Simi Valley’s Mayor Paints a Grim Picture for Taggers, Parents

At a summit Tuesday of Simi Valley city, police, schools and parks officials, a city staffer laid out a strategy for stemming the rising tide of graffiti, one that would be tough on juvenile taggers and their parents.

Joe Hreha, who oversees code enforcement and the city’s graffiti hot line, told the City Council and the parks and school district boards that the city must make graffiti tools harder to get, guard taggers’ targets more closely and stiffen the penalties for tagging.

“What it really comes down to is the whole community is a canvas, when I drive around and see all the surfaces that are available” to graffiti taggers, Hreha said.

Lt. John Ainsworth flashed slides on a projection screen at City Hall showing fresh graffiti scrawled in Simi Valley by local gangs and gangs from Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, Burbank and the San Fernando Valley. He warned that the tagging could escalate into violence among rival tagging crews if the city does not act.

The city, schools and parks officials then directed Hreha and his staff to prepare a report for the City Council by late June on how the city can hammer the anti-graffiti strategy into law.

The strategy includes:

* Making it illegal for minors to own spray cans, glass etchers and other graffiti tools, and enforcing a 1990 city ordinance against selling them to minors.

* Strengthening penalties for graffiti tagging and enforcing a part of that ordinance that could make parents pay for cleaning up after their children’s vandalism. Stiffer penalties also could include suspending taggers’ driver’s licenses or making younger taggers wait one year for each graffiti conviction before getting their first driver’s license.

* Hiring full-time staff to remove graffiti and discourage tagging, requiring developers to make new properties graffiti-resistant and starting an adopt-a-block-wall program to help finance graffiti cleanup.

* Injecting anti-graffiti lessons into the schools’ curriculum.

Making parents pay could be the key to curbing graffiti in Simi Valley, Mayor Greg Stratton said after the meeting. He added, “In many of these cases, these are just kids who feel this is the cute thing to do, and we have to bring home to parents that this is not the same as scrawling hopscotch on the sidewalk.”

The Simi strategy was laid out the same day that Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury announced a new policy for prosecuting graffiti cases that he said would increase the chances of recovering the cost of repairing graffiti damage.

Bradbury said his office now will file two charges against some suspects--one for vandalism and a new one tailored to juvenile graffiti vandals.

Under the vandalism law, which the office has relied on in the past, crimes causing up to $250 in damage are punishable by fines of up to $250, and court-ordered community service of up to 48 hours for a first conviction and 96 hours for two or more convictions.

If the repairs cost more than $250, prosecutors will ask the judge to order guilty vandals to spend part of their community service time cleaning up graffiti, Bradbury said.

Under the new graffiti law, convicted vandals also could be ordered to pay restitution to the owner of the defaced property. And if the vandals are minors and unable to pay the court-ordered fine, their parents would have to pay, Bradbury said.

The second charge will be pushed especially hard for cases in which it appears that parents can afford to pay the fines and restitution, he said.

“Once the word gets out that parents are financially responsible for this kind of misconduct, parents will be more concerned about what their kids are doing, and maybe exercise more control over them,” Bradbury said.

Although a police crackdown following gang-related drive-by shootings has led to a decrease in gang-related crime, the number of graffiti is increasing.

During 1992, Simi Valley police counted 2,196 incidents of graffiti, and since Jan. 1, there have been another 1,214 cases.