The Fight Against Crime: Notes From The Front : Task Force Puts Focus on Taggers

These are the quiet graffiti-haters, the ones who work within the system.

Armed only with Polaroid cameras, they dash about their neighborhoods documenting the scrawls that deface fences, freeways and businesses.

They are the Community Tagger Task Force, a group of 150 Van Nuys residents who have joined forces with a small group of police officers to keep track of taggers and help prosecute them.

They never come face to face with the enemy but instead wage their battle with photos and reports.

Trained in evidence gathering, the residents hand over their material to task force officers who use it as evidence to back up felony graffiti charges--for which the prosecution must show widespread damage, but which bring stiffer sentences.

LAPD Reserve Officer Ivor Alan-Lee said he enthusiastically joined the team partly as a civic duty, but also because he personally detests graffiti.

“It’s just a feeling of wanting to do something good for the city,” said the retired executive.

“And like any citizen, I hate to see graffiti.”

With the determined group of civilian members gathering intelligence, the police officers on the team can concentrate on tagger investigations.

Since the team’s inception in 1993, it has aided in the successful prosecution of four adults and 17 youths for vandalism, and graffiti in the Van Nuys area has declined 20%, Alan-Lee said.

Because they constantly monitor graffiti, and look for the work of convicted taggers, task force members say they can tell when a new tagging “crew” appears or an old tagger returns.

A 16-year-old convicted tagger mistakenly thought he could muddy the trail the task force follows when he changed his tag.

Alert task force members noticed the new tag. A routine computer check of convicted taggers turned up the name of a youth who had been cited a few months earlier for possession of a spray-paint can in the same area.

The task force connected the two incidents.

The youth had a 1993 felony conviction for graffiti vandalism using a different tag but had been given probation because he had no criminal record.

His case stuck in the minds of task force members because it involved more than $40,000 in damage and one of the youth’s parents and two grandparents also were arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

“It was a hunch,” said Alan-Lee, who devotes most of his time to fighting vandalism. “The (tag) name appeared in the same area he had been cited at.”

The boy’s house was searched and officers found marijuana, pornographic videos and lists of tagged locations with the new tag name, police said. Handwriting analysts said the boy had written the lists.

His grandparents, former Disney employees, had an abundance of high-grade painting material in their home which itself was marked with the boy’s graffiti.

“We try to talk to parents to see if the kid is worth saving,” Alan-Lee said.

“And most of the time they are. But in this kid’s case, it was different.”

Alan-Lee has become somewhat of an expert after years of studying the graffiti.

“I can tell you what crew did it, the person’s moniker and what areas they like to tag,” he said.

He said graffiti hot spots in the Valley include a stretch of Victory Boulevard from the Hollywood Freeway to the San Diego Freeway and the industrial section of Sherman Way in Van Nuys.

“Right now it is nice and clean, but just wait a few days and it will change,” he said, confidently.

There are about 300 tagging “crews” in the Valley, with new ones emerging as quickly as others disappear, he said, fingering the binders that contain his task force’s photo records of their work, preserved as potentially damaging evidence.

“And if we let them get away with it, the city will look like a shambles,” he said.