Graffiti terrorists

When Ronald Lamonte Barron confronted a tagger on Pico Boulevard and was shot and left to die for his efforts, the killer committed a small act of terrorism.

If the idea was to scare us, it’s working.

Any doubts I might have had about that were erased one recent Saturday morning. I was jogging toward home at the end of a run along Pico, west of La Brea, just half a mile from where Barron died that February night.

When I run, I don’t listen to music, and I hate company. My mind goes its own way as my body huffs and slogs around mid-city L.A. That day, I was preoccupied with how not to crush the snails on the sidewalk.

I looked up and noticed a teenager, one hand holding his baggy jeans not quite over his red plaid boxers. In the other hand he held a can of black spray paint. My first instinct, as I watched him tag a cinderblock wall, was to run across Pico and confront him. As the mother of two teenage boys, I’m accustomed to chastising them and their friends. Then I remembered the guy who got shot.

So I just watched. Jogging very slowly, and trying not to seem like I was looking. Other pedestrians appeared to be doing the same thing. There was a dad pushing a baby in a stroller, an older woman with a mesh plastic shopping bag. There was steady but not heavy car traffic.

The young man finished and ran to the corner, where he got into a dark gray sedan. I saw it had California plates, but I couldn’t read the number. The driver was older, wearing glasses, respectable looking. Like a dad dropping off his son for music lessons or tutoring.

And here’s what really horrified me. They didn’t drive away. They drove a block or so, and the young man jumped out again and sprayed over another tagger’s handiwork, adding his own. And again. Three times in maybe five blocks.

No one did a thing. No one yelled out. Or tried to stop him. Maybe, like me, they were scared.

The police don’t want us to confront taggers, who could be armed, says Adam Green, the senior lead LAPD officer for my neighborhood. Get a description, get a license plate number, but keep your distance.

Tagging seems intractable and, as Green says, “out of control.” Taggers, who are sometimes affiliated (such a highfalutin word in the circumstance) with gangs and sometimes just with tagging crews, are usually minors and usually work in the dark, Green says. Their handiwork gives them bragging rights with other taggers.

The language of graffiti is often opaque. Who is “Shorty?” What does “EXP” mean? But the broader meaning is more than clear.

“It brings the community down, the property values down,” Green says.

By late afternoon on the Saturday I saw the tagger, his handiwork had been painted over, creating that two-tone look so prevalent all over this city.

Several businesspeople in the area say crime is down so much from a couple of decades ago that they can take the tagging in stride, though they’d rather not have to. And they all praised how quickly the city’s graffiti removal services respond.

Ed Jeffers, who owns property along Pico, says he’s been in the neighborhood since 1974, when he was often afraid. “I wouldn’t walk around the block,” he said. “I thought I wouldn’t make it.”

These days, he says, he might confront a tagger. “I’m 6’ 4” and 300 pounds. I don’t think they’re going to bother me.”

Nick Babila, who owns Impact Auto Body on Pico, sees things as much better too. A decade ago, tagging wouldn’t turn heads. The fact that people are bothered by it is progress, he says.

It may be progress, but it’s only a start. Our neighborhood is about halfway between downtown and the beach, with great economic and ethnic diversity. It’s an area with a few new cafes and antique shops, but also more liquor stores than any neighborhood needs, and the streets aren’t kept as clean as in Hancock Park. If it often feels like a neighborhood coming into its own, it’s also easy to see what a fragile process that can be. As fragile as a stream of paint from a $8 can.

mary.macvean@latimes.com