Crime News Bulletins Painted on City’s Walls

Dan Jaramillo, a Los Angeles Police Department anti-gang detective in the Hollenbeck Division, looked for the usual spent casings and bullet holes when he received a call in October to investigate the shooting of a 10-year-old girl and a 19-year-old boy.

It was clear from the start that it was gang-related. But which gang? There are 37 in the East Los Angeles area.

The killers might as well have left a signed confession. Messages tagged onto a concrete wall read like street hieroglyphics. The tragedy had started with the male victim’s gang tagging in the suspect gang’s territory. Detectives confirmed the rival gangs’ names, which were written out in bright spray paint.

Although most police say graffiti is a nuisance and should be removed, some say it can be a crime-solving tool.

Law enforcement officers know that to gang members, walls are like newspapers, which detectives read closely.

A renewed effort by activists and the City Council to clean up graffiti will affect an important tool used to decipher gang activity, some law enforcement officials said.

The cleanup effort was launched in the wake of a new report showing Los Angeles graffiti rising 24% in a 10-month period from 1999 to 2000, calculated in graffiti removal by square foot.

Calls to the Operation Clean Sweep graffiti hotline increased 5% during the same period.

In January, Los Angeles City Council members proposed increasing the budget for graffiti removal by $3.1 million and stepping up coordination with state and county agencies to combat the spray-painted messages and drawings. The council will discuss the proposal during budget hearings this spring.

Some detectives and experts say graffiti doesn’t tell law enforcement officials anything they don’t already know.

Carlos Sanchez, anti-gang detective in the LAPD’s Foothill Division, which is plagued with more than 30 gangs of many ethnicities, said graffiti is a clue but does not necessarily help him solve crimes.

Malcolm Klein, a professor emeritus of sociology at USC who has researched gangs for four decades, said that in all the gang-related trials in which he has testified, graffiti never served as a major clue. Graffiti-writing is simply about attracting attention, he said.

“Who’s putting his name up doesn’t tell you anything about the guys that aren’t,” Klein said.

But Dave Demerjian, former chief of the hard-core gang unit in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, said graffiti can aid investigations.

“I’m comfortable in knowing they’ll never remove all the graffiti,” he said. “We would lose valuable evidence if [tagging on] all walls were wiped out.”

Of the hundreds of gang-related cases he has prosecuted, graffiti have helped as corroborative evidence in about half, Demerjian said. In gang-related trials, he said, officers will often bring in photographs of graffiti relating to the alleged crime, and a gang expert will interpret the drawing for the jury and judge.

Sometimes graffiti reveal which gang members hang out together and help detectives and prosecutors determine who may have been involved in a crime, such as a drive-by shooting, Demerjian said.

Graffiti also can detail the progression of gang warfare, said Tony Moreno, supervisory detective for the LAPD’s career criminal gang section.

“They’ll write the name in. The next day it’s crossed out. The next day a reply,” Moreno said. “It’s a way to get a feeling for the various politics.”

Traditionally, a gang marks walls in its territory with its gang name, detectives said.

“Graffiti was a way of saying ‘This is us,’ ” said former gang member Robert Olvera, 30, who supervises a graffiti cleanup crew in Boyle Heights. “It was a way to hold your own.”

The LAPD’s Jaramillo said that when detectives in his unit learn that a wall might be painted over, they rush out to photograph it for future reference.

With an increase in tagging, he said, comes an increase in burglaries, robberies and shootings.

“When one gang crosses out another a lot,” Jaramillo said, “you know something is coming. You tell officers. You try to direct additional units [to the area].”

Olvera and his crew of five have begun to pay off what some of them call a debt for an adolescence of graffiti-writing. Removing graffiti with violent cross-outs is their first priority, he said.

“I was active doing everything you see here,” Olvera said. “Now I feel sorry for everything that I did.”

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Times staff writer Noaki Schwartz contributed to this story.

Two Sides to Graffiti Issue

Former gang member Raul Barajas paints over graffiti. Some say markings can be useful in probing gang activity, but others scoff. B4