RAGE Grows Over Graffiti Explosion in Southwest Valley : Crime: Several paint-outs have been held since the formation of a community group to battle taggers in affluent neighborhoods.

Tarzana real estate agents Dori Marler and Matthew Mealey wanted to get a few neighbors together last month to talk about how to combat the multicolored scourge of graffiti “tags” along Ventura Boulevard.

They were shocked when more than 200 people showed up, some angry, some fearful and desperate for assurance that there was a solution to the graffiti explosion in affluent areas of the southwestern San Fernando Valley. Although no magic solutions came out of that meeting, it did lead to creation of a community organization called Residents Against Graffiti Everywhere, or RAGE.

“We as residents weren’t prepared for this explosion of graffiti,” Marler said. “But there are more of us than there are of them and we are much more motivated. They don’t care, but we care a lot and we’ve got to . . . take care of it.”

Since the first meeting March 4, RAGE participants have conducted several paint-outs and, at a second meeting Thursday attended by more than 80 people, continued formulating other ideas for striking back.

“It’s our community and we have to take charge of it,” Marler said. “We don’t know all the answers. We’re just learning. But we’re here to come up with some solutions.”

Some of the solutions tossed out by the group urged swift and even brutal retribution, reflecting the frustration of seeing the work of youthful tagging crews spread like wildfire into the West Valley in recent months. Other ideas were aimed at making legislative changes to stiffen penalties.

City Councilwoman Joy Picus, who addressed the group, said she supports requiring convicted taggers to spend 1,000 hours apiece--nearly six months at 40 hours a week--cleaning up graffiti for repeat offenses. “Let them scrub it out with a toothbrush,” she said.

She also wants tagging offenses to carry a $1,000 fine that parents would have to pay.

Los Angeles Police Senior Lead Officer Russ Long, who attended the meeting, said most youthful taggers barely get a slap on the wrist. Although police in the West Valley seek charges against every tagger arrested, he said, the Probation Department often releases them on probation. The common penalty for second offenses, he said, is 30 hours of community service.

Others who attended seemed eager to join anti-graffiti surveillance teams being organized by the Police Department.

Joan Cowan, an administrative assistant who lives in Encino, said she attended Thursday’s meeting to join efforts to paint out the tags. Quickly painting out the graffiti is aimed at denying vandals the satisfaction of seeing their work on display.

She said that every day on her way to work she sees a wall on Sepulveda Boulevard that has been tagged and every day it upsets her. “This is where I live and I don’t like it looking like that,” she said.

“It’s very upsetting. I have felt powerless to do anything about it and I don’t like feeling powerless.”

Marler has proposed negotiating a “cease spray” with tagger crews at Reseda High School and school administrators have helped make tentative arrangements for a private session with known “taggers” next week. If the crews would agree to stop tagging, the community would come up with ways for the youths to get attention “without destroying or defacing other people’s property,” she said.

Since forming the RAGE group, Marler said, she has gotten telephone calls suggesting graffiti-fighting methods from all over California. Some of the suggestions, she said, are helpful. But others, reflecting the depth of the anger against graffiti, proffered more radical ideas.

“Some have suggested we get rifles and start shooting them,” Marler said.

“In these tough economic times it seems that people are just holding on . . . and your house means everything to you and all of a sudden you see it being vandalized. It’s very threatening to them.”