Some Say the Stick Could Do the Trick : When Bob and I talked on the phone, it gave me a chance to voice my pet theory of when and why things started to go awry.

Bob of Studio City writes:

Mr. Masters . . . does not sound like somebody I would care to associate with. Nevertheless a squad of Masters types roaming around at night for a few years might be the quickest way to get our streets back safe for law abiding people. It’s not just tagging, it’s rapes, murders, robberies, carjackings, muggings etc. . . . Do you think the police and midnight basketball are going to do it without that? Being realistic, do you see a solution acceptable to the urban political establishment or are we just to drift on down as the middle class flees?

You didn’t really think you’d be able to read your paper without hearing a bit more about the relative merits of graffiti versus gunfire and vandalism versus vigilantism, did you? Well, don’t blame me. Blame your fellow readers, like Bob here.

The letters, faxes, e-mail and phone calls keep coming in. Bob, unlike some readers, wasn’t so shy as to omit his name; he requested anonymity. I called him after his fax arrived, and Bob struck me as a caring, intelligent and thoughtful man. It’s one thing for the usual zealots to talk seriously about the desirability of vigilantes. It’s frightening when the notion occurs to people who are caring, intelligent and thoughtful. (In Latin America, such patrols are referred to as “death squads.”)

What spurs such ruminations, of course, was that lethal late-night encounter in Sun Valley between a gun rights advocate named William A. Masters II and two graffiti vandals named Cesar Arce, 18, and David Hillo, 20. Arce was shot dead and Hillo was wounded. And Masters--thanks in part to his commentary afterward--emerged as a folk hero to some, a folk villain to others.

The confrontation occurred in a matter of moments. It took the district attorney’s office a couple of days to untangle Masters’ and Hillo’s stories before deciding not to charge Masters, ruling that he had acted in self-defense. It’s up to the city attorney to decide whether to file charges for carrying a concealed weapon without a permit.

At one extreme, I’ve heard people recommend shoot-on-sight policies for taggers. At the other, people have theorized that Masters all but invited Arce and Hillo to confront him, so that, a la Dirty Harry, they might make his day.

And then there are letters like Bob’s. In a few paragraphs he summarizes a world of problems. Pondering possible solutions, we think in terms of the carrot and the stick. For Bob, roaming vigilantes are the stick, while “midnight basketball” is shorthand for ineffectual, feel-good social programs. And graffiti, of course, is the symbol of much, much more than meets the eye. David Eastman, a reader from Venice, called to say that every tagger in the city should be made to understand that they are in some way responsible for Cesar Arce’s death.

“Every time a tagger goes out and vandalizes property, there’s a growing public anger,” Eastman said. “And the result is when one of them gets shot the public takes an attitude of ‘Who cares?’ ” How many taggers, he asks, would have to be shot before the public cares? “How many times does a person have to dump garbage in the yard before you do something about it?”

Eastman predicts that, within 20 years, Los Angeles could indeed have the kind of death squads that now roam some South American countries, killing homeless orphans and other undesirables.

Eastman adds his voice to the chorus calling, quite literally, for the stick. Inspired in part by news from Singapore, Assemblymen James Rogan (R-Glendale) and Mickey Conroy (R-Orange) co-wrote legislation last year advocating the caning of vandals--and we’re sure to hear more about the revival of the spare-the-rod, spoil-the-child idea in the months to come.

The stick alone, in whatever form, may address the symptom--but will it address the disease?

City Councilman Richard Alarcon, writing in The Times, suggested that defacing of a community by taggers reflects a failure by the community. He wrote that his heroes aren’t people who willfully break the law, but those who devote themselves to making the community better. They might participate in Neighborhood Watch and they might try to guide juveniles in social programs that these days might be scorned as so much “midnight basketball.”

Bob’s letter mentioned both the police and the specter of a fleeing middle class. When Bob and I talked on the phone, it gave me a chance to voice my pet theory of when and why things started to go awry. It’s when Californians started to turn their backs on their public schools.

It’s a tired point but still true: California’s schools were among the nation’s best before Proposition 13. Now student performance is ranked with Mississippi, and juvenile crime is up.

The litany of troubles is long: drugs, illegal immigration, the coarsening of popular culture. Factory closures dimmed prospects for decent blue-collar jobs, and thanks to the easy availability of guns, disputes once settled with fists become deadly. Have well-intentioned desegregation efforts been worth the cost? Public school students travel far from home, and many parents reacted by putting their kids in private schools, further weakening the sense of community. Nothing bonds a neighborhood like a strong public school--and nothing weakens those schools like a lack of neighborhood support.

Proposition 13 empowered the political minority against the majority by imposing a two-thirds majority for the increase of property taxes. Twice in recent years a wide majority of Los Angeles voters agreed to a tax increase to finance an additional 1,000 officers in the Los Angeles Police Department--but failed to reach the two-thirds necessary.

Proposition 187, the initiative against illegal immigration, received 59% of the vote and was called “an overwhelming landslide.” But 59% is as good as 5.9% if you’re trying to improve schools or put more cops on the street. Politicians who preach about the virtues of local control should tackle that.

Graffiti’s been around since long before Kilroy, so I doubt it will ever disappear. But if society gave kids from low-income families better hope of reaching the middle class, I bet it would decrease.

Maybe that’s really the most troubling thing about Bob’s letter, even more so than the dark musings of a vigilante patrol. Immigrants, at least, still regard America as a land of opportunity, but natives seem to doubt that. Now the vision is of a middle class that flees, leaving behind a struggle between the haves and the have-nots . . . as if we’re not all in this together.