Handwriting Expert the Last Word on Taggers : Graffiti: Forensic scientist helps police catch vandals by matching samples of their work. His services are increasingly in demand in the Southland and beyond.

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

Little do they know that the shy man in jeans and 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 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 last 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 proved 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--any item suspected taggers have scrawled on.

It is primarily the vandal’s tag that opens the door for Black.

“The spelling (of the tag) 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 tag 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 rutted, gravel road under an overpass, making his way past wary transients amid a clutter of broken glass and stolen shopping carts to examine every available surface.

He found plenty of graffiti and several spent cans of 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.

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 are evident, Black said, the public frequently--and mistakenly--concludes that gangs are taking over the neighborhood.

Another misconception: That graffiti are 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.

A father of three 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.

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

But he also enjoys helping to acquit someone, if the evidence leads him there. He also works for defense attorneys, although usually he’s helping to convict.

“I like getting somebody off the hook if that’s where it takes me,” he said. “Somewhere in those markings, you can usually find the truth. And, really, all I’m after is the truth.”