GRAFFITI BUSTERS : Sandblasting Patrols Winning the Battle, Officer Says

Larry Carmona is a cop who cruises around the northwest San Fernando Valley in a black and white police van with a strobe light on top. But he’s not hunting criminals.

Carmona is a graffiti buster. Working with a crew of people sentenced to perform community service, Carmona uses a sandblaster to erase the ugly signature of urban blight.

“Pump that one more time,” he said to one of the workers last week as a white streak of water and sand hissed against a graffiti-stained block wall in the Bryant-Vanalden area of Northridge. “Get that in high gear.”

During the past two years, sandblasters have become an increasingly important weapon in the Valley’s war against graffiti. Purchased by politicians, community groups and chambers of commerce, at least six of the machines are being used in the Valley.

But even though the machines erase graffiti with ease, police and community activists say state law prevents them from being used to their maximum potential. In many cases, they say, the machines cannot be used on private property because the owner cannot be located to give permission.

Last month, the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance allowing the city to remove graffiti from private property and bill owners, even if they refuse to clean it up on their own. The ordinance is awaiting approval by Mayor Tom Bradley.

While praising the goal of the ordinance, some say it does not go far enough because the city still must track down the property owner before removing the graffiti. The Northridge Chamber of Commerce is pushing for a change in state law, which takes precedence until the city approves its ordinance, that would allow cities to declare graffiti-stained properties a nuisance. Once the property is declared a nuisance, the city could remove the graffiti after an unspecified waiting period even without the owner’s permission.

“It’s going to make it quicker and you’re going to save the expense” of spending weeks on identifying landowners and contacting them, said Sandra Dack, executive director of the Northridge Chamber of Commerce. Some property changes hands rapidly and some owners live out of the county or out of state, making it difficult to find them, she said.

The chamber made its proposal last month in a letter to the Southern California Assn. of Governments. No state legislators have offered to carry legislation implementing such a change, said Robert Giacobbe, the Northridge Chamber of Commerce president.

In the meantime, graffiti-busting officers Carmona and Tom Shaw, who uses a sandblaster in the Police Department’s West Valley Division, say the machines are having an effect. Both work on the project full time.

Carmona and Shaw said community complaints about graffiti have dropped with the advent of the sandblasters. The officers said no figures are kept, but that complaints at both divisions have fallen from about 100 a week to about 50.

The West Valley Division sandblaster was christened in July, 1988. The Devonshire Division machine used by Carmona has been in use for six months.

“We are winning the battle,” Shaw said. “Sometimes we have to go back as many as three times to a location, but normally after the third time it stays removed.”

The persistence of graffiti artists is evident on Carmona’s beat. At Bryant-Vanalden, he and his crew wiped out some spray-painted initials from a building entrance, leaving behind the sandblaster’s characteristic whitish residue. As Carmona drove away, he passed another building entrance with the same initials sprayed above a white patch left by the sandblaster. Carmona and company had been there several days before.

The Devonshire Division sandblaster was bought for $4,600 by City Councilman Hal Bernson with funds from his office’s expense budget. Carmona is awaiting delivery of a second machine that Bernson is donating.

Businesses Donate

The machine used in the West Valley Division was bought with funds donated by business groups in Canoga Park, Reseda and Woodland Hills.

Other machines are in use in North Hollywood, Van Nuys and Sylmar, where a group called the Sylmar Graffiti-Busters pioneered the idea.

Next week, a recently formed West Valley group calling itself the Neighborhood Beautification Program plans to use its new sandblaster for the first time, selecting the alley behind a supermarket in West Hills. Homeowner groups, chambers of commerce and individual businesses from West Hills, Woodland Hills and Tarzana bought the machine, said Rick Najar of West Hills, an organizer of the group.

“It makes a miraculous difference,” Najar said of the presence of the machines across the Valley. One of his group’s goals, Najar said, is to persuade apartment managers, homeowners and others that graffiti should be removed immediately after it appears.

“You take it off twice, maybe three times, and it’s gone,” he said. “If enough people catch on to this fact and use the machines, we’ll keep on pushing.”