Parent on Patrol to Keep Tabs on Taggers : Woman Who Turned in Son Takes Pride That Her Penance Helps Reduce Graffiti in Lomita

The woman “doing penance” for having raised a graffiti tagger nosed her 1977 Ford LTD through a parking lot behind a Lomita shopping center and eased to a stop. She pointed to a wall. It was clean, except for patches of mismatched paint covering the scribble of local taggers.

She beamed with satisfaction.

“This used to be the worst area for graffiti,” said Cindy Beiro, a member of the city’s citizen advisory committee on gangs and graffiti. “Now look at it. Can you believe it?”

Beiro speaks with a mixture of shock and pride. She has been fighting graffiti for a few years in this former farming town trying to hold the line against a rise in gangs and graffiti tagging.

It is a small town, just two square miles, of about 20,000 people living in Cape Cod-style houses and modest bungalows on small lots often ringed by picket fences. It tries to stay low-key, seeing itself, Beiro says, as a buffer between lower-income areas of the Los Angeles city strip and upper-income neighborhoods of the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Torrance.

So when gang crimes and graffiti boomed over the past few years, the city and its residents took a high-profile approach to the problem.

The statistics were jarring: In 1990, Lomita reported just 12 gang-related incidents, including tagging, fights, stabbings and occasional shootings. In 1992, the figure reached 116. Most of the gang members come from Lomita--including a neo-Nazi cell broken up last year--or other parts of the South Bay.

Last summer, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department anti-gang unit, Operation Safe Streets, swept through Lomita, breaking up gangs with arrests for narcotics and firearms violations. Lomita deputies have kept up the pressure.

Last August, gang and tagger incidents averaged 10 or 11 per month, but the figure is closer to four or five now, said Sgt. Jim Sully of Operation Safe Streets.

Still, Sully said, there is enough work to assign two gang investigators permanently to the Lomita sheriff’s substation, something that station Capt. Bill Mangan has not done because of budget cutbacks.

Some wonder how long Lomita, which has prided itself on its small-town nature, can hold off the ills more common in neighboring Harbor City and to some extent in Torrance.

“Right now we are like a hospital patient in stable condition,” Mangan said.

Mangan attributes the city’s success in controlling its problems to both its small size and the aggressive anti-crime stance some residents have taken.

Perhaps nobody personifies the get-tough attitude better than Beiro. By day she manages two construction companies; by night she plies Lomita streets and meets with community groups, city officials and others working to keep the city clean. She wishes more people, particularly parents, were involved.

“I don’t want to be the only one devoting a hundred hours of my life to this,” Beiro said. “I should not be the only parent doing penance for a tagger.”

She said the tagger in her life was her son, Kirk, who is now 19 and has a steady job.

Looking back a few years after their son gave up tagging, Beiro and her husband said they were slow to pick up on it.

Hilton Beiro began noticing his paint disappearing; Cindy Beiro wondered about the intricate scribble on her son’s books--practice for tagging, she learned later.

There were other signs: His fingernails were well-manicured so that paint would not get under the nails. They found patches of paint around the house (testing the can).

Evidently their son was an adept tagger.

“Can you spray anything with no drips or runs?” Cindy Beiro asked. “When they’re good, you don’t find any paint on their clothes.”

Eventually, they noticed the color of some of the tags on walls around the city resembled the same kind that her husband kept for painting model trains.

They confronted him.

“It wasn’t, ‘Are you a tagger?’ It was ‘Why the hell are you doing that?’ ” Cindy Beiro recalled.

Even now, a few years later, the Beiros still debate their son’s motivation. He said at the time that he did it to rebel against society. Hilton Beiro figures their son fell in with the wrong crowd. His wife wonders what role peer pressure and boredom played.

Whatever the case, they turned him in to sheriff’s deputies and he ended up in a diversion program before he “more or less outgrew it.”

Cindy Beiro has stayed with the cause, though. She spoke with other taggers identified by her son and warned them against further graffiti painting. In a couple of instances, she confronted their parents.

“Some of them were, like, ‘They are pranksters,’ ” Beiro said scornfully.

At the same time the city stepped up its graffiti paint-overs.

About two years ago, the city had one part-time worker who painted two days a week. Now there is a full-time, two-person crew responding within 24 hours of a graffiti call.

“It’s absolutely amazing what’s going on with these little idiots,” a city official said.

The city set up a hot line for people to report gang and graffiti activity anonymously.

“It’s frustrating the kids. As fast as they get their name up we get it down,” Mangan said.

The city also is using a surveillance camera at various locations, trying to catch taggers in the act.

So far, no luck. In fact, deputies have arrested only six taggers in two years, Mangan said, adding that it is a testament to the craftiness of the taggers. But he and others believe the steps taken by the city have discouraged some would-be vandals.

Just how long this will last is debatable. Lomita officials do not encourage publicity about their anti-tagging efforts, fearing it might serve as an advertisement that the city has plenty of unmarked walls.

Cindy Beiro, for one, said she believes anything could set off another round of heavy tagging. All it takes, she said, is for one crew of kids to antagonize another and the “bombing”--all out tagging--would be on.

If that happens, a list of taggers that she has compiled might help identify the vandals.

These days, she also is seeing new tags, either from new taggers or from old ones who have changed their marks.

Of one thing she is sure: Merely painting over the graffiti won’t solve the problem for long.

Said Beiro: “Graffiti is like a 3-year-old with snot running down his nose. You can remove the snot but the cold is still there.”

Lomita at a Glance Population: 19,382 Ethnic Breakdown White: 79% African-Americans: 3% Latino: 11% Asian and Pacific Islanders: 9% (Does not add up to 100% because people of Latin descent can be of any race.) Median age: 33 Median household income: $36,222 People living below poverty line: 11% South Bay Figures Population: 940,640 Ethnic Breakdown White: 58% African-Americans: 14% Latino: 27% Asian and Pacific Islanders: 13% (Does not add up to 100% because people of Latin descent can be of any race.) Median age: 32 Median household income: $41,014 People living below poverty line: 10.4% Source: 1990 U.S. Census