Revive the Graffiti War

The low, graffiti-marred wall of a mostly demolished public building in downtown Los Angeles is surrounded and overlooked by the Los Angeles County Law Library, the Superior Court Building and City Hall. Each day some of the city’s and the county’s most influential people pass the vandalism, which began with a mocking ochre stain and has since spread across the wall. Buses crowd past during every rush hour. Imagine the message this sends to poor neighborhoods suffering from similar spray-paint malaise: Even downtown, amid symbols of order and power, graffiti vandals own another foothold.

In the first 10 months of 2000, volunteers, city employees, businesses and others reported they had scoured, pressure-washed, sandblasted or painted over nearly 20 million square feet of graffiti and still lost ground. That represents only what was reported to city officials. The figure is a 24% increase over the corresponding period of a year ago and a 61% rise since July 1998.

Graffiti is usually a sign of something more insidious, and it has exploded everywhere. It adds insult to the fiscal injury of the abandoned and unfinished $160-million Belmont Learning Complex, covering the fences that surround it. From Angeles Abbey Memorial Park in Compton to the $50,000 in vandalism at the West Valley Hebrew Academy last year, graffiti signals that the villains are in charge, discouraging residents, businesses and new development. More than property is in danger; some of the volunteers and contractors trying to rid the city of the tagging have been threatened, physically assaulted, even shot at.

The increase in graffiti vandalism and the boldness of the tagger gangs can be tied to several factors. A report commissioned by City Council members Laura Chick and Joel Wachs says that an effective multi-agency task force involving Caltrans, the Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department, among others, is no longer operating. Budget cuts are partially to blame. Citizens complain that they lost their best allies when the LAPD pulled the senior lead officer program off the streets. Graffiti removal organizations, such as the Hollywood Beautification Team, need additional resources to keep up. The fallout from the LAPD corruption scandal is part of it, with the worst increases in graffiti found in the Rampart, Newton and 77th police divisions.

Every spray-painted wall or fence or etched window that is not cleaned or replaced represents a skirmish lost, a neighborhood that feels a little less certain of itself. In the middle 1990s, this city had had enough. Neighborhoods mobilized. Elected and appointed officials held graffiti cleanup days. The police knew that this was as important as fighting direct violence or open-air drug markets. It’s time the city and its officials regained that sense of outrage and purpose.