Civic Pride Motivates Local Graffiti Grabbers : Crime: Palmdale resident collected $1,000 reward for nabbing teen-age tagger. But cash bonuses are shrinking in some communities.

Greg Galli says he didn’t even know about the $1,000 reward last year when he jumped out of his van and hurtled over a back-yard fence to chase down a teen-age tagger who had just marked a newspaper machine.

With a buddy behind the wheel, Galli, 31, hauled the vandal to the sheriff’s substation in Palmdale, where deputies told him he was eligible for a hefty payoff from the city.

But Galli, a real estate agent who collected his check Thursday night, says he was motivated by civic pride--and good business sense. Graffiti, after all, can cause home prices to plummet.

“It hurts property values, and it affects the opinion of people wanting to move up here,” Galli said. “I would have done it anyway, whether there was reward money or not. But it was a nice bonus.”

City leaders in Palmdale and neighboring Lancaster and Santa Clarita hope most graffiti grabbers share Galli’s civic dedication, because the cash bonuses are shrinking.

Last year, Lancaster replaced its $1,000 anti-graffiti rewards with $500 gift certificates that can be redeemed at local businesses. Santa Clarita, which has a sliding graffiti reward system, dropped its maximum payoff from $1,000 to $500 last May.

And on Thursday night, after handing out $1,000 checks to Galli and five others for nabbing vandals, the Palmdale City Council voted 3 to 1 to switch to $250 gift certificates.

Council members, who recently laid off six employees because of a severe budget crunch, said the $1,000 rewards were taking too big a bite out of the city treasury. Since the reward program began in 1988, Palmdale has handed out more than $42,000 in rewards--at least $31,000 in the last two years alone.

Another 30 reward applications are under review.

“It’s obvious that it’s getting awfully expensive,” said Councilman Joe Davies, who supported the reduction to $250.

Mayor Jim Ledford, who also voted for the change, said most residents who help catch graffiti vandals are not motivated by cash. “I don’t think the people we recognized tonight got involved and stepped forward because of the $1,000 reward,” he said.

James J. Alcala, who received one of Palmdale’s payouts last April, said money was not on his mind on the morning he earned it. Alcala was driving to a funeral when his 10-year-old son spotted a youth spraying red paint on a wall. Alcala grabbed his steering-wheel locking device, and hopped out of his pickup.

“I pointed it at him like it was a gun and told him to come here,” the 39-year-old printing press operator recalled. “He took a couple of steps toward me, but when he saw it was just a Club, he took off running.”

Alcala gave chase, tackled the teen-ager and asked a passing city maintenance worker to radio for sheriff’s deputies. The deputies required him to make a citizen’s arrest.

While waiting for help, Alcala said the youth threatened him and vowed to damage his prized 1958 Chevrolet Apache pickup. In addition, the scuffle left Alcala with ripped trousers and made him late for the funeral.

Asked if he would still go to all of that trouble now that the reward has been cut to $250, Alcala at first said no.

Then he changed his mind. “If it came down to it, I would turn him over to the deputies,” he said. “I’ve got my kids growing up, and I don’t want them to think it’s good to do graffiti.”

Even cities like Santa Clarita, which did not lay off employees this year, have recognized that their funds will go further if the rewards are not quite so generous.

Kevin Tonoian, who oversees Santa Clarita’s anti-graffiti program, pointed out that his city set aside $6,000 for fiscal 1994-95 for rewards--the same amount as last year. But because the rewards have been cut in half, he said, “we’ll get more bang for the buck.”

Similarly, the city of Los Angeles curbed its generosity to graffiti busters after its reward money ran out too quickly.

The city’s Operation Clean Sweep began offering $1,000 rewards in 1989. But after the first 48 payoffs ate up most of the funds, the Los Angeles City Council in 1991 gave the program another $25,000--and cut each reward in half.

“Given our financial situation, it was becoming too expensive,” said Delphia Jones, director of Operation Clean Sweep. “And donations to the graffiti reward trust fund fell short of expectations.”

Overall, Operation Clean Sweep has handed out 120 rewards. Like most cities, Los Angeles pays the money after a conviction or a similar resolution by juvenile authorities.

Some of the Clean Sweep rewards have gone to members of neighborhood groups in Sylmar and Silver Lake, who put the cash back into their cleanup organizations.

But Jones said she has also received a few calls from professional bounty hunters who wanted to know what a graffiti vandal’s arrest was worth. “My only guess is that they wanted to do it for the money,” she said.

Jones said her group prefers to have residents snap pictures, shoot videotape and write down license numbers, then let the police capture the vandals. “It’s our preference that they don’t physically intervene,” she said.

People who do try to detain the vandals are taking a risk. A San Fernando Valley man who confronted vandals outside his house about a year ago was fatally shot by one of them, Jones said.

A Santa Clarita resident named Paul, who asked that his last name not be published, chose to avoid a physical confrontation in October when he spotted a man spray-painting the wall of a fast-food restaurant.

Paul remained in his car but wrote down the vandal’s license number. After the offender was prosecuted, Paul received a $1,000 reward, but he said he did not do it for the money.

“You kind of feel like this is the mess you see every day, and you’re actually seeing someone do it,” he said. “So you get kind of defensive because it’s your community.”

Tina Courtney, a Palmdale mother of four, was well aware of her community’s graffiti problems when she spotted taggers in action last year. She volunteers one morning a week to transcribe vandalism reports left on the city’s graffiti hot line.

When she spotted taggers near a wall last year, Courtney alerted an off-duty deputy and followed the youths in her car, with three of her own children along for the ride. Even though she kept her distance, the taggers spotted her, waved their paint cans and made obscene gestures before deputies arrived.

Courtney used her $1,000 reward to buy Christmas presents for her children. But she too said she was not motivated by the money.

“I don’t think that if they decrease the reward--or get rid of it--that it will stop people in the community from turning in taggers,” Courtney said. “People are so angry, and they don’t want to see this any more.”