Keeping Tabs on Taggers : Crime: Gardena Detective Ken Mulroney is a one-man anti-graffiti force. He makes arrests, trains other officers and testifies on subject.

It is late morning, and Detective Ken Mulroney is cruising down the Harbor Freeway. He’s excited about what he is not seeing.

“Freeway’s looking real good this week. Even some of the businesses took their graffiti out,” he says.

Seconds later, he spots graffiti on some of the overhead traffic signs taggers refer to as “the heavens.” Says Mulroney: “Well, it can’t be perfect.”

For the past year, Mulroney has headed graffiti prevention for the city of Gardena. That has meant tracking down taggers, educating schoolchildren on the consequences of tagging and enforcing the city’s “lock-up law,” which requires retailers to keep spray paint and large markers locked up so taggers can’t steal them.

In the process, Mulroney has become one of the Los Angeles area’s more prominent graffiti experts. He trains other law enforcement officers in graffiti prevention and has been asked to testify on behalf of San Francisco in a legal challenge to that city’s lock-up law.

“Ken is one of a handful of area experts on tagging,” said Dennis Porter, a detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “Ken can tell how tagging is done and what the tagging means. You can give us a (tag) and within a week, we can find out what school this kid is going to.”

Mulroney, an eight-year veteran of the Gardena police, became the city’s first anti-graffiti officer in October of last year. The Police Department created the post out of concern that today’s taggers may become tomorrow’s gangbangers.

Mulroney considers education one of his more important tasks. In the first year statistics have been kept on taggers, Gardena police have arrested 87 suspected taggers, 90% of whom are juveniles. Curiously, Mulroney said, many of the youths do not know tagging is illegal.

To set youngsters straight, Mulroney teaches a class each year at Peary Middle School. Over the academic year, he will talk to 500 students.

Because youngsters revere peers whose initials are plastered throughout the city, Mulroney has to show them the downside of tagging.

In a recent session with Peary sixth-graders, he told the youngsters that tagging can land them on probation or in the California Youth Authority. For each place they tag, he said, their parents will be fined $150.

Mulroney said tagging often leads to gang activity. He graphically described a 15-year-old boy lying on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood: “If he gets shot with an AK-47, his guts are going to be lying on the street next to him.”

“Uuuggghhhh!” the students cry.

Mulroney also raised the specter of prison. “Imagine being locked up in this classroom for 30 years without the freedom to eat when you want, shower when you want and have visitors when you want.”

Mulroney tries to befriend students. At the end of his presentation, he wrote his phone number on the blackboard and invited them to call him any time to talk about whatever may be bothering them.

Mulroney is tight-lipped about the methods he uses to identify taggers, saying only that he uses his own sources, community agencies and a computer databank on taggers that he and Porter of the Sheriff’s Department have created.

After he figures out who’s to blame for a specific graffiti incident, Mulroney often collars the suspect by simply putting out the word that he wants the offender to call him. Sometimes Mulroney and other Gardena police officers resort to surveillance to catch taggers, but they lack the staffing to do so regularly, he says.

When Mulroney tracks down a suspected tagger, he doesn’t always seek prosecution. First, he tries to talk with the tagger and the tagger’s parents. If a tagger agrees to stop and is a first-time offender, Mulroney will counsel the youth and release him, he says.

“I try to get them to agree that tagging is wrong and to agree to stop,” Mulroney says. “If that doesn’t work, or if their attitude tells me that they’re unwilling to stop, then I send their file to a probation officer or I arrest them and let them face a judge.”

In May, when Mulroney heard that a chronic tagger was going to be sentenced, he showed up in court and petitioned the judge to assign the 18-year-old to him. He then drafted an outline of activities for the tagger and presented it to the judge.

The first item on the agenda was for the tagger to write a letter of apology to all Gardena residents and business people he had harmed with his graffiti and send it to area newspapers. The offender then agreed to get a job and return to college. The tagger also made a videotape on tagging for police and the courts.

Finally, the tagger agreed to help Mulroney steer other local youths away from graffiti.

“He was assigned to three corners,” Mulroney says. “I told him that if anybody tagged there, he’d have to clean it by himself. He got other taggers to respect his request not to tag on those corners.”

It is this sort of experience that has earned Mulroney a reputation as an expert on tagging.

Using a manual he has compiled, he trains probation officers and California Highway Patrol officers in graffiti prevention. He also advises neighborhood watch groups on what they can do to stop tagging.

Recently the governor’s office asked him to serve on an anti-tagging committee. San Francisco officials have asked Mulroney to testify in a federal district court case in which Sherwin-Williams, a paint manufacturer, is challenging the city’s spray-paint lock-up law, which is similar to Gardena’s.

Sherwin-Williams charges that the lock-up law unfairly restricts commerce and infringes on its constitutional right to due process. Earlier this year, Sherwin Williams lost a similar battle against Los Angeles in a case that reached the California Supreme Court.

What does Mulroney think about his newfound prominence?

“It makes me feel like I’m doing my job and I’m doing it well,” he says. “It lets me know that I’m making a difference and that I’m not just spinning my wheels.”