Local Task Force Tracks Down Taggers

The final straw for Cliff Reston came the day his neighbor’s front-yard wall became the latest target of a tagger’s illegible scrawl.

“It was a very pretty stone wall and somebody marked it up,” Reston said of the 1992 incident near his Sherman Oaks home. “We used steel brushes to clean it up but I thought, ‘This is too much.’ ”

Determined to fight back against the graffiti vandals who were marring his neighborhood with increasing frequency, Reston called the Los Angeles Police Department’s Van Nuys Division, where he was put in touch with Det. Craig Rhudy.

Rhudy, who was formulating a plan to create a computer database to track the area’s most prolific taggers, was glad to receive the call.

“He said, ‘How involved do you want to get?’ And I said, ‘I’ll do whatever it takes,’ ” Reston recalled.

Thus began a community-police partnership that in five years has helped reduce graffiti in Sherman Oaks and other Valley neighborhoods by up to 50%, police officials said.

Established in 1993, Rhudy’s Community Tagger Task Force consists of one full-time officer, one reserve officer from the Van Nuys LAPD station and a Valleywide network of roughly 150 civilian volunteers stretching from Pacoima to Woodland Hills.

Rather than simply painting over graffiti, the volunteers wage their war by taking photographs and gathering other evidence that enable prosecutors to nab the Valley’s most egregious violators. New graffiti is quickly erased, but only after being photographed and cataloged.

“It was like a hamster in a cage. You paint it out and then they come right back and tag it again,” said Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. “This is a different approach.”

So far, the task force has been responsible for more than 60 arrests and prosecutions, said Ivor Alan-Lee, the LAPD reserve officer who has worked with the task force since its inception.

“As soon as one [tagger] gets too busy, I set up a tracking system,” said Alan-Lee, who collects the reports and plots tagging trends. “It can take a month or it can take a year, but we usually make an arrest.”

The task force works with anti-graffiti groups throughout the Valley, but Alan-Lee credited the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. with raising the money for cameras, film and other supplies that have helped make the program a success.

In five years, the homeowner’s group has raised more than $20,000 for the task force and it recently initiated a new fund-raising drive to mark the program’s fifth anniversary.

Although Polaroid film is the task force’s top expense, items on the current wish list include a new computer printer and a night-vision scope for stakeouts.

“People have been generous because they feel strongly about the need to keep the community graffiti-free,” Close said. “Graffiti is not as dangerous as murder or robbery, but it’s like a cancer in the community and people don’t like it.”

As more and more taggers face fines and even jail for their vandalism, Reston said the aggressive approach taken by the task force is paying off.

“It’s been very effective,” he said. “If we earmark somebody for investigation, it’s because they have 50 or 60 violations. These guys are marking up entire neighborhoods and we’re out to send them a message.”