The Bill for Graffiti Is Past Due : Taggers Should Be Tagged With the Enormous Financial Costs of Their Vandalism

One of the worst aspects of the epidemic of graffiti vandalism is its enormous cost. That expense, at a time when the San Fernando Valley and the region as a whole is limping through a recession, ought to serve as the best guide for punishing apprehended graffiti taggers.

The Antelope Valley city of Palmdale, for example, spent about $12,000 to clean up graffiti in 1989. In 1992, the figure was $100,181 to clean up 667,000 square feet of property. Already, the toll in Palmdale this year stands at 596,000 square feet of damaged property.

The firms that control billboard advertising in Los Angeles County spend far more than such localities to clean advertisements and to erect fencing and razor wire for their structures. Los Angeles County paid more than the billboard firms, about $3.7 million last year on graffiti cleanups. The RTD coughed up even more with some $13 million last year for the same problem. According to the most recent annual statistics from the state Department of Transportation, the overall public and private cost of covering and removing graffiti was $66 million.

So, how will one of the Valley’s most prolific graffiti taggers be punished? DEN, a 16-year-old Reseda boy, will be sent at taxpayer expense to a juvenile work camp for up to three years. Only after his release will he be expected to pay back a measure of that cost, not to mention the expense of his graffiti damage, by performing just 200 hours of cleaning up graffiti. That amounts to only 25 eight-hour days.

Gilberto Perales, 29, was either brazen enough or dumb enough to write his graffiti tag on the wall of an interview room at the LAPD’s North Hollywood station. His punishment of 45 days in the County Jail seems appropriate, but is it, considering the cost of keeping him there?

Perales is a suspected member of a gang that is at war with the LAPD over control of the adjacent neighborhood. How much more suitable it would have been to have seen authorities pursue a punishment against Perales that would have forced him into the very visible task of cleaning up the police station and its grounds.

Similarly, DEN admitted to 31 acts of graffiti vandalism involving more than $20,000 in damages. It would have been appropriate to have forced the youth to clean up an amount of graffiti damage that was equivalent, in terms of cost, to his own offenses.

We would argue that this is the best and most cost-effective way to punish graffiti vandals. That is particularly true at a time when our jails, prisons and work camps are already strained to bursting by the presence of more serious criminals who present a greater danger to law-abiding citizens.