, “Confessions of a Law-and-Order Liberal,” blasts to pieces the smug Leftist wienies who view crime as some sort of noble abstraction.

“People in neighborhoods besieged by drugs and guns often hate liberals because they assume we don’t ‘get it,’ ” she writes. “And much of the time they are right . . . Daily violence wears on your ideals almost like HIV on your immune system. Slowly, imperceptibly, you change.”

Finally, Vicki Kemper’s story about the former Washington police chief who continues on his anti-crime crusade demonstrates the fallacy of considering crime control a liberal or conservative issue.

Juvenile arrests for violent crime have tripled since 1965, and the statistics on violence and inner-city youths are now well known: Homicide is the No. 1 killer of young black men.

But to save inner-city children, society must do more than arrest and incarcerate those who have already crossed the line into criminality.

It must, the article says, “move to protect . . . those children who are hit hardest by increasing rates of poverty, domestic abuse, urban decay and job loss, and a popular culture that continues to glorify and glamorize violence.”

Still, in Los Angeles, children shoot each other on campus while educators arrogantly quibble about whether metal detectors are Politically Correct.

In England recently, two 10-year-old boys allegedly kidnaped and killed a 2-year-old.

Americans might learn something from British Prime Minister John Major’s reflections on the matter of children gone to seed, as quoted in Newsweek’s “Perspectives” column this week:

“I feel strongly that society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less.”