ENCINO : 100 Residents Trained to Track Taggers

There are more than 100 new recruits in the war against graffiti artists or taggers who are increasingly making their mark in the San Fernando Valley, police said Wednesday.

Officers from the Los Angeles Police Department instructed volunteers from across the Valley on how to fill out incident reports documenting graffiti drawings, or “tags,” in their neighborhoods at a training session Tuesday night in Encino.

“We don’t have the police manpower to devote to this effort,” said Detective Craig Rhudy, who coordinates the Community Tagger Task Force for the Los Angeles Police Department. “That’s why we’re asking for volunteers to do it for us.”

“My building was tagged last week,” said Rita Frischer of Encino. “We’ve had the building for 22 years, and this is the first time we’ve been tagged--this is really a community problem.”

Volunteers were told to turn in the completed reports to local police stations where they would be entered into a Valleywide tagger database.

“This way, we don’t have to catch them in the act,” Rhudy said, explaining that a “tag” is similar to a signature and that detailed information and photographs of the tags would make it possible to build a case against a habitual tagger.

The training session included a short educational film on taggers and their habits.

Spotlighting infamous graffiti artists such as “Strobe,” of the STK or “Shoot-to-Kill” crew, the narrator told of an estimated 30,000 taggers in Los Angeles.

Traveling in large groups or “mobbing,” the voice explained against a backdrop of teen-agers randomly tagging freeway signs and city buses, “their trail marks the city like an infectious disease.”