The Fight Against Crime: Notes From The Front : Officer Makes Own Mark in Graffiti Battle

Detective Craig Rhudy used to drive to work an angry man.

It had nothing to do with his job, his home life or even the traffic jams on the Golden State Freeway. His anger stemmed from the scrawls of indecipherable graffiti visible along a good part of his route.

Tags were left on overpasses, on directional signs and on the walls of the liquor stores and factories that abutted the roadways heading from his Santa Clarita Valley home to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Van Nuys station.

To say he disliked what he saw would be a massive understatement.

“It was on both sides of the street, on freeway off-ramps, everywhere,” said Rhudy, 44. “It was just a frustrating thing. Maddening.”

While one might not expect a 22-year veteran cop who has worked on murder cases, investigated sex crimes and served on the robbery detail to get too upset about something as banal as graffiti, Rhudy takes the random markings of today’s youth personally.

“Graffiti vandalism is almost as serious a detractor for the quality of life as narcotics and prostitution activity,” he said speaking in the clipped vernacular of a policeman, “because graffiti sets the scene for everything else.

“If criminals enter an area that is not well-maintained, they stay. They break into cars, deal drugs, there’s prostitution and street crime. . . . If you were looking for an area to move into or open a business, you wouldn’t move into a graffiti area.”

So last May, Rhudy helped start the Community Tagger Task Force, a coalition of citizen volunteers, businesses and local law enforcement officials who report, catch and prosecute taggers in the San Fernando Valley.

Their efforts have apparently paid off. Rhudy said 100 citizen volunteers who hunt for graffiti and the markings’ authors are finding less to report. And last month, Rhudy won an award for his pet project, which has led to the successful prosecution of 15 taggers.

“Over the past six months, graffiti has decreased in the San Fernando Valley because of the task force,” he said. “And there’s been some good press coverage, so when the taggers read about (the prosecutions), they are afraid to tag. They don’t want to get six months in a (juvenile offenders) camp, or probation.”

Early on, Rhudy said, he realized that if he was going to have any luck in keeping kids from spray-painting walls, he would need to understand why they did it in the first place. So he immersed himself in a subculture where loosely knit tagging crews use monikers like “Under No Authority,” “Unstoppable Criminals,” “Mexicans Causing Panic,” and “Every Woman’s Fantasy.”

What he found, he said, was an age-old problem: attention-starved youths, typically 13 to 17 years old.

“They do it for recognition and because of lack of attention by parents,” said Rhudy, himself the father of two.

Taggers gain recognition from other taggers for being very prolific or for successfully placing their tags where they can be seen by many people--for instance, on buses or freeway overpasses.

Rhudy said the task force is able to catch taggers after members of the public spot and then report graffiti to the police. Next, civilian volunteers take photos of the markings, fill out a police report and, finally, erase the offending message. Volunteers are told not to confront taggers, even if they catch them in the act.

For the most prolific taggers, a more serious step can be taken. Rhudy developed a data base of tagger names in 1990. If officers are able to use it to identify the people behind the tag, police can obtain a warrant to search their homes.

While most of the cases are circumstantial in the early stages, Rhudy said, there is often a preponderance of evidence in the homes of the suspects.

“Every search warrant so far has yielded evidence,” he said. “Sometimes we get photos they take of themselves putting up graffiti, and in a couple of cases, they even had videotapes.”

So while the war on graffiti is far from over, Rhudy said his commute is a happier one--though certainly not totally graffiti-free.

“There’s still a lot out there,” he said. “We have more information than we have manpower to deal with it.”