Teaming Up on Taggers : Activism: Mad-as-hell residents are joining the fight against graffiti vandals. Some act on their own, others in groups organized by police.

David A. Champion’s enlistment in the city’s war on tagging came at 10:30 p.m. on a recent Friday as he drove past a busy Northridge commercial strip.

He and his buddy, just out for the evening, watched in amazement as one youth sprayed paint on a wall while three others stood by, oblivious to the passing traffic. The taggers then drove off, but the adults chased them.

“We’ve been waiting for a long time to catch these kids doing it,” Champion said later that night. Graffiti “used to be an irritant but there’s been an incredible explosion of it in the past few months and now it’s completely out of control.”

The red, white, black and blue scrawls that many people fear represent the leading edge of social decline are more and more turning typical Southern Californians such as Champion into defiant activists.

Once mostly the work of street gangs staking out their turf, graffiti, or tagging as it has come to be known, is now considered sport by youths from every type of neighborhood.

Police say tagging goes beyond mere entertainment, however. They say at least two killings in February, one the campus shooting of a Reseda High School student, were related to tagging rivalries.

It is also increasingly costly. A state Department of Transportation study found that public and private spending on graffiti removal in Los Angeles County totaled $66 million in 1991 and, according to some estimates, now exceeds $100 million annually.

Still, the battle is being lost, officials acknowledge. And residents of newly afflicted neighborhoods--from affluent stretches of Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley to middle-class areas of Altadena and Palmdale and working-class neighborhoods of Wilmington and San Pedro--are not taking the spreading scourge lightly.

Although many are trying to deny vandals the thrill of seeing their work on display by painting it out or removing it, a growing number of citizens and public officials are trying to prevent the scars on a community’s pride from being inflicted--by helping police make arrests.

Some of the citizen involvement is a matter of chance. That was the case withChampion, who owns a security guard company. After happening by the tagging scene, he used his vehicle to force the vandals’ car to the curb eight blocks away and had the 19-year-old driver and the four taggers--ages 11 to 14--sitting compliantly on the curb when a police patrol car happened by.

Others have joined nighttime surveillance missions, some using infrared video cameras operated by remote control or peering from rooftops with binoculars, to help police arrest more of the region’s thousands of taggers. Police also are asking residents to assist them by filing crime reports and taking photographs so the damage can be catalogued.

To make sure those arrested receive swift and sure punishment, law enforcement officials, politicians and frustrated citizens are lobbying for new local or state laws. Now, many taggers are released on informal probation numerous times without going to court.

“What it boils down to is that the citizens are fed up,” said Los Angeles Police Officer Al Longobardi, who regularly assembles volunteers to keep watch over frequently targeted locations in the west San Fernando Valley. “They want this city to be their city and they’re doing something about it. You’re going to see a lot of people uniting . . . just to clean up the city.”

Those emotions are fed by fear, anger and a desire for retribution--as well as by a sense of duty to one’s community. The spread of tagging into virtually every Southern California neighborhood has combined with the recession-related plunge in real estate prices and the nervousness associated with the second trial of police officers involved in the beating of Rodney G. King to give anti-graffiti activism a militant edge.

At a recent San Pedro meeting to discuss the battle against graffiti, a member of the audience suggested cutting a tagger’s hand off for a first offense. The comment drew cheers. In Encino, those at a meeting of a new anti-graffiti group spoke facetiously of hanging, shooting and castrating the vandals. The name of that group, Residents Against Graffiti Everywhere, or RAGE, emphasizes the emotions surrounding the issue.

Graffiti is even playing a role in the Los Angeles mayoral and City Council elections. A television advertisement for Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) that portrays him as tough on crime shows the candidate speaking in front of a wall of graffiti. And Tom LaBonge, who is a council candidate in the 13th District north of downtown, said graffiti has been the top concern of residents he has met campaigning in Eagle Rock, Mt. Washington and Glassell Park.

“There’s a whole breakdown of the established order in our communities . . . and we have to attack this vigorously because it does break the spirit of a neighborhood,” LaBonge said. “I equate spray paint with dynamite . . . and I think we should make it just as difficult to get.”

In response, state legislators this session have introduced 20 graffiti-related bills, most of which would raise the penalties for a graffiti conviction or make taggers easier to prosecute. One bill proposed by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office would make repeat graffiti offenses a felony, although a judge could reduce the case to a misdemeanor.

Cities, including Pomona, Long Beach, Glendale and Palmdale, have increased fines for tagging offenses, offered larger rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of taggers or, like the city and county of Los Angeles, passed ordinances requiring stores to keep spray paint locked up.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores has introduced an ordinance that would require an automatic sentence of community service for first-time offenders and establish an 800 number for reporting acts of vandalism. It also would set up five roving graffiti surveillance teams made up of civilian volunteers and a reserve police officer.

Flores, who represents the San Pedro, Wilmington and Harbor areas, said her proposed ordinance is a new approach to the problem.

“Everything that we have tried has met with very little success . . . and now everybody wants to be part of the solution because they can’t stand it anymore.”

On a recent Saturday night, about 40 volunteers in the Wilmington area stood on rooftops with binoculars, patrolled in their cars or parked and watched selected targets popular with taggers. Several Los Angeles Police Department patrol cars assigned to the mission were standing by.

Lew Prulitsky, a Wilmington real estate agent who helped organize the patrols, said the volunteers alerted police to a handful of vandals and several dozen curfew violators and chased several of them.

Suspects were taken to the Harbor Division police station where another group of volunteers called their parents. If the parents and the taggers were willing to help clean up the graffiti, the volunteers could recommend their release.

Citizens also serve as the eyes and ears of police in anti-graffiti efforts in Palmdale, Moreno Valley, the El Rio area of Oxnard and the Northeast and Devonshire police divisions in Los Angeles. The Palmdale patrols soon will be outfitted with an $8,600 remote-control video camera equipped with infrared technology for spotting taggers in the dark. And more than 100 volunteers are being trained as lookouts along Ventura Boulevard, from Studio City to Woodland Hills.

Most public agencies are shifting the focus of their anti-graffiti efforts to prevention.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority spent $13 million last year on removal but still saw a steady increase in vandalism on its buses. This year, the agency declared the 30-31 line, which runs through Mid-Wilshire and downtown to Monterey Park, a zero-tolerance route.

Graffiti is cleaned off within one round trip or the buses are removed from service. The incidence of vandalism on those lines is dropping, spokesman Bill Heard said.

The district also has a squad of officers whose job is to target repeat taggers. Mostly working undercover on buses and in schools, they made nearly 1,000 arrests last year and issued 250 citations. Other strategies include “sacrificial windows” that can be peeled off glass if they are etched with graffiti, and expanding community outreach and education programs in junior high schools along certain bus lines.

Caltrans’ graffiti budget for Los Angeles and Ventura counties went from $100,000 to $3 million annually in five years. The agency has installed razor wire on 450 overhead signs, yet officials acknowledge that this has done little to slow the spread.