CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : What Happened to Community? : Public responses to the slaying of a young tagger by an armed man should make us question our civic obligations.

Has it come to this? As I read the newspaper accounts of the death of a tagger at the hands of a late-night stroller in Sun Valley, and the cheering that followed this act of violence, I have to ask: What happened to community?

Listen to conversations about the incident and you hear people picking sides, glorifying or vilifying the tagger or the shooter, as if it were some kind of sporting match. It sends a chill down my spine to hear people cheer on violence and applaud vigilantism, and then to hear the talk of retaliation.

It is time that we turned inward to reflect on what makes us a community and, more important, what makes us human.

I have great empathy for the grieving mother who lost a child. As a parent, and as a father who has also experienced the death of a son, I understand the loss and the pain of knowing your hopes and dreams for your son will never be fulfilled. I share her pain.

I feel more conflicted about the incident. The details of what transpired are still sketchy. We may never know what really happened that evening, but the facts that we do know--two taggers marking the wall encounter a man, who, feeling threatened, shoots them--are evidence of our lingering social malfunctions and of our collective failure to take responsibility for them.

As I listen to different people describe the incident and the tension that surrounds our community in the aftermath, I wait for someone to say the obvious, what we all know is true: that all of those involved in the incident were wrong, and that there are no heroes and no winners in this situation, only collective losers.

Although taggers are not usually violent gang members, they don’t contribute to a healthy community. They degrade and depress their own neighborhoods by filling them with unsightly, ugly and often obscene graffiti. They don’t create jobs, they don’t draw new residents to an area. Instead, graffiti makes a neighborhood seem inhospitable to all; businesses don’t want to bring new jobs to a community filled with kids who engage in petty turf battles, and residents surely don’t want to live in some tagger’s marked turf. So to say that tagging is harmless or even to suggest, as some have in the last week, that “tagging creates jobs,” is mere fantasy.

But William Masters, the man who shot at the two taggers and killed one of them, is not the savior of the community. Anybody who walks the streets in the middle of the night, armed illegally with a concealed and unlicensed loaded gun, ready to shoot, is not a hero. And, while Masters may not have been legally wrong for doing what he did, I certainly don’t encourage anybody to follow his extreme footsteps.

As a community--which is, after all, what we strive to be--we should take responsibility for the problems in our neighborhoods. It is not right to point the finger at somebody else, as people have been doing during the past week, by blaming the mother, contending that it was her “bad parenting” that killed her son, or blaming Masters for feeling what we all do sometimes--fear of being victims.

We should be taking this incident and using it to create compassion and construct solutions. It is not the time to take sides and condone vigilantism or defend tagging; it is the time to recognize that problems fester in communities, and that all of us have within our means the power to change our own communities and to contribute to making them better. If we tolerate the problems by blaming all the ills on somebody else and excusing ourselves, then we become part of the problem. It may sound like a cliche, but it is true.

My heroes are the people who sacrifice their time and energy to volunteer to work with at-risk youth, to teach them a better way; people who work closely with the Los Angeles Police Department to provide nonviolent assistance in a coordinated manner with volunteer patrols, Neighborhood Watch and cleanup programs. People like Charlotte Bedard, Socorro Gallegos, Tom Weissbarth from Sylmar Graffiti Busters; Joe Jackson from New Directions for Youth; Harry Williams from the Arleta Looky-loos; Leslie Yamashita from Panorama City Residents Assn.; Blinky Rodriguez, who organized the Valley Unity Peace Treaty; my own Youth Advisory Council and numerous other individuals and groups. All of their hard work and effort to change people’s lives is being overshadowed by one man who took another’s life.

The incident did not occur in my district, but it occurred in what I still consider my community. I grew up there and my mother still lives there.

I believe that most people in our community are equally aghast at the cycle of violence and are not ready to cheer it on. I believe that most of us take this incident for what it is--a sign that things need to change, that our lives need to become more entwined, that we need to learn how to respect our neighbors, to share communities and values.

The true heroes in our community, who have already taken those steps by volunteering their energy and time, should be recognized. All of us should understand that solutions to our problems are not to create more divisiveness, not to talk about retaliation, but to take responsibility--and teach responsibility.