Too Angry for Words : What Is It About Graffiti--Rather Than, Say, Poverty--That Makes People So Crazy?

In Singapore, the government lashes them. In Mexico, instead of dragging them to jail, the police routinely spray their faces with their own aerosol weapons. In America, sometimes they get shot.

We hate taggers.

Few things raise the ire of people like chicken-scratch on a creamy white wall. Tagging can bring in far more letters to the editor, more talk-show callers, more shouts for law and order than day-to-day stories of murder, rape and child abuse. Experts can’t quite explain it, except to say that tagging affects everyone.

“Violent victimization is a relatively infrequent act,” says USC sociologist Cheryl Maxson. “Graffiti is a type of victimization that everyone can experience.”

Just by looking at it.

For many, graffiti is a symbol for everything that is wrong with America. Crime. Gangs. Disrespect for our social contract--our laws. The impotence of police. And the decline of property values. “It’s a symbol of the general breakdown of society,” says David P. Marple, a Loyola Marymount University sociologist.

Tagging can also be perceived as marking territory, which is particularly irksome when the area being marked belongs to you. Maxson says it represents “a territorial challenge.”

It’s no wonder many Southern California residents rallied behind William Masters II after he shot to death an 18-year-old tagger in Sun Valley two weeks ago. Masters maintains he shot the tagger in self-defense after the young man, armed with a screwdriver, tried to rob him.

Simi Valley Councilwoman Sandi Webb called Masters a “crime-fighting hero.” Few doubt, however, that Masters would be so popular had he shot a non-tagger.

Even before the Jan. 31 incident highlighted--once again--society’s distaste for taggers, Los Angeles County residents ranked tagging as one of the community’s top 10 problems. In a Times Poll of the region’s woes conducted last summer, graffiti vandalism beat out homelessness, poverty and illegal immigration.

And despite an Anglo-Latino community riff over the shooting--with some Latinos calling for the prosecution of Masters--tagger-haters come from all ethnic backgrounds. Sergio Palos, 40, owns a print shop in Southeast Los Angeles. Over the past two years, he has sustained more than $1,000 in damage from graffiti. For a small-business owner, that’s not a small sum. “I have five kids,” Palos says, “and I’m trying to start a new business in this area.

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“I am Latino, too,” he says. “They have to realize they’re making a statement for the whole Latino community; don’t make it tagging.”

Tagging taxes even those who don’t have to cover their walls with fresh paint. Real-estate appraisers say consistent and widespread graffiti can bring down a neighborhood’s property values 8% or more. “It brings the whole community down,” says Leo Montes, a certified appraiser for Barry Miller Appraisal Service in Los Angeles.

The link to increased crime is also often cited. UCLA public policy expert James Q. Wilson is a proponent of the “broken windows theory.” The theory says graffiti, like a broken window unattended, invites more crime.

“When people see graffiti unattended,” Wilson said last year, “they really believe that the quality of their life has been threatened in a very personal way, and they begin to wonder whether the good guys or the bad guys control the streets.”

Lately, the good guys seem to be winning. Police say abatement programs (to the tune of $1 million a year in Long Beach, $4 million on Orange County, tens of millions in L.A. County), healthy rewards for turning in offenders ($500 a pop) and hefty punishment have meant less than half the usual graffiti from Orange County to Long Beach to Palos’ neighborhood in Southeast L.A. “I’m hardly being tagged anymore,” he says.

Last year, a teen-ager in Oxnard received the longest sentence ever dealt a graffiti vandal in California: eight years. The 16-year-old, however, is eligible for parole this year. Prosecutor John Cardoza usually doesn’t enjoy putting away teen-agers. But like many taggers, the youth showed little remorse. “He said, ‘How is this going to stop me from tagging?’ ” Cardoza recalls.

On the West Coast, youths have been tagging for 40 years or more. Since the ‘50s, Eastside gangsters have used graffiti to state their presence. In the early ‘70s in New York, youths began marking up walls to declare their political bent.

Through the years, tagging has ascended to art form status in some circles. The permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., contains a graffiti-influenced piece. And the graffiti world recognizes an artistic hierarchy with its titles--from the lowly “writer” to the high-concept “graffiti artist.”

Although tagging’s past included the territorial warnings of gang members, experts say most tagging today is not produced by gangs, but rather is the scrawl of less-violent quasi-gangs called tagging crews.

“If people see it, they think there are gangs in their neighborhood,” says USC sociologist Malcolm Klein. “(But) by and large, taggers are not gang members and are far less fearsome.”

Yet these days taggers are more brazen and less artful, experts say. Inherent in tagging is a rebellious ethic that only worsens the public distaste for graffiti. It is often said to be an addictive activity, where a clean wall is irresistible and a hard-to-access freeway sign is the ultimate conquest.

Add to that the successful crackdown on graffiti, and the result is quick-and-dirty tagging “thrown up” for quantity, not quality. Examples range from last summer’s tagging spree down the Long Beach Freeway, which caused at least $100,000 in damage, to the tagging last year of a Los Angeles Police Department squad car, to the incessant and un-artful monikers of people like New York City’s “JA.”

“It’s ugly and pointless,” says USC psychology chair Adrian Raine. It wasn’t always that way.

A New York hip-hop culture expert known as Gerb theorizes that a decline in graffiti’s artfulness has no doubt contributed to today’s boiling point over tagging. “The reason people hate graffiti is because it’s nowhere near as beautiful as it was 20 years ago,” argues Gerb, 37. “It’s vandalism.”

“People like JA put their names everywhere,” says a man known as LSD3, one of New York’s first taggers. “You really think it’s a race to the moon. That’s not what it’s supposed to be about.”

At the same time, LSD3 says civilians are more willing to confront taggers. “I had a situation where a guy grabbed my friend and held him for the police,” says the 39-year-old, who has been tagging since the early ‘70s.

“A lot of people are frustrated over crime,” he says. “People are mad at something.”

We hate taggers.