Increase in Tagger Activity Linked to Start of School Year

For six months, pleased county officials watched as the graffiti fad wilted under increased law enforcement and cleanup efforts. But now, those same officials say, the taggers are back.

The start of the school year in September apparently reunited graffiti vandals with their old cohorts or inspired new youngsters to join in the craze that costs Orange County agencies $4 million a year, graffiti abatement coordinator Chaz Ferguson said.

“There’s been a big increase in the past month, without a doubt,” Ferguson said. He will chair a meeting today in Garden Grove with dozens of county and city officials to analyze the recurring problem and devise strategies to curb it.

“We’ve got to get all these agencies to talk to each other and work together on this, or (vandals) will have us whipped,” Ferguson said. “We won’t have a chance.”

Tagging, the illegal fad of spray-painting or etching monikers on any flat public surface, first exploded in Orange County last November and December when reports increased by 300%.

Authorities attributed that surge to the school system’s winter break and a television series on the tagging lifestyle. In the months that followed, police, prosecutors and politicians scrambled to clamp down on taggers with new ordinances, hot lines, task forces and rewards.

The concerted effort, which included the county’s creation of Ferguson’s post, seemed to yield results. By the end of April, both vandalism reports and arrests were down, suggesting that the stiffer penalties were working, Ferguson said.

“But now it’s back on the rise,” Ferguson said, citing county work crew statistics, citizen complaints, police observations and Caltrans reports.

The increase has been most evident on the county’s network of freeways, the longtime favorite target of taggers in their bid for street recognition. Called “the heavens,” the difficult to reach overpasses and signs along the freeways act as concrete canvases that can be seen by tens of thousands of drivers.

“They use Caltrans as a marquee,” Caltrans community relations director Anna Nieto-Gomez said. “And we’re trying to turn the marquee light off.”

That effort, including hefty rewards for information and quick removal of the graffiti, had led to a consistent decline in vandalism since March. But, Nieto-Gomez said, things changed last month.

“There has been a significant increase without a doubt,” Nieto-Gomez said, although she said statistics were not yet available. “The increase was significant for last month, but it still is not as bad as it was last March and April.”

Officials expected the upswing when school opened, she said.

“It’s something we anticipated,” Nieto-Gomez said. “When school begins and when school ends we expect to see an increase.”

The relationship between the school calendar and juvenile crime is a strong one, said Marilyn McDougall, a former schoolteacher who now serves as the gang strategy coordinator for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

“During the summer, they might be at camp, or be visiting relatives out of town, or they might live on a different side of town than their friends,” McDougall said. “Then school brings them back together and into trouble. No doubt about it. That’s kids.”

Likewise, officials said, when school ends, the freedom of the first few days and weeks lead to more juvenile crime.

But in Santa Ana, the Orange County city hardest hit by taggers, officials have not experienced the same increase since school started.

Police Lt. Michael Foote said city workers painted over 230,000 square feet of graffiti last month, down from the high of 691,000 square feet last December.

In the neighboring city of Orange, the school year also has not affected tagging. Unfortunately, Lt. Timm Browne said, the city also has not seen the decrease that Santa Ana has enjoyed.

“It has been a steadily increasing problem for us, and I don’t know that the school year has had any effect on that,” Browne said.