Making His Mark : Handwriting Expert Is Increasingly Used to Help Identify Graffiti Vandals

James (Jay) Black is the taggers’ unseen enemy.

Little do they know that the shy man in jeans and Nike running shoes could one day take the stand against them and put them away, without ever having met them.

Black, 47, is a forensic scientist whose work the past dozen years has involved forgeries and fraud. But as a handwriting-analysis expert, he finds himself increasingly used in prosecuting graffiti vandals, otherwise known as taggers.

He recently testified in two trials in Orange County, including one in which Kaya, one of the region’s most infamous juvenile taggers, was convicted and given a three-month sentence.

Black now is employed by six law enforcement agencies in Orange County, three in San Bernardino County and, increasingly, by others around the country. He recently was asked to testify in Massachusetts.

During the past two years, he has worked primarily for the Orange Police Department in 36 cases involving graffiti, or as Black calls it, “visual terrorism, constituting both a property crime and a social crime.”

“Jay is a recognized, court-tested examiner of ‘questioned documents,’ or to paraphrase, he’s a handwriting expert,” said Orange Police Detective Jack Nanigian, who works closely with Black. “Our agency had used him for years on forgeries and written-document fraud cases.

“Then, about two years ago, when graffiti vandalism--especially tagging--exploded, Jay conceived of the idea of using his skills in handwriting analysis to identify the authors of graffiti vandalism.”

Black has proven consistently, Nanigian said, that the characteristics of handwriting are the same “for a questioned document as they are for spray-painted vandalism on walls.”

Nanigian routinely provides Black with schoolbook covers, folders, lunch boxes, backpacks, practice pads, tennis shoes, hats--items used by suspected taggers to scrawl their monikers.

It is primarily the tagger’s moniker that opens the door for Black.

“The spelling (of the moniker) is one of the first things,” Nanigian said. “The shape of the letters, the proportionality, the frequency of it being written in various locations. . . . If it appears similar to that of other writing samples, Jay can usually establish a connection.”

In the case of Kaya, a 17-year-old high school dropout suspected in numerous acts of graffiti vandalism, Black was able to show that in 45 out of 100 locations, “the author was (Kaya),” Nanigian said.

Kaya’s work appeared on freeway signs, buildings and signal boxes and often was etched in glass throughout central Orange County, Nanigian said. He even was suspected of leaving his moniker outside the Federal Building in Santa Ana and on a sign along the Costa Mesa Freeway.

Black’s skill at linking Kaya to as many as 45 incidents propelled the amount of damage to more than $5,000--meaning he could be prosecuted for a felony and not just a misdemeanor, a critical factor in such cases.

“There’s only four ways to nail a tagger,” Nanigian said. “You’ve got to see ‘em do it, somebody else has to see ‘em do it, the guilty party confesses, or you have a scientific handwriting analysis done to pin it down to a single suspect. . . . We don’t get too many of the first three, which is the reason Jay’s so valuable.”

Photographs are Black’s best pieces of evidence. But on occasion, he checks out the markings himself. On a recent muggy morning, he walked stealthily along a gravel-rutted road under an overpass, making his way past wary transients amid a clutter of broken glass and stolen shopping carts to eye every available surface.

He found plenty of graffiti and several spent cans of Krylon spray paint, including one with a bullet hole straight through it.

“This was put up by gangs,” he said, pointing to undistinguished markings that read “dark side”--the name of a local gang.

More scrawlings under the same bridge were the work of taggers, Black said, explaining that what the public knows about graffiti is oddly limited, considering the millions of dollars in damage it inflicts on property, both public and private, and the level of attention it commands from law enforcement.

Graffiti vandalism now costs county agencies more than $4 million a year, including, officials say, more than $1 million a year in Santa Ana alone.

Taggers, Black said, tend to be nonviolent and not affiliated with gangs, whereas the public assumes that most, if not all, graffiti is the work of gun-toting gang members. If graffiti is evident, Black said, the public frequently--and mistakenly--concludes that gangs are taking over the neighborhood.

Another misconception: that graffiti is the province of the underclass.

“Some of the worst tagging is going on in affluent areas of Irvine by affluent kids who live in Irvine,” Black said.

The father of three children who lives in a bucolic area of Lake Forest, Black finds himself cast in an unlikely role: He’s suddenly well versed in the culture known as hip-hop.

“Hip-hop or tagger graffiti is far more artistic than gang graffiti, which I don’t work with very often,” he said. “Members of the hip-hop culture, which began in New York in the 1970s and spread west, subscribe to rap music and break-dancing and love to spray-paint graffiti, usually in places more visible than this.”

Fame, artistic expression, power and rebellion are the major motivators of the hip-hop culture, he said, and fame is determined by the quantity and quality of a tagger’s work. Why do they do it? “For peer approval and the thrill of it,” Black said.

Hip-hop painters usually are males in their teens or early 20s, but, he said, “females and older individuals have been known to write it.” Hip-hop increasingly is prevalent in Orange County, as are its symbols, Black said: baggy pants, shorts and shirts; stocking and baseball caps; long belts, oversize (often untied) high-top tennis shoes and backpacks.

Black most enjoys the work for “helping to establish out of a murky situation what the truth really is.”

But the work isn’t easy.

“The process itself is very labor intensive, both for the police and for me, because it takes a lot of time for police to keep track of everything and a lot of time to do the procedures,” he said.

A guarded man who describes himself as bland, Black said he “rarely gets excited about anything,” whether it’s triumphs or setbacks.

“But it’s real disappointing to police officers,” he said, “to put in hours and hours of work and have something come back inconclusive or equivocal, because I didn’t have enough to ID somebody.

“When I can’t prove it, or nobody can prove it, it’s real frustrating, especially if a lot of time and effort has gone into the preparation.”