Safe and Simple Ways to Battle Graffiti’s Scourge

David Bermudez, who has been cleaning up graffiti for the past six years in the neighborhoods west of Downtown L.A., says we don’t have to pull out a gun--and blow the punks away--to take part in the struggle against the taggers and gang members who mindlessly spray their crap across our city.

“Use some common sense,” Bermudez, 36, advises. “Don’t put yourself in danger.” And he tells a story to illustrate his point.

Last fall, while on his city-paid job as a graffiti-buster with the Central City Action Committee, Bermudez noticed two teenagers scrawling graffiti on the wall of a popular salsa nightclub in Silver Lake. Normally a soft-spoken man, Bermudez got visibly agitated, pulled his truck over and screamed at the two to stop their vandalism. “I cussed them out,” he remembers.

Although he knows most of the taggers and gang members in the area, he says he doesn’t get hostile with them. But he does tell them it’s his job to paint over graffiti. If he finds graffiti to obliterate with his spray gun, he does so quickly. He doesn’t wait to see if the offenders want to chat about his handiwork. “You never know what they’re going to do,” explains Bermudez, who doesn’t carry a weapon while making his rounds.

On this particular afternoon, Bermudez warned the teen-agers that he was going to find a cop. A short distance away, on Sunset Boulevard, he did encounter one of the LAPD’s finest and led him back to the spot where the graffiti punks were. With the officer watching, Bermudez placed the two under citizen’s arrest and turned them over.

It turns out one of the teen-agers was wanted for a suspected rape in the area and is still locked up.

“That’s the right way to do it,” Bermudez says. “People should remember never to take (taggers) on their own. Go home and call it in. You don’t want to stop, because maybe there’s something going on. Maybe the gang members are armed. And you don’t let people know you’re writing down a license plate number to catch them. Memorize it. If you need to write it down, go around the corner and write it down when you’re not being seen.”

*

There are wrong ways to fight graffiti. There’s doing absolutely nothing. And there’s what William Andrew Masters II did on an early-morning walk in the San Fernando Valley nearly two weeks ago.

He shot and killed one tagger and wounded another.

Masters, 35, told police he was taking a 1 a.m. walk on Jan. 31 when he encountered two Latino taggers, Cesar Arce, 18, and David Hillo, 20, spray-painting graffiti on pillars beneath the Hollywood Freeway at Arleta Avenue in Sun Valley.

As Masters wrote down the license plate number of their car, the pair allegedly confronted him, trying to get him to hand over the paper on which he had written the number. Masters claimed he was threatened with a screwdriver--he apparently was about 10 feet away from the two--before he pulled out a gun, killing Arce and wounding Hillo. He said they tried to rob him, though Hillo has denied that.

One of the reasons he shot the pair, Masters says, is that he was frightened at being confronted by “two skinhead Mexicans.”

Since then, the case has attracted considerable publicity. Some Latino activist lawyers are outraged over Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti’s decision not to prosecute Masters. But Masters, a gun advocate, has gotten considerable public support for his actions. And then there was Hillo’s ridiculous comment that tagging is OK because it creates jobs for people like Bermudez.

The graffiti-busters I’ve talked to in recent days are afraid their jobs will be tougher and more dangerous.

“That guy’s against graffiti, great!” one of them told me. “Call us or the cops or somebody at City Hall. But let’s not be blasting away. That’s crazy. I don’t carry a gun but maybe the taggers don’t know that.”

A city worker in the Valley says: “Somebody’s going to try what this guy Masters did and there’s going to be real big trouble. Use some common sense.”

“Two wrongs don’t make it right,” Bermudez concludes.

*

Last year, I came across five gang members who were writing graffiti on a building near my apartment. I barked at them but I walked on when I realized I was outnumbered. It was dark and I knew I was in trouble if I challenged the punks.

When I got home, and after encountering a neighbor who also saw the vandals, I called the cops. Within an hour, the police arrived and arrested the five.

It seemed simple enough then and it seems that way now.

More George Ramos

* For a collection of recent columns by George Ramos, sign on to the TimesLink online service and “jump” to keyword “George Ramos.”

Details on Times electronic services, A6