Taggers Beware

Taggers Beware: The Writing is on the Wall from Law Enforcement Technology at Officer.com

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Taggers Beware: The Writing is on the Wall

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From the September 2005 Issue By Douglas Page

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In the United States the annual cost of graffiti abatement programs is estimated between $10 and $12 billion. In just the mass transit industry, the cost of vandalism is growing by 11 percent a year, according to a survey sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration. In New York City alone, the average cost of removing graffiti increased from $300,000 to $10 million between 1993 and 2003. The City of Las Vegas has three full-time employees who remove graffiti by painting over it or blasting it off with a power sprayer. In 10 years prior to 2002, Operation Clean Sweep in Los Angeles, a long-term beautification program designed to promote community participation in neighborhood improvement projects, removed 162 million square feet of graffiti. Graffiti removal can come with more than a monetary cost. A graffiti-removal worker painting over a wall in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles was fatally shot in June 2004 by a gunman who police believe was angry because his gang tags were being covered. Graffiti tells a story Most cities fight graffiti with their paint brushes by quickly dispatching work crews to slather a coat of fresh paint over tagger or gang scribblings. In doing so they are also removing a valuable source of intelligence. One city in California has found a way to exploit graffiti by establishing a tracking program that empowers law enforcement and prosecutors to use this form of street-level intelligence in court. Timothy Kephart, a Carson crime analyst, graduate student at California State University-Long Beach, and president of Crime Prevention and Graffiti Consulting, analyzed more than 450 gang graffiti photographs in the Carson area for his master’s thesis.

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Taggers Beware: The Writing is on the Wall from Law Enforcement Technology at Officer.com

“It became clear that gangs were using graffiti to actually communicate,” he says. Kephart identified five forms of graffiti communication — publicity, roll call, territorial, threatening and sympathetic graffiti. Kephart says publicity gang graffiti contains the name or abbreviation of the gang’s name but does not include a threat, mark territory or have any monikers listed. Publicity graffiti is the most frequent graffiti found in the study, accounting for 47 percent of the analyzed images. Roll call graffiti (26 percent) contains the gang name and a list of gang monikers. Territorial graffiti (17 percent) is identified by some sort of symbolic or semantically written graffiti that marks a gang’s territory. Typically, this is in the form of an arrow pointing down. Threatening graffiti renderings contain some sort of threatening message aimed at a rival gang or sometimes at law enforcement. “This can appear as a gang crossing out another gang’s graffiti or writing the numbers 187 (California penal code for murder) next to another gang’s name,” Kephart says. Although threatening graffiti may be the type most frequently talked about, it is one of the least frequently (9 percent) observed. Sympathetic graffiti was the least observed (1 percent). Kephart says this type of graffiti is put up to honor a slain gang member, usually in the form of an RIP (rest in peace). Get the message Each of these various types of graffiti can be useful to law enforcement and prosecutors, according to Kephart. Roll call graffiti can help prove gang membership when prosecutors are seeking greater punishments of gang members through gang enhancements. Territorial graffiti can assist law enforcement in determining which gangs are expanding their boundaries. Publicity graffiti can be used when seeking gang injunctions to prove that a gang has become a public nuisance. “Threatening graffiti can be used to prove motive for murder or assault,” he says. Kephart’s research lead him to develop two software tracking packages — Graffiti Analysis/Intelligence Tracking System (GAITS) and Vandal Apprehension/Graffiti Reduction Program (VanGraff). GAITS is designed to extract the intelligence information from graffiti photographs and provide detailed intelligence reports regarding each incidence of graffiti. Each piece of intelligence information in the report is attached to an image of the respective graffiti and can be quickly accessed on a computer. “Now, when an offender is caught putting up graffiti, they are not just charged with one count of vandalism; they can be held accountable for all of the other damage for which they are responsible,” Kephart says. This has two main benefits. One, it sends a signal to the offenders that their vandalism is being tracked. Two, a city can seek restitution from offenders for all of the damage that they have committed, not merely a single incident. Another advantage is that GAITS interfaces with GIS mapping software. “By mapping a suspect’s graffiti, we can demonstrate a nexus between the

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Taggers Beware: The Writing is on the Wall from Law Enforcement Technology at Officer.com

geographic location of the graffiti and the location of the offender’s residence,” Kephart says. This has been used successfully in the course of securing search warrants of gang members’ residences. During the course of the search it is common not only to find instruments of the crime but also additional graffiti at the offender’s residence. This graffiti can then be matched in style to the graffiti stored in the GAITS program. Legends of the wall Using Kephart’s methods of comparing graffiti to known gang members, Carson took down the second largest tagging crew in the area. “We were able to track all of the graffiti by this tagging crew, and specifically the individual taggers, and identify where they were putting up their graffiti,” says Capt. Todd Rogers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, Carson Station. “Subsequently, we found the responsible parties and arrested three of the four members from this crew. The fourth called us and turned himself in.” In another example, a new tagger that recently moved to Carson began putting up graffiti over a four-month period. Using GAITS, the graffiti was found to be located in a circumference around his house, the park he frequented and the school he attended. “After using those locations to limit the suspect pool, we came up with our suspect,” Rogers says. “Concerned citizens confirmed who the vandal was, and we obtained and executed a search warrant on his house, which turned up many graffiti tools, photos of his graffiti damage and a listing of many of the locations he vandalized outside of the Carson area.” As a result, he was charged with felony vandalism and plead guilty. In fact, every graffiti case filed by the Carson district attorney has resulted in a guilty verdict. Rogers says what makes this program different is the close collaboration with law enforcement. “We have had several programs in the past that have tracked graffiti; however, they were rendered meaningless due to a lack of law enforcement follow-up,” Rogers says. In this case, Carson provides Rogers the resources needed to commit a trained gang investigator, albeit on a limited basis, to be proactive relative to the information Kephart provides. “The bottom line is that we are now able to respond on a sustained basis to graffiti issues throughout our city,” Rogers says. Douglas Page writes about science and technology from Pine Mountain, California. To contact him, e-mail [email protected].

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Taggers Beware: The Writing is on the Wall from Law Enforcement Technology at Officer.com

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