Police Go to the Wall : Unique Stakeout Tries to Catch Gang Graffiti Artists While They Sketch

LONG BEACH —  Police Officer Bill Corson, in grubby jeans and a ponytail wig topped by a dirty baseball cap, was the first to report potential trouble-makers: “It looks like one has a pencil or a small pen . . . They may be writing on the southeast side of the wall.”

“You want us to jump out and grab him?” radioed another policeman waiting in an old unmarked van.

But Corson did not see the suspicious-looking characters actually write on walls, and there were no arrests. The officers sat and waited.

It was the beginning of the shift for Corson and eight other undercover officers who staked out the intersection of 7th Street and Magnolia Avenue one night recently--waiting for gang members to scrawl graffiti on freshly painted walls.

The stakeout was part of a unique pilot program: Paint over graffiti-scarred walls in the morning and stake out the site at night.

The city hopes to send a message with the graffiti stakeouts. “When you do this, you can expect to be grabbed,” Cmdr. Danny Reynolds explained.

Graffiti is a reflection of gang activity, and some city and police officials say they hope to reduce gang-related crimes by putting a stop to the squiggly lines, obscenities and gang names scrawled on walls. Others question whether that is the best use of manpower.

So far, the special metro unit--which has fielded two such surveillance details--has not been very successful.

On the first stakeout, a graffiti artist shot at Officer Jim Settles. “Over 18 years (in the police force), I never thought if I was going to be shot at it would be over someone spraying paint on a house,” said Settles, who called the graffiti stakeouts “a complete waste of time and taxpayers’ dollars.”

Gang members were so infuriated by that first undercover surveillance that they returned to finish what they had begun. “Not only did we get shot at, but they came back the next day, (spray painted) and knocked out the windows, so we sure showed them, didn’t we?” said Sgt. Mike Sergi.

The second stakeout, a six-hour wait near clean walls on May 20, did not net police any graffiti-related arrests. They did stop and handcuff one teen-ager they thought had brushed against a wall as if he were writing on it. But after finding no graffiti and determining that the teen-ager did not fit the characteristics associated with a gang member, police quickly released him.

Although the officers nabbed no one for graffiti, that stakeout did net one arrest involving a drug deal the officers witnessed. And the nine undercover men who took turns watching the walls at Seventh and Magnolia ended up assisting in the investigation of several gang-related shootings within a few blocks of the corner.

“Maybe the gang members are too busy ducking bullets to bother with graffiti tonight,” Sergi commented.

Or maybe, another officer joked, the gangs were fighting over “graffiti rights” to the clean walls.

Two Gunshot Victims

In any case, it was hectic on that Wednesday night. Two people wounded by bullets were taken to the hospital; nearby, someone else ducked as a gang member yelling “Eastside Longos” fired a gun from a moving car; four other shots were heard around 11:10 p.m. and several more around 11:50 p.m.; sometime during the night, another man was beaten up during a drug deal.

It was not an unusual night, police said. The area is in disputed territory, where several gangs--mainly the Samoans, the Eastside Longos, the Westside Longos and the Barrios Small Town--are vying for control.

Shortly after 11 p.m., the police radio crackled and Officer Steve Nottingham informed his colleagues helping with the shootings that they did not need to return to the graffiti patrol: “By the way, the walls are Code 4. (No further assistance is needed.) I know you were worried about that.”

In alleys and streets within blocks of the 7th and Magnolia corner, groups of young people clad in leather jackets gathered, indifferent to a police helicopter hovering above and the swarms of marked police cars cruising the streets.

“You have to read the reaction to your presence. If they’re really cool, they’ll (psychologically) beat you,” Sergi said as he drove up to one group of teen-agers. Some looked straight at him and others ignored him.

Patrol Cars Numerous

Sergi, one of two sergeants overseeing 22 officers in the Police Department’s special metro unit, attributed the graffiti stakeout’s lack of success that night to the number of patrol cars in the area. Even before the shootings, patrol cars were seen cruising through the busy intersection as officers spotted potential gang activity nearby.

Sometime after 8 p.m., for example, an officer in the narcotics unit sarcastically described gang members that he spotted near Chestnut Avenue and 14th Street: “They’re all carrying bats, so it must be a big game.”

Police and city officials acknowledge that graffiti is far from the most dangerous activity associated with gangs. But it is one of the most visible and one of the most irritating, they say.

Sgt. Bob Titus, who heads the Police Department’s gang detail, calls graffiti the gangs’ “newspaper of the streets,” and he says the pilot program can make a dent in the problem.

“Graffiti is not just visual blight anymore, but economic blight” because it devalues properties, said Dennis Thys, neighborhood development project manager in charge of the city’s graffiti abatement program. Some homeowners and businessmen whose buildings are scarred with graffiti also have a hard time finding insurance because carriers link graffiti with crime, Thys said.

Allocation Increased

Long Beach has allocated $180,000 for this year’s graffiti abatement program--$20,000 more than last year and triple the amount allocated five years ago when the program started, Thys said. The increase does not mean there has been a threefold jump in graffiti, Thys said, but a realization that “the problem is bad and is not going away.”

The stakeouts are a preventive, rather than a reactive, measure, said Thys, who came up with the idea of painting walls in the morning and having police guard them that same night.

“We have an ongoing program. We’re dealing, until recently, with the problem of graffiti after the fact,” Thys said. By arresting people scrawling on walls, “(We) get the word out that the city is really tired of the problem of graffiti, and we’re not going to let the gangs run these neighborhoods any more.”

Graffiti is one of the major complaints heard by police and city officials, Titus said. An average of 50 to 75 people a week call 590-6367, the city’s graffiti hot line, and an additional 25 complaints are referred from City Council members and others, Thys said.

Program Believed to Be Unique

Tim Sullivan, co-owner of Graffiti Removal Inc., which works for Long Beach, Bellflower, Burbank, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Monterey Park, Culver City and others in Los Angeles and Orange counties, said he knows of no other city with a graffiti stakeout program.

Sgt. Sergi, whose special unit is better known for rock cocaine crackdowns and other hard crimes, said he supports the surveillance of walls to prevent graffiti.

“If I lived there, it wouldn’t be trivial. What should we do? Ignore it?” Sergi said. “They’re just painting the town. It’s starting to look like New York, for Christ’s sake.”

Others, like Officer Settles, say the program is “ridiculous.”

“I think there are better ways to send out a message,” Settles said, adding that most of the officers in his unit feel the same way.

“I think if you are going to deal with the gang problem, you should deal with the more serious business, where they are shooting at each other and dealing with rock cocaine and shooting at passersby,” Settles said.

Sergi said the stakeouts would work “if we were consistent in arrests and if the courts were consistent.”

Juvenile Vandal Arrested

During the first stakeout in March, police could not find the person who shot at Settles but they arrested someone with him, a 17-year-old boy caught spraying graffiti at the corner of Summit Street and Harbor Avenue. The juvenile pleaded guilty to vandalism, was released to his parents and ordered by a judge to pay restitution, according to Corson.

In addition to its contract with Graffiti Removal Inc., the city also has an adopt-a-block program in which the city offers supplies to neighborhood groups which want to maintain their areas. This summer, Long Beach also will begin a mural project on Santa Fe Avenue aimed at providing area youngsters with a “creative outlet,” Thys said.

Some neighborhoods are visited frequently by the company which is paid to remove the street language. “Studies have shown that by cleaning graffiti immediately, it cuts down on it,” Thys said.

Last week, just one week after the futile second stakeout by the graffiti detail, some of the once-clean walls at Seventh and Magnolia were no longer pristine. White chalk scarred the brown paint on the side of a liquor store, and looping letters in blue paint marked the back of a self-service laundry with gang names.